Lewis A. Coser

Lewis A. Coser was a German-American sociologist, born Ludwig Cohen in Berlin in 1913, who fled Nazi Germany and settled in the United States, later teaching at Brandeis University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His 1956 book The Functions of Social Conflict argued that social conflict is not purely destructive but can serve integrative functions, strengthening group cohesion, clarifying boundaries and enabling adaptation, an argument that bridged structural-functionalist and Marxist conflict traditions in American sociology. He also wrote Masters of Sociological Thought (1970), a widely used history of the discipline's major theorists, and Greedy Institutions (1974), on organizations that demand a member's total loyalty. He served as the sixty sixth president of the American Sociological Association in 1975. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003.