Liah Greenfeld

Greenfeld's maternal grandfather, Mikhail D. Kirschenblat, died in 1937 under torture during an interrogation by NKVD.

He was a brother of Yakov D. Kirschenblat, a prominent biologist and a cousin of Yevgeny Primakov, a future Russian Prime Minister.

His wife, Greenfeld's maternal grandmother Emma, was arrested several months later as a “wife of the enemy of the people” and spent ten years in the GULAG.

They asked to be sent to the Far East to be near her father's parents: her paternal grandfather, in the GULAG in the Arctic since 1938 and just released, was there in exile.

This grandfather, Natan Grinfeld, was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet diplomat and movie producer, political prisoner in both Tsarist and Soviet Russia.

His wife, Greenfeld's paternal grandmother, a physician, exiled from Leningrad to Central Russia, joined him there.

Liah Greenfeld (born 1954) is an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar engaged in the scientific explanation of human social reality on various levels, beginning with the individual mind and ending with the level of civilization.

She has been called "the most iconoclastic" of contemporary sociologists and her approach represents the major alternative to the mainstream approaches in social science.

Throughout her analyses, she emphasizes the empirical foundation of claims that she makes about human thought and action, underlining the importance of logical consistency between different sources of evidence as well as between the many interrelated hypotheses that come together to help us explain complex human phenomena.

Because our thought and action are rarely limited to one, conveniently isolated sphere of human existence but rather occur within the context of more than one area of our reality at the same time (e.g. the political, the religious, the economic, the artistic, etc.) Greenfeld highlights the fact that an empirical study of humanity must necessarily be interdisciplinary.

Liah Greenfeld was born in Vladivostok, USSR, in 1954.

Both her parents (Vladimir/Ze’ev Grinfeld and Viktoria Kirshenblat) were physicians, educated in Leningrad, who worked in the first hospital opened in the port of Nakhodka.

Greenfeld's parents, dissidents from the get-go, tried to emigrate to Israel since 1967, and were among the first “refuseniks” – the only ones in Sochi, where they lived at the time.

They obtained the permission to leave in 1972.

In Sochi, before she emigrated to Israel with her parents, Greenfeld was first known as a child prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for poetry (and a bust of Pushkin) at 16, and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias, in Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Greenfeld received her doctoral degree in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982.

In the same year, she came to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer at the University of Chicago.

She moved on to hold positions of Assistant and later the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard during 1985–1994.

Best known for her trilogy on nationalism -- Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013), Greenfeld has studied and written about the entire range of modern social reality, including art, literature, science, religion, love, mental illness, ideological politics, economic competition, and so on.

In 1994 she joined Boston University as a University Professor and Professor of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology.

At various periods, Greenfeld has held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Lingnan University and the Open University of Hong Kong.

She was a recipient of the UAB Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel.

She received grants from the Mellon, Olin, and Earhart foundations, the National Council for Soviet & East European Research, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

In 2002, she received the Kagan Prize of the American Historical Society for the best book in European History for her book The Spirit of Capitalism. In 2004, she was chosen to deliver the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics, and in 2011, the Nairn Lecture at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia.

In her first book on nationalism: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld examines the emergence and spread of nationalism in the first five societies which defined themselves as nations—England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States.

She traces the birth of the idea of the nation to 16th century England.

This idea, she argues, was brought about by the historical accident of the Wars of the Roses which created a vacuum in the upper strata of English feudal society leading to an unprecedented amount of upward social mobility.

Such upward mobility was a new, bewildering (anomic), yet positive experience for many of the English people.

It required justification because it could not be made sense of within the framework of their previous—feudal—consciousness.

At that time, the word “nation” meant an elite.

The English defined the English people – the word “people” was, at that time, defined as the lower classes –as a nation, elevating the entire population to the dignity of the elite.

With this definition, our distinctly modern world was brought into being.

Nationalism, fundamentally, is the equation of the “people” with the “nation”.

It destroyed the traditional social hierarchy and, with national identity, granted people dignity, which was previously enjoyed only by the elites.

National identity, as such, is a dignifying identity: it makes dignity the experience of every member of a nation.

Once one experiences dignity, it cannot be given up.

The fundamental equality of national membership also implies an open and inclusive social stratification which encourages all people to mobilize and to play the active political and cultural role formerly played only by the elites.

The people become the bearer(s) of the sovereignty, replacing God and king, and have the freedom and right to decide their own as well as the common destiny.

Popular sovereignty, together with fundamental equality of membership, as well as secularization, are the three core principles of nationalism.

Presupposing an open system of social stratification, at the core of nationalism lies a compelling, inclusive image of society and an image of a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members.