Morris Janowitz

Morris Janowitz (October 22, 1919 – November 7, 1988) was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism.

He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations.

He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago.

He was the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Janowitz was the vice-president of the American Sociological Association, receiving their Career of Distinguished Scholarship award, and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association.

Janowitz also founded the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, as well as the journal Armed Forces & Society.

He was an early founder of the field of military sociology.

His students, such as David R. Segal, Mady Segal, and James Burk are prominent and influential military sociologists.

Janowitz was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, the second son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, and attended Eastside High School.

Paterson was known for its silk industry, in which his father worked, eventually establishing his own silk business.

Janowitz earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington Square College of New York University, where he studied under Sidney Hook (former student of John Dewey) and Bruce Lannes Smith (former student of Harold Lasswell).

Hook exposed Janowitz to Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism, while Smith exposed him to Laswell's "Chicago School" approach to social science and psychoanalysis.

After graduating from Washington Square College, he worked for the Library of Congress and the Justice Department Special War Policies Unit.

In 1943, Janowitz was drafted into the Army, where he joined the Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis Branch, performing content analysis of communications and propaganda in German radio broadcasts, as well as interviews of German prisoners of war.

Janowitz's experiences with the war had a profound impact on the subsequent direction of his academic career: "This experience with war, with the research that war required of him and with other social scientists engaged in the war effort, crystallized Janowitz's self-identification as a social scientist".

In 1946, Janowitz began his graduate studies at the University of Chicago.

Janowitz' dissertation at the University of Chicago was supervised by Bruno Bettelheim and Edward Shils.

Before completing his Ph.D in Sociology in 1948, he was hired as an instructor at Chicago.

He became an assistant professor upon completion of his PhD. In 1951, Janowitz became a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1961.

Toward the end of his stay at Michigan, Janowitz took an academic fellowship, during which he completed his first major publication, The Professional Soldier. During his last year at Michigan, Janowitz organized a group of scholars around the founding of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS) to "support development of sociological analyses of military organization; to prepare a series of specific research papers on internal military organization; and to serve as a focal point for long-term training in and for the development of a relationship between sociology and the military establishment".

The IUS remains active to date, and continues to publish the journal Armed Forces & Society.

In 1953 Janowitz summoned a group of scholars, including Samuel P. Huntington, to Ann Arbor, Michigan to discuss the future study of the armed forces.

This led Janowitz to cultivate and develop his ideas about military sociology through a Fulbright Fellowship in 1954 and a fellowship at the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1958, where in 1960 he completed his first major publication on military sociology, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (13).

The Professional Soldier was a major accomplishment and established the study of the military as a sub-field in sociology by creating a "fertile research agenda" which other scholars could and still do follow.

It remains one of the foundational works in the area of civil-military relations,

and was particularly important given that previous foci of sociology had avoided the study of the armed forces.

The Professional Soldier focused on military elites, as well as those officers who were "destined soon to join the inner-circles of military decision-making"(177).

In The Professional Soldier, Janowitz used a methodology which included content analysis, a survey of 760 generals and admirals and 576 military officers from the Pentagon, and interviews of over 100 high-level officers (995).

It revealed the changing nature of organizational authority within the military away from a disciplinary model towards subtler forms of personnel management, reflecting a convergence between the military and civilian spheres.

Furthermore, the soldier had become more technical and proficient in its functional means, narrowing the gap between the civilian and military spheres by requiring specialized civilian participation in the more technical capacities of the military.

In 1962, Janowitz left Michigan and became a professor in the University of Chicago Sociology Department.

In 1967, Janowitz was appointed chairman of the department.

In this capacity, he worked to rebuild what seemed to be a once great, but presently fractured, Sociology Department.

Janowitz did so by encouraging "new theoretical outlooks and alternative methodological approaches" through hiring more diverse faculty members from different disciplines.

He also sought to reconstruct the intellectual heritage of the department through the creation of "The Heritage of Sociology" book series.

The compilation of 40 volumes in the Heritage series led Janowitz to reflect upon the philosophical foundations for sociology, recalling influential pragmatists such as George Herbert Mead, Sydney Hook, and perhaps most importantly, John Dewey.

Janowitz completed his five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department in 1972.

In 1972, Janowitz was honored as a Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions by the University of Cambridge.

Janowitz remained in the department until his retirement in 1987, focusing more heavily on his academic pursuits, which culminated into a trilogy of books published between 1976 and 1983: Social Control of the Welfare State, The Last Half-Century, and The Reconstruction of Patriotism.

Janowitz died one year after retirement in 1988 on November 7 from Parkinson's disease.