Seymour Martin Lipset

Lipset was born in Harlem, New York City,{{cite news| url= https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/obituaries/04lipset.html |title= Seymour Martin Lipset, Sociologist, Dies at 84 | first= Douglas |last= Martin | work= The New York Times | date=4 January 2007| access-date= 19 July 2014}} the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.{{cite news| url= http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Remembering-Seymour-Lipset-most-cited-political-scientist | title= Remembering Seymour Lipset, 'most cited' political scientist | first= Joe | last= Enskenazi |newspaper= Jerusalem Post| agency= JTA |date= 14 January 2007 | access-date= 19 July 2014}} He grew up in the Bronx among Irish, Italian and Jewish youth. "I was in that atmosphere where there was a lot of political talk," Lipset recalled, "but you never heard of Democrats or Republicans; the question was communists, socialists, Trotskyists, or anarchists. It was all sorts of different left wing groups." From an early age, Seymour was active in the Young People's Socialist League, "an organization of young Trotskyists that he would later head."{{cite journal |last1=G. |first1=Jesús Velasco |title=Seymour Martin Lipset: Life and Work |journal=The Canadian Journal of Sociology |date=2004 |volume=29 |issue=4 |pages=583–601 |doi=10.2307/3654712 |jstor=3654712}} He graduated from City College of New York, where he was an anti-Stalinist leftist. He received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto.

Lipset was the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and then became the George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. He also taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and George Mason University, where he was the Hazel Professor of Public Policy.

Lipset was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.{{Cite web |title=Seymour Martin Lipset |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/seymour-martin-lipset |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |language=en}}{{Cite web |title=S. M. Lipset |url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/53204.html |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=www.nasonline.org}}{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Seymour+Martin+Lipset&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2022-06-07 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}} He was the only person to have been President of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). He also served as the 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.

Lipset received the MacIver Prize for Political Man (1960) and, in 1970, the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason.

In 2001, Lipset was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations, in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.{{cite book|last=Posner|first=Richard|title=Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline|year=2001|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=978-0-674-00633-1|url=https://archive.org/details/publicintellectu00posn}}

One of Lipset's most cited works is "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy" (1959),Lipset, Seymour Martin. Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy. The American Political Science Review, Volume 53, Issue 1 (1959): 69-105. a key work on modernization theory, on democratization, and an article that includes the Lipset hypothesis that economic development leads to democracy.

Lipset was one of the first proponents of the "theory of modernization", which states that democracy is the direct result of economic growth, and that "[t]he more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy."{{cite journal|title=Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy |first=Seymour Martin |last= Lipset |journal= The American Political Science Review | volume= 53| issue= 1 |date= March 1959 | pages= 69–105 |jstor= 1951731|doi=10.2307/1951731 |s2cid=53686238 }} Lipset's modernization theory has continued to be a significant factor in academic discussions and research relating to democratic transitions.{{cite journal |last1=Diamond |first1=Larry Jay |title=Thinking About Hybrid Regimes |journal=Journal of Democracy |date=2002 |volume=13 |issue=2 |pages=21–35 |doi=10.1353/jod.2002.0025|s2cid=154815836 }}{{cite journal |last1=Zakaria |first1=Fareed |title=The Rise of Illiberal Democracy |journal=Foreign Affairs |date=1997 |volume=76 |issue=6 |pages=22–43 |doi=10.2307/20048274 |jstor=20048274|s2cid=151236500 }} It has been referred to as the "Lipset hypothesis"{{Cite SSRN|ssrn = 2573981|title = The Lipset Hypothesis in a Property Rights Perspective|date = 5 January 2015|last1 = Czegledi|first1 = Pal}}{{Cite web|url=https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/Driving%20Democracy/Chapter%204.pdf|title=Harvard Kennedy School|accessdate=11 March 2023}} and the "Lipset thesis".{{Cite journal | doi=10.1080/23254823.2019.1570859| title=The political sociologist Seymour M. Lipset: Remembered in political science, neglected in sociology| year=2019| last1=Korom| first1=Philipp| journal=European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology| volume=6| issue=4| pages=448–473| pmid=32309461| pmc=7099882| doi-access=free}}

The Lipset hypothesis has been challenged by Guillermo O'Donnell, Adam Przeworski and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.

