Smelser, Neil

Future historians will write about Neil Smelser (b. 1930) as an iconic figure in twentieth-century sociology's second half. Smelser has had an extraordinarily active career, not only as scholar but as teacher and organizational leader. His impressive and varied performances as organizational leader are perhaps less well known, but they speak equally clearly of scholarly power exercised in a more political manner. His roles have included adviser to a string of University of California chancellors and presidents; referee of the nation's most significant scientific training and funding programs, from NSF (National Science Foundation) to the departments of leading universities; organizer of the Handbook of Sociology and the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences; and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

In many respects, both Neil Smelser and the social sciences matured together in the last half of the last century. Smelser expanded his areas of research to include sociology, psychology, economics, and history, at the same time that newly synthetic cross-disciplinary programs, area studies, and applied programs appeared. Through his work with commissions and foundations and as a spokesperson for the social sciences, he sought a greater public role for sociology, and helped to foster the gradual infiltration of their findings and methods into other disciplines, practical settings, and popular culture. Smelser's early interest in comparative international studies anticipated their expansion, an increase in international collaboration, and greater awareness of globalization issues. His move from optimism about positivist approaches and functionalism in the 1950s, to a more guarded optimism and plurivocality today has paralleled broader doubts within the academy and greater tolerance for other ways of knowing.

There is one fundamental respect, however, in which Smelser has broken with dominant trends. The last one-third of the twentieth century was marked by increasing fragmentation and seemingly endless specialization. It was an age of centrifugal conceptual forces and centripetal methodological rigor. These post-1960s intellectual developments have unfolded against a background of ideological jeremiads, the continuous reference to social crisis, and alternations between elegies and eulogies to revolutionary social change. Through all this, Smelser has continued to uphold generality and synthesis as worthy scientific goals. He has maintained his intellectual commitment to uniting divergent disciplinary perspectives and even expanded significantly his own disciplinary reach. He has become ever more dedicated to bridging various conceptual and methodological divides. He has also maintained a quiet and impressive serenity about the continuing possibility for progressive social reform and democratic political change.

Neil Smelser's active life as theorist and researcher has spanned more than 50 years. In 1962, at the age of 32, he became editor of the American Sociological Review, the most influential editorial position in the discipline. Almost 35 years later, in 1996, he was elected president of the American Sociological Association, in recognition not only of his lifetime achievement but of the influence, both [Page 709]scientific and organizational, that he continued to wield over those decades.

Smelser began his public life as a Wunderkind. Having barely settled into Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1952, he was tapped by Talcott Parsons, his Harvard mentor, to advise him about preparing for the Marshall lectures at Cambridge. Parsons wanted to demonstrate that his newly developed AGIL theory could handle economics. (AGIL refers to the four “pattern variables” in Parsons's theory of social action. In particular, they refer to: A = adaptation; G = goal attainment; I = integration; L = pattern maintenance, later changed to Latency.) Yet he had stopped reading in that discipline before Keynes' General Theory. Smelser was au courrant with the Keynesian revolution and AGIL besides.

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