Archive for January 11th, 2007
Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006)
Embarassing, but I managed to miss this piece of news completely:
- Washington Post, 4th January: Political Scientist Seymour Lipset, 84; Studied Democracy and U.S. Culture
- New York Times: Seymour Martin Lipset, Sociologist, Dies at 84
- Larry Diamond and Gary Marks on Seymour Martin Lipset (written 1992)
Note that while the Washington Post calls Lipset a political scientist, the New York Times claims him for sociology.
Who is right?
As a matter of fact, both. Lipset’s main body of work was concerned with political sociology but he was very much one of founders of modern political science. (The Lipset-Rokkan thesis, anyone?)
When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, Lipset was one of those scholars that we read about – rather than reading the man himself. For a number of reasons, I became more fascinated with Lipset’s contemporary Giovanni Sartori.