Irving Louis Horowitz | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Proposing a quantitative index for measuring a country's quality of life, and helped to popularize "Third World" as a term for the poorer nations of the Non-Aligned Movement |
| Academic background | |
| Education | City College of New York Columbia University University of Buenos Aires |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Sociologist |
| Institutions | University of Buenos Aires Washington University in St. Louis Rutgers University |
Irving Louis Horowitz (September 25, 1929 – March 21, 2012) was an Americansociologist, author, and academic. He proposed a quantitative index for measuring a country'squality of life, and helped to popularize "Third World" as a term for the poorer nations of theNon-Aligned Movement.
Horowitz was born inNew York City on September 25, 1929, to Louis and Esther Tepper Horowitz. He was educated atCity College of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), where he received hisB.Sc. in 1951. He obtained hisM.A. in 1952 atColumbia University, New York City, and hisPh.D. at theUniversity of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957.[1]
After beginning his career as an assistant professor of social theory at theUniversity of Buenos Aires, 1956–1958, Horowitz spent the next forty-plus years at various academic institutions in India, Tokyo, Mexico, and Canada. In addition to his teaching positions, he was an advisory staff member of the Latin American Research Center, 1964–1970; and consultant to the International Education Division, Ford Foundation, 1959–1960.
From 1963 to 1969, Horowitz was professor ofsociology atWashington University in St. Louis. He has also been a visiting professor atStanford University, theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison,Queen's University in Canada, and theUniversity of California, and aFulbright Lecturer in Argentina,Israel, andIndia; a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Scientific Information, 1969–1973; consulting editor for Oxford University Press, 1969–74, for Aldine-Atherton Publishers, 1969–1972; an external board member of theRadio Marti and Television Marti Programs of theUnited States Information Agency, beginning in 1985; chair of the board of the Hubert Humphrey Center,Ben Gurion University, Israel, 1990–1992; and served as an external board member of the methodology section of the research division,United States General Accounting Office. Horowitz's latest academic post wasHannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science atRutgers University, since 1992.
He was the founding president of the Transaction Society, whoseTransaction Publishers has been an international publisher of scholarly monographs, including academic monographs that need not have been viewed as profitable. He was the founding editor ofSociety, which published articles on sociology, politics, and social criticism. It has been purchased bySpringer Verlag.
As the author of more than twenty-five books and editor of numerous other titles, Horowitz analyzed such diverse topics as the influence ofSun Myung Moon and theUnification Church on American politics, the future of book publishing, and politics inCuba. Horowitz was the founder of Studies in Comparative International Development. He was also chairman ofTransaction Publishers.
Early in his career, Horowitz was a student of Leftist sociologistC. Wright Mills, a Texas-born professor at Columbia University whose most significant books include,White Collar,The Power Elite, andThe Sociological Imagination. Horowitz edited two posthumous collections of Mills' work, includingThe cultural apparatus.[2][3]
Over the several decades until his death Horowitz worked to develop apolitical sociology that can measure the extent of a society's personal freedom and State-sanctioned violence. As a result of his work, a standard for the quality of life in any particular nation or social system has been constructed based on the number of people arbitrarily killed, maimed, injured, incarcerated, or deprived of basiccivil liberties. Horowitz tried to build a bridge between his current analysis of state power and authority and his earlier studies of comparative international stratification and development. He was key to introducing the phrase "Third World" into the lexicon of social research. Horowitz articulated the view that republication of previous publications in different formats is necessary in the social sciences to disseminate research results and make them useful to society.[4]
Horowitz wrote aboutgenocide: “First comes the act and then comes the word: first [the crime of] genocide is committed and then the language emerges to describe a phenomenon."[5] He published lasting contributions on the subject, includingGenocide: State power & mass murder;[6]Taking lives: Genocide & state power;[7] and "Genocide and the reconstruction of social theory: Observations on the exclusivity of collective death"[8] inArmenian Review. Horowitz's last scholarly pieces on genocide were his preface to R. J. Rummel'sDeath by government,[9] and his essay on state-sponsored terror, "Counting Bodies. The Dismal Science of Authorized Terror"[10] inPatterns of Prejudice. In Summer 1994, a volume of essays in honour of Horowitz was published by Transaction Publishers.[11]
In 1990, he published an autobiography, a brief "sociological biography" rather than one that is intellectual or intimate. This wasDaydreams and nightmares: Reflections on a Harlem childhood,[12] for which he received theNational Jewish Book Award in 1991.[13] It is an unromanticized look at growing up as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the streets of predominantly black Harlem, New York City, in the 1930s. Among his most recent books areTributes: Personal reflections on a century of social research;[14] andBehemoth: Main currents in the history and theory of political sociology.[15]
A list of scholarly publications including more than two hundred works by Horowitz is found at the beta-version of Google Scholar.[16]
Horowitz is noted for his 1994 workThe Decomposition of Sociology, in which he argued that the discipline is in decline due to overly-ideological theory, a shift away from American sociology and toward European (particularly Marxist) trends which he labelled as "left-wing fascists" and "professional savages", and an apparent lack of relevance to policy making.[17] He wrote: "The decomposition of sociology began when this great tradition became subject to ideological thinking, and an inferior tradition surfaced in the wake of totalitarian triumphs."[18] SociologistGeorge Steinmetz challenged Horowitz. In a 2005 article inThe Michigan Quarterly Review titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Irving Louis Horowitz", he wrote that "historical, cultural and geographic" context remained critical.[17]
In 1951, he married Ruth Narowlansky, with whom he had two children; they were divorced in 1964. He married Danielle Salti in 1964; the couple was divorced in 1978. He married Mary Ellen Curtis in 1979. He died on March 21, 2012. In 1973, Horowitz was one of the signers of theHumanist Manifesto II.[19]
Throughout his academic career, Horowitz received many awards, including a special citation from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for his 1957 book,The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Philosophy; recognition byTime magazine as a leader of a new breed of radical sociologist;[20] the Centennial Medallion from St. Peter's College, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1971, for outstanding contribution to a humanistic social science; and a Presidential Outstanding Achievement Award, 1985, from Rutgers University. He was a member of theCarnegie Council, American Association of Publishers,American Political Science Association,American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past president (1961–1962) of the New York State Sociological Society.
