Glazer, Nathan

Glazer, Nathan, 1923–2019, American sociologist, b. New York City, grad. City College, 1944. He became an editor at The Contemporary Jewish Record, later Commentary, and contributed to The Lonely Crowd (1950), a seminal work on American society. From 1962 to 1963 he worked for the Kennedy administration's Housing and Home Finance Agency; he subsequently taught at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and then, from 1969 (emeritus from 1993), at Harvard. With Daniel Patrick Moynihan he wrote Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), an influential study of American ethnicity. Becoming skeptical of the effects of government social programs, Glazer moved over time from the political left to neoconservativism, but he never fully identified with either group, and he later re-evaluated and reversed some of his neoconservative positions. In 1965 he became one of the original contributors to the neoconservative periodical The Public Interest, which he edited with Irving Kristol from 1973 to 2005. Glazer's other works include Affirmative Discrimination (1975), The Limits of Social Policy (1988), and We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997).

See P. Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (1979).

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