One of the debates as to how exactly democracy emerges, is between endogenous or exogenous democratization. Endogenous democratization holds the argument that democratization happens as a result of the country's previous history leading up to that point. So here economic development and expansion of the middle class play a crucial role. Proponents of this viewpoint are Charles Boix and Susan C. Stokes.{{cite journal | url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054237 | jstor=25054237 | title=Endogenous Democratization | last1=Boix | first1=Carles | last2=Stokes | first2=Susan C. | journal=World Politics | year=2003 | volume=55 | issue=4 | pages=517–549 | doi=10.1353/wp.2003.0019 | s2cid=18745191 | url-access=subscription }}

Exogenous democratization, on the other hand, argues that democratization happens as a result of external factors, such as the zeitgeist of pro-democracy political movements seen across the world from the third wave of democratization[https://www.ned.org/docs/Samuel-P-Huntington-Democracy-Third-Wave.pdf Democracy's Third Wave] up until the 1990s. According to Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, the reason for the correlation between economic wealth and democracy is for the simple reason that once a country has transitioned to a democratic rule, it has a much better chance of staying democratic if it is wealthy, where as poor countries most often fall back into autocratic rule.{{cite journal | url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25053996 | jstor=25053996 | title=Modernization: Theories and Facts | last1=Przeworski | first1=Adam | last2=Limongi | first2=Fernando | journal=World Politics | year=1997 | volume=49 | issue=2 | pages=155–183 | doi=10.1353/wp.1997.0004 | s2cid=5981579 | url-access=subscription }}

Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, published in 1960, is an influential analysis of the bases of democracy, fascism, communism ("working class authoritarianism"), and other political organizations, across the world, in the interwar period and after World War II. One of the important sections is Chapter 2: "Economic Development and Democracy." Larry Diamond and Gary Marks argue that "Lipset's assertion of a direct relationship between economic development and democracy has been subjected to extensive empirical examination, both quantitative and qualitative, in the past 30 years. And the evidence shows, with striking clarity and consistency, a strong causal relationship between economic development and democracy." In Chapter V, Lipset analyzed "Fascism"—Left, Right, and Center, and explained that the study of the social bases of different modern mass movements suggests that each major social stratum has both democratic and extremist political expressions. He explained the mistakes of identifying extremism as a right-wing phenomenon, and Communism with the left-wing phenomenon. He underlined that extremist ideologies and groups can be classified and analyzed in the same terms as democratic groups, i.e., right, left, and center.

Political Man was published and republished in several editions, sold more than 400,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages, including: Vietnamese, Bengali, and Serbo-Croatian.

In 1967, Lipset co-authored work with Stein Rokkan,Lipset, Seymour Martin; Rokkan, Stein (1967). "Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: an introduction". In Lipset, Seymour Martin; Rokkan, Stein (eds.). Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. The Free Press. pp. 1–64. Lipset introduced critical juncture theory and made a substantial contributions to cleavage theory.

In The Democratic Century, published in 2004, Lipset sought to explain why North America developed stable democracies and Latin America did not. He argued that the reason for this divergence is that the initial patterns of colonization, the subsequent process of economic incorporation of the new colonies, and the wars of independence varied. The divergent histories of Britain and Iberia are seen as creating different cultural legacies that affected the prospects of democracy.Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason Lakin, The Democratic Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, Part II.

Lipset 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.{{cite news| url= https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010301793.html |title= Political Scientist Seymour Lipset, 84; Studied Democracy and U.S. Culture |first= Patricia |last= Sullivan |date= 4 January 2007 |newspaper= The Washington Post |access-date= 19 July 2014}} He became active within the Democratic Party's conservative wing, and associated with neoconservatives, without calling himself one.See John Richards, "Seymour Lipset" in {{cite book|editor=David E. Smith|title=Lipset's Agrarian Socialism: A Re-examination|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U1xOd4vBTh0C&pg=PA63|year=2007|publisher=University of Regina Press|page=63|isbn=978-0-88977-205-2}}{{cite news| url=http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/206955/neoconservative-invention/jonah-goldberg |title= The Neoconservative Invention | work=National Review| date= 20 May 2003 | first= Jonah |last= Goldberg| access-date= 19 July 2014}}

Lipset was vice chair of the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace, a board member of the Albert Shanker Institute, a member of the US Board of Foreign Scholarships, co-chair of the Committee for Labor Law Reform, co-chair of the Committee for an Effective UNESCO, and consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the American Jewish Committee.

