Peter Blau

Peter Michael Blau (February 7, 1918 – March 12, 2002) was an American sociologist and theorist.

Peter Blau was born in 1918 in Vienna, a few months before the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed.

He was raised in a Jewish family as fascist power within Europe grew and Hitler's influence within Austria became increasingly evident.

At the age of seventeen, Blau was convicted of high treason for speaking out against government repression in articles he wrote for an underground newspaper of the Social Democratic Worker's Party and was subsequently incarcerated.

Blau was given a ten-year sentence in the federal prison in Vienna.

He was then released shortly after his imprisonment when the ban on political activity was lifted due to the National Socialists' rise to power.

When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Blau attempted to escape to Czechoslovakia on March 13, 1938.

Both Blau and his sister—who was sent to England—managed to escape.

The rest of his family, however, decided to stay in Austria.

Blau's original attempt to flee proved unsuccessful as he was captured by Nazi border patrol and was imprisoned for two months.

During the two months he was detained, he was tortured, starved, and was forced to eat only lard.

Yet, he was once again released and made his way to Prague.

When Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, he escaped again, returning illegally to Vienna to visit one more time with his parents.

In the dark of night, Blau hid on a train to cross the border into France.

There he turned himself in to the Allied forces, who had not yet reversed their policy of putting anyone with a German passport—even the Jews—into labor camps.

He spent several weeks as a POW of France crushing grapes in Bordeaux.

When the policy about Jews was reversed, he was able to continue his journey to Le Havre, France where he received a refugee scholarship to Elmhurst College in Illinois through a group of missionaries studying at the theological seminary.

Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939.

Blau emigrated to America on the Degrasse ship and landed in New York on January 1, 1939.

He later attended Elmhurst College, earning his degree in sociology in 1942, and becoming a United States citizen in 1943.

Blau returned to Europe 1942 as a member of the United States Army, acting as an interrogator given his skills in the German language and was awarded the bronze star for his duties.

It was during this time that Blau also received word that his family had been killed at Auschwitz.

He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy.

After receiving his bachelor's degree from Elmhurst College, Blau continued his education at Columbia University, where he received his PhD in 1952.

The next year, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1970.

He also taught as Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in Great Britain, as a senior fellow at King's College, and as a Distinguished Honorary professor at Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences which he helped to establish.

One of Blau's most memorable and significant contributions to the field of sociology came in 1967.

Working together with Otis Dudley Duncan and Andrea Tyree, he co-authored The American Occupational Structure, which provided a meaningful sociological contribution to the study of social stratification, and won the highly touted Sorokin Award from the American Sociological Association in 1968.

Blau is also known for his contributions to sociological theory.

In 1970 he returned to Columbia University, where he was awarded the lifetime position of Professor Emeritus.

In 1974 Blau served as the 65th president of the American Sociological Association.

From 1988 to 2000 he taught as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the same department as his wife, Judith Blau, while continuing to commute to New York to meet with graduate students and colleagues.

His sociological specialty was in organizational and social structures. He formulated theories relating to many aspects of social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, and heterogeneity.

From each of his theories, he deduced an hypothesis which he would test against large scale empirical research.

He was one of the first sociological theorists to use high level statistics to develop sociology as a scientific discipline using macro-level empirical data to gird theory.

He also produced theories on how population structures can influence human behavior.

One of Blau's most important contributions to social theory is his work regarding exchange theory, which explains how small-scale social exchange directly relates to social structures at a societal level.

He also was the first to map out the wide variety of social forces, dubbed "Blau space" by Miller McPherson.

This idea was one of the first to take individuals and distribute them along a multidimensional space.

Blau-space is still used as a guide by sociologists and has been expanded to include areas of sociology never specifically covered by Blau himself.