Seymour Martin Lipset

Lore & Background

Lipset was born in Harlem, New York City, to Russian Jewish immigrants and grew up in the Bronx among Irish, Italian, and Jewish youth. He was active from an early age in the Young People's Socialist League, an organization of young Trotskyists that he would later head. He graduated from City College of New York, where he was an anti-Stalinist leftist, and received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto.

His academic career included positions at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, Stanford University (as Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution), Harvard University (as George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology), and George Mason University (as Hazel Professor of Public Policy). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He also served as president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Sociological Research Association, the World Association for Public Opinion Research, the Society for Comparative Research, and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna.

A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right and was considered one of the first neoconservatives. He left the Socialist Party in 1960 and later described himself as a centrist, deeply influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville, George Washington, Aristotle, and Max Weber. He became active within the Democratic Party's conservative wing and associated with neoconservatives without calling himself one.

Reader's Guide

Lipset's most cited work is 'Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy' (1959), a key work on modernization theory that includes the Lipset hypothesis that economic development leads to democracy. He was one of the first proponents of modernization theory, which states that democracy is the direct result of economic growth. The hypothesis has been challenged by scholars such as Guillermo O'Donnell, Adam Przeworski, and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. His book Political Man (1960) sold more than 400,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages, analyzing the social bases of democracy, fascism, communism, and other political organizations. In 1967, with Stein Rokkan, he introduced critical juncture theory and made substantial contributions to cleavage theory. His later work The Democratic Century (2004) sought to explain why North America developed stable democracies and Latin America did not, arguing that divergent histories of colonization and cultural legacies affected democratic prospects. Lipset was named among the top 100 American intellectuals in Richard Posner's 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. At his death, The Guardian called him 'the leading theorist of democracy and American exceptionalism'; The New York Times labeled him 'a pre-eminent sociologist, political scientist and incisive theorist of American uniqueness'; and The Washington Post reported he was 'one of the most influential social scientists of the past half century.'

Did You Know?

• Lipset was the only person to have been president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993).
• His book Political Man sold more than 400,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages, including Vietnamese, Bengali, and Serbo-Croatian.
• Lipset was a strong supporter of Israel and served as president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East.
• He received the MacIver Prize for Political Man (1960) and the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason (1971).