Lipset was a strong supporter of the state of Israel, and was President of the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, chair of the National B'nai B'rith Hillel Commission and the Faculty Advisory Cabinet of the United Jewish Appeal, and co-chair of the executive committee of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East. He worked for years on seeking solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict{{cite journal| title= Seymour Martin Lipset 1922–2006| url= http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v23n2p15.htm |first= Metta |last= Spencer| journal=Peace Magazine |volume= 23 |number= 2 |page= 15| date= April 2007 | access-date= 19 July 2014}} as part of his larger project of research on the factors that allow societies to sustain stable and peaceful democracies. His work focused on the way in which high levels of socioeconomic development created the preconditions for democracy (see also Amartya Sen's work), and the consequences of democracy for peace.Spence, Metta. "Lipset's Gift to Peace Workers: On Getting and Keeping Democracy"

Lipset's book The First New Nation was a finalist for the National Book Award. He was also awarded the Townsend Harris and Margaret Byrd Dawson Medals for significant achievement, the Northern Telecom-International Council for Canadian Studies Gold Medal, and the Leon Epstein Prize in Comparative Politics by the American Political Science Association. He received the Marshall Sklare Award for distinction in Jewish studies and, in 1997, he was awarded the Helen Dinnerman Prize by the World Association for Public Opinion Research.

Lipset's first wife, Elsie, died in 1987. She was the mother of his three children, David, Daniel, and Carola ("Cici"). David Lipset is a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He had six grandchildren. Lipset was survived by his second wife, Sydnee Guyer (a director of the JCRC), whom he married in 1990.

At age 84, Lipset died as a result of complications following a stroke.

• "The Rural Community and Political Leadership in Saskatchewan." Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 13.3 (1947): 410–428.
• Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology (1950), {{ISBN|978-0-520-02056-6}} (1972 printing)
• We'll Go Down to Washington (1951)
• "Democracy in Private Government: a case study of the International Typographical Union." British Journal of Sociology (1952) 3:47–58 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/587526 in JSTOR]
• Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) with Martin Trow and James S. Coleman
• "The Biography of a Research Project: Union Democracy." in Sociologists at Work: the craft of social research edited by Phillip E. Hammond. (1964)
• Social Mobility in Industrial Society with Reinhard Bendix (1959), {{ISBN|978-0-88738-760-9}}
• Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development with Neil J. Smelser (1966), {{ISBN|978-0-8290-0910-1}}
• "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy." The American Political Science Review Volume 53, Issue 1 (1959): 69–105.
• "Social Stratification and right-wing extremism," British Journal of Sociology (1959) 10:346–382.
• Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960), {{ISBN|978-0-385-06650-1}} [https://archive.org/details/politicalmansoci00lips online]
• The First New Nation (1963), {{ISBN|978-0-393-00911-8}} [https://archive.org/details/firstnewnationth011378mbp online]
• The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, edited with Sheldon S. Wolin (1965)
• Party Systems and Voter Alignments, co-edited with Stein Rokkan (Free Press, 1967)
• Student Politics (1967), {{ISBN|978-0-465-08248-3}}
• Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures, (1968) {{ISBN|978-0-88738-694-7}} (1988 printing)
• editor, Politics and the social sciences (1969)
• Prejudice and Society with Earl Raab
• The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 with Earl Raab (1970), {{ISBN|978-0-226-48457-0}} [https://archive.org/details/politicsofunreas00 online]
• Rebellion in the University (1971)
• Education and politics at Harvard: Two essays prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (1975) with David Riesman
• The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics with Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. (1975), {{ISBN|978-0-07-010112-8}}
• editor, The Third century : America as a post-industrial society (1979) [https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.12539 online]
• The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind (1983) [https://archive.org/details/confidencegapbus00lips online]
• Consensus and Conflict: Essays in Political Sociology (1985) [https://archive.org/details/consensusconflic00seym online]
• Unions in transition: entering the second century (1986)
• editor, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures (1988)
• Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (1989)
• "Liberalism, Conservatism, and Americanism", Ethics & International Affairs vol 3 (1989). [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-7093.1989.tb00219.x/abstract online]
• "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited." American Sociological Review Vol. 59, No. 1: 1-22. (1994) [http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Lipset%20Social%20Requisites%20of%20Democracy%20Revisited.pdf online]
• Jews and the New American Scene with Earl Raab (1995)
• "Steady Work: An Academic Memoir", in Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 22, 1996
• American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996) [https://archive.org/details/americanexceptio0000lips online]
• It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States with Gary Marks (2000), {{ISBN|978-0-393-32254-5}} [https://archive.org/details/itdidnthappenher0000lips online]
• The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, but Join Much Less with Noah Meltz, Rafael Gomez, and Ivan Katchanovski (2004), {{ISBN|978-0-8014-4200-1}}
• The Democratic Century with Jason M. Lakin (2004), {{ISBN|978-0-8061-3618-9}} [https://archive.org/details/democraticcentur0000lips online]

