Seymour Martin Lipset

Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist whose work covered political sociology, trade unions, social stratification, public opinion and the conditions for democracy. Born in Harlem to Russian Jewish immigrants, he took a PhD at Columbia University in 1949 and taught at Stanford and Harvard, among others. His 1959 article Some Social Requisites of Democracy set out the Lipset hypothesis that economic development leads to democracy, and Political Man (1960) sold more than 400,000 copies. He alone presided over both the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. A socialist when young, he later moved to the right.