The Psychoanalytic Post

Martin Lipset was another one of those brilliant undergraduate students whose debating skills in particular and critical acumen more generally were honed at the Alcove One of the cafeteria of the City College of New York in the late thirties and early forties. The unifying factor of those 30-50 City students who congregated at Alcove […]

Alfred (Louis) Kroeber (1876-1960) was an American anthropologist born in Hoboken, New Jersey to parents of German Protestant extraction. Fluent in both English and German (which was the predominant language of use growing up in his childhood home) he received a classical training in Latin and Greek and other humanistic subjects. He became interested in […]

C. (Charles) Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the most significant sociologists and sociological theorists to challenge the Parsonian consensus in American sociology during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Waco Texas he completed his doctoral dissertation in the sociology of knowledge on the relationship between pragmatism and sociology, having been influenced in […]

Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Talcott Parsons  Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was a dominant figure in American sociology from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s. He became a lightning-rod for criticism by a younger, more radical generation of sociologists who were just coming into their own against the backdrop of the anti-nuclear and peace campaigns of the […]

Robert King Merton: (1910-2003) born in Philadelphia on the fourth of July as Meyer Robert Schkolnick to newly immigrated Russian-Jewish parents. Merton changed his name as an amateur magician to this stage name by which he came to be known during his scholarly career. One of the most celebrated sociologists in the mid to late […]

  Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) was a co-founder – with Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart and Max Weber – and first president of the German Sociological Society (1909). He is best known and remembered for his pairing of social groupings into Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) a pairing that has often been linked to Durkheim’s mechanical and […]

Nathan Glazer (1923- ) is professor emeritus at Harvard University. Born in New York City and raised in the Bronx, he attended CCNY (entering the freshman class in February 1940) and was a “member” of Alcove One where the anti-Stalinist left tended to congregate to debate the issues of the day. He was also a […]

Daniel Bell (1919-2011) Daniel Bell was one of the most influential sociologists and public intellectuals in the post-war era. His most famous works include The End of Ideology(related to the Cold War) in which he argued that the imperative of the new, post-war economy narrowed the field of ideology so that real ideological and political […]

Sociology and Anthropology Monday April 21, 2014 Lawrence Krader (1919-1998) Lawrence Krader was born in New York City and died in Berlin, Germany. He was known in Anthropology as one of the world’s leading experts on the peoples of Soviet Central Asia, having both written a leading textbook on the subject and leading many expeditions […]

Franz Boas (1858-1942) – Progenitor of American Anthropology Franz Boas was a German-Jewish physicist and geographer who, through his studies of Inuit on Baffin Island and of the Kwakiutl in British Columbia under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, came to devote himself to the study of anthropology by challenging […]