Neil Smelser

Obituary

The following obituary appeared in “A Tribute to Neil Smelser, 88th ASA President” published in the January/February 2018 issue of Footnotes.

Sociologist Neil Smelser,whose research on collective behavior and economic sociology were rivaled by his tenure as a mentor, teacher, and liaison to a restive University of California-Berkeley student body in the 1960s, died at age 87. According to the university, he died peacefully at his Berkeley home on October 2.

Smelser had a storied academic career, starting at an early age—he was tenured a year after earning his PhD—and continuing deep into his retirement. From his retirement in 1994 until the last year of his life, Smelser remained a whirlwind of activity on campus and beyond. Those activities included writing seven books, directing the Center for Advanced Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1994-2001), serving as the president of the ASA in 1997, and mentoring Berkeley undergrads, junior faculty, and Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellows.

It was as an academic theorist that Smelser’s impact was felt the widest, as many of his peers recognized well before his death. Jeffrey Alexander, Gary Marx, and Christine Williams wrote in Self, Social Structure and Belief (2004), “Future historians will write about Neil Smelser as an iconic figure in twentieth-century sociology’s second half. … In many respects, both Neil Smelser and the social sciences matured together in the second half of the last century. Smelser expanded his areas of research to include sociology, psychology, economics, and history at the same time that newly synthetic cross-disciplinary programs, area studies, and applied programs appeared.”

Neil Joseph Smelser was born on July 22, 1930, at his grandparents’ farm outside Kahoka, Missouri. His parents, both teachers, moved to Phoenix, AZ, six weeks later, and that’s where Neil and his two brothers grew up. He attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude in 1952. From Harvard, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, returning to Harvard for his PhD in sociology. In his first year of graduate school, Smelser co-authored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons, establishing both his propensity for economic sociology and achievement at a young age.

After earning his PhD in 1958, he joined the faculty at Berkeley as an associate professor of sociology, and achieved tenure the next year. Two years later, at age 31, he became editor of the American Sociological Review.

In 1965, during the Free Speech Movement, Smelser acted as a liaison between the university administration and student groups. The experience cemented his reputation as an authority on the nuances of political activism. An outspoken and influential advocate for social and behavioral sciences, Smelser mentored generations of scholars.

Smelser could be counted on to serve his home campus, and over the years acted as assistant chancellor for educational development, chair of sociology, UC Berkeley faculty representative to the UC regents, and chair of the Academic Senate Policy Committee, among other roles.

As a theorist—and a trained psychoanalyst—Smelser’s research encompassed “sociology, psychology, economics, and history at the same time that newly synthetic cross-disciplinary programs, area studies, and applied programs appeared,” Alexander, Marx and Williams noted in their book.

His largest academic contributions generally centered on economic sociology, such as his value-added theory, which echoed his work as a Free Speech era liaison by setting out the conditions for some kinds of collective behavior to succeed. Also known as the “strain theory,” one key condition is for some sort of injustice to strain society.

Smelser was also a prolific writer, as his post-retirement count suggests. He wrote more than a dozen books, including classics such as 1962’s Theory of Collective Behavior, 1963’s The Sociology of Economic Life, 1991’s Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century, 1997’s Problematics of Sociology, and 2007’s The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions. Recent books include Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict (2013), Getting Sociology Right (2014), and his most recent book, The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys (2009).

Smelser was named to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2000 he was named Ernest W. Burgess Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Sharin Smelser, four children — sons Joseph and Eric, daughters Sarah and Tina — and a number of grandchildren. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Neil J. Smelser Graduate Student Support Fund; for information on the fund, contact Michael Schneider at [email protected]

This obituary is adapted from the Social Science Space, published on October 18, 2017. For the complete article, see www.socialsciencespace.com/2017/10/sociologist-synthesis-neil-smelser-1930-2017.