Neil Smelser

Neil Joseph Smelser (July 22, 1930 – October 2, 2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods.

Neil Joseph Smelser was born in Kahoka, Missouri, on July 22, 1930. His parents moved to Phoenix, Arizona six weeks later, and he attended Phoenix public schools through high school. Both of his parents were teachers: his father taught philosophy and drama at Glendale Community College and his mother taught high school Latin. His father was politically active on the left, particularly in the local American Federation of Teachers union.

Smelser next attended Harvard University on a national scholarship, where he graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Department of Social Relations. He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis under the mentorship of social psychologist Gardner Lindzey, who would remain a mentor, close friend, and professional resource for decades to come. From 1952 to 1954, he was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, rowed crew, and married just after his exams; there he was awarded a second Bachelor of Arts degree in 1954.

He returned to Harvard in September 1954 for graduate work and became a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows the next year, in the summer of 1955. During his first year of graduate school he co-authored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons, first published in 1956. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology from Harvard in 1958. His doctoral dissertation was later published as Social Change in the Industrial Revolution in 1959.

Later in life he studied psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, where he began his training in 1963 and graduated in 1971.

Smelser joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 after graduating from Harvard and was given tenure just a year after. In 1962 he was made full professor, and in 1972 he was raised to University Professor. He retired emeritus in 1994, but remained active in campus life and academic mentorship. In the year of his retirement, he was awarded a Berkeley Citation.

In the mid-1960s Free Speech Movement at Berkeley he became a leading liaison between the university administration and student groups. He became Special Assistant for Student Political Activity to the Chancellor at UC Berkeley in 1965, Assistant Chancellor for Educational Development 1966–1969, and Associate Director of the Institute of International Studies 1969–1973 and 1980–1990. He also chaired the Academic Senate Policy Committee 1971–1972 and chaired the Department of Sociology twice, 1974–1976 and 1991–1992. He assisted with the founding of Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1970s, and 1989–1997 he was a high level advisor to Berkeley's management of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He became the youngest editor of the American Sociological Review in 1961, at the age of 31. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968, to the American Philosophical Society in 1976, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973–1974) and a Russell Sage Fellowship (1989–1990) and served on the board of trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation 1990–2000.