Neil Smelser

Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Smelser was born to a Jewish family, in Kahoka, Missouri, on July 22, 1930.

He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1952 in the Department of Social Relations.

From 1952 to 1954, he was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied economics, philosophy, and politics and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree.

During his first year of graduate school at the age of 24, he co-authored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons, first published in 1956.

He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994.

His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods.

Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."

He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology from Harvard in 1958, and was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows.

He was given tenure a year after graduating from Harvard and joining Berkeley.

and, at the age of 31, he was the youngest editor of the American Sociological Review in 1961, just three years after coming to Berkeley.

In The Sociology of Economic Life (1963), Smelser defines the field of economic sociology "as the sociological perspective applied to economic phenomena."

Smelser contrasts economic sociology to mainstream economics in terms of (1) their concept of the actor, (2) their concept of economic action, (3) their sense of constraints on Economic Action, (4) their view of the relationship between the economy and society, (5) their goals of analysis, (6) the models they employ, and (7) their intellectual tradition.

1968 American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences (1976), Smelser shows how classic studies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber relied on the comparative method.

Smelser's work on the comparative method influenced a key text on the comparative method by Arend Lijphart.

1993 National Academy of Sciences

1993 Berkeley Citation

He was the fifth director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1994 to 2001.

Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg's edited volume The Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994; 2nd edition in 2005) is credited with "consolidat[ing] the field of economic sociology."

Smelser wrote some important early works on the comparative method in the social sciences.

1995 Elected President of American Sociological Association

2000 Ernest W. Burgess Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

2002 Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for Distinguished Career Achievement from the International Sociological Association.

American Philosophical Society

In Theory of Collective Behavior, Smelser offers a unified theory of collective behavior.

It differs from the European social-psychological research on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, William McDougall, and Sigmund Freud.

It also breaks with the American tradition of Edward Alsworth Ross, Robert E. Park, and Herbert Blumer.

As part of his theory, Smelser used the concept of value-added as a metaphor to describe how collective actions occur.

Smelser's value added theory (or strain theory) argued that six elements were necessary for a particular kind of collective behavior to emerge:

Smelser was a proponent of economic sociology, an interdisciplinary field that links sociology and economics.

He retired in 1994 when he became an emeritus professor and died in Berkeley on October 2, 2017.

Over his career, Smelser received many prestigious awards and prizes.