• {{annotated link|American civil religion}}
• {{annotated link|Comparative politics}}
• {{annotated link|Democratization}}
• {{annotated link|Juan José Linz}}

{{Reflist}}

• Falter, Jürgen W. "Radicalization of the middle classes or mobilization of the unpolitical? The theories of Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix on the electoral support of the NSDAP in the light of recent research." Social Science Information 20.2 (1981): 389–430.
• Grajales, Jesus Velasco. "Seymour Martin Lipset: Life and work." The Canadian Journal of Sociology 29.4 (2004): 583–601. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/176984/summary online]
• Houtman, Dick. "Lipset and 'working-class' authoritarianism." American Sociologist 34.1 (2003): 85–103. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dick_Houtman/publication/226656111_Lipset_and_working-class_authoritarianism/links/004635282913542c36000000.pdf online]
• McGovern, Patrick. "The young Lipset on the iron law of oligarchy: a taste of things to come1." British journal of sociology 61.s1 (2010): 29–42. [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/35308/1/The%20young%20Lipset%20on%20the%20iron%20law%20of%20oligarchy%20(LSERO).pdf online]
• Marks, Gary, and Larry Jay Diamond, eds. Reexamining democracy: essays in honor of Seymour Martin Lipset (Sage, 1992).
• Marks, Gary, and Larry Diamond. "Seymour Martin Lipset and the study of democracy." American Behavioral Scientist 35.4/5 (1992): 352+.
• Marx, Gary. "Travels with Marty: Seymour Martin Lipset as a Mentor," American Sociologist 37#4 (2006) pp. 76–83. [http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/lipset.html online]
• Miller, Seymour M., and Frank Riessman. "'Working-Class Authoritarianism': A Critique of Lipset." British Journal of Sociology (1961) 15: 263–276. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Dekker3/publication/229604710_Working-Class_Authoritarianism_A_Re-Examination_of_the_Lipset_Thesis/links/562135c708ae70315b58ca2c.pdf online]
• Smith, David E. ed. Lipset's Agrarian Socialism: A Re-examination (Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy (SIPP) 2007).
• Wiseman, Nelson. "Reading Prairie Politics: Morton, Lipset, Macpherson." International Journal of Canadian Studies 51 (2015): 7–26.

• Archer, Robin, "Seymour Martin Lipset and political sociology." The British Journal of Sociology Volume 61, Issues 1 (2010)
• Philipp Korom, "The political sociologist Seymour M. Lipset: Remembered in political science, neglected in sociology." European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6:4 (2019), 448–473, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2019.1570859 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7099882/ The political sociologist Seymour M. Lipset: Remembered in political science, neglected in sociology - PMC]

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{{external media| float = right| video1 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?71379-1/american-exceptionalism Presentation by Lipset on American Exceptionalism, April 22, 1996], C-SPAN| video2 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?71644-1/american-exceptionalism Booknotes interview with Lipset on American Exceptionalism, June 23, 1996], C-SPAN| video3 = [https://www.c-span.org/video/?158930-1/it-happen-here Presentation by Lipset on It Didn't Happen Here, August 23, 2000], C-SPAN}}

• [https://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1250.html Seymour Martin Lipset] interview with Ben Wattenberg (PBS)
• [http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/lipset-seymour.pdf Claude S. Fischer and Ann Swidler, "Seymour M. Lipset", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2016)]
• {{C-SPAN|23626}}

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