Howard P. Becker

Howard Paul Becker (1899 to 1960) was an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born in New York and raised in Reno and Winnemucca, Nevada, he took his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and a master's and doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago. Among his interests was what he called constructed types of sacred and secular societies. He is perhaps best remembered for Man in Reciprocity: Introductory Lectures on Culture, Society and Personality (1956), an edited series of radio lectures on introductory sociology that drew on sociology, social psychology and anthropology and was praised for an urbane, witty and literate style. He also wrote Social Thought from Lore to Science (1938) with Harry Elmer Barnes, German Youth: Bond or Free (1946), a history and sociology of the youth movement, and Through Values to Social Interpretation (1950). He advised C. Wright Mills on his doctoral thesis at Wisconsin. At his death in 1960 he had just been elected president of the American Sociological Association, and his presidential address, Normative Reactions to Normlessness, was delivered by his son.