Seymour Martin Lipset

Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist whose major work spanned political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life, and who wrote extensively on the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He served as president of both the American Political Science Association (1979 to 1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992 to 1993). A socialist earlier in his career, Lipset later moved to the right and was considered one of the first neoconservatives; at his death in 2006 he was described in the press as a leading theorist of democracy and American exceptionalism and as one of the most influential social scientists of the past half century.