Sociologist and intellectual, Nathan Glazer, dead at 95

NEW YORK (AP) — Nathan Glazer, a prominent sociologist and public intellectual who assisted on a classic study of conformity, “The Lonely Crowd,” and co-authored a groundbreaking document of non-conformity, “Beyond the Melting Pot,” has died at 95.

Glazer’s daughter, Sarah Glazer, confirmed her father died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Saturday morning.

A longtime professor at Harvard University, Glazer, was among the last of the deeply-read thinkers who influenced culture and politics in the mid-20th century. Starting in the 1940s, Glazer was a writer and editor for Commentary and The New Republic. He was a co-editor of The Public Interest, and wrote or co-wrote numerous books. With peers such as Daniel Bell and Irving Howe, he had a wide range of interests, “a notion of universal competence,” from foreign policy to Modernist architecture, subject of one his latter books, “From a Cause to a Style.”

A radical in his youth, he was regarded as a founding “neo-conservative,” a label he resisted. His most famous projects were the million-selling “The Lonely Crowd,” primarily written by David Riesman and a prescient 1950 release about consumerism and peer pressure, and the landmark “Beyond the Melting Pot,” which countered the core American myth of assimilation.

Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan examined five racial and ethnic groups in New York City – blacks, Italian-Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans and Irish-Americans – and concluded that even as languages and customs from the old world faded, new styles and traditions emerged that reflected distinct identities. “It was reasonable to believe that a new American type would emerge, a new nationality in which it would be a matter of indifference whether a man was of Anglo-Saxon or German or Italian or Jewish origin,” the authors wrote. “The initial notion of an American melting pot did not, it seems, quite grasp what would happen in America.”

The book was published in 1963 to immediate and continuing debate over its refutation of a blended society, over the authors’ belief that blacks’ struggles could not be blamed on discrimination alone.