Peter Blau

Lore & Background

Peter Blau was born in Vienna in 1918 into a Jewish family. At age seventeen, he was convicted of high treason for writing articles against government repression in an underground newspaper and was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released after the National Socialists' rise to power. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Blau attempted to escape to Czechoslovakia but was captured by Nazi border patrol, imprisoned for two months, tortured, and starved. He was released again, made his way to Prague, and later escaped to France, where he was held as a prisoner of war crushing grapes in Bordeaux. He emigrated to the United States in 1939, earned a degree in sociology from Elmhurst College in 1942, and became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He returned to Europe as a U.S. Army interrogator and was awarded the bronze star; during this time he learned his family had been killed at Auschwitz.

Reader's Guide

Blau completed his PhD at Columbia University in 1952 under Robert K. Merton, laying early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1953 to 1970, then returned to Columbia as professor emeritus, and later taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1988 to 2000. His work on exchange theory, particularly in Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964), explained how small-scale social exchange relates to societal-level social structures. Co-authoring The American Occupational Structure (1967) with Otis Dudley Duncan and Andrea Tyree, he contributed to the study of social stratification, winning the Sorokin Award in 1968. Blau also formulated theories on population structures, upward mobility, and heterogeneity, and was among the first sociologists to use high-level statistics with macro-level empirical data. He introduced the concept of 'Blau space,' mapping individuals along a multidimensional space of social forces, which remains a guide for sociologists. His 1977 book Inequality and Heterogeneity presented a macro-sociological theory of social structure based on distributions of people among social positions. Blau was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Did You Know?

• Blau was convicted of high treason at age seventeen for writing articles in an underground newspaper and served time in a Vienna prison.
• He escaped Nazi capture multiple times, was tortured and starved, and later learned his family died at Auschwitz.
• He co-authored The American Occupational Structure, which won the Sorokin Award from the American Sociological Association in 1968.
• Blau served as the 65th president of the American Sociological Association from 1973 to 1974.