IN MEMORIAM: SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, 1922–2006:
Complicated Questions, Elegant Answers

By Bill Schneider

Marty Lipset did not believe that people had to be enlightened and sophisticated—“educated”—to function democratically. What they had to do was understand and pursue their interests. By Bill Schneider.

Lipset, of a generation of public intellectuals that includes Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, and the late Irving Howe, had a deep and enduring faith in democracy. Not democracy as an ideology to reshape the world: democracy as a competition of interests and values, a process. He did not believe that people had to be enlightened and sophisticated—“educated”—to function democratically. What they had to do was understand and pursue their interests.

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Lipset was no hedgehog. He was not a man of grand theories or ideologies that set out to organize the world. He was far too grounded in reality for that. Lipset knew many things. In fact, he knew just about everything—American politics, Christian religious doctrine, Jewish history, Latin American social structure, Canadian culture, comparative labor movements, European social theory, statistical methodology, Marxist philosophy, and models of economic development. For starters. Lipset vacuumed up vast quantities of information, always looking for the answers to big questions. Why do some democracies thrive and others fail? Why is there no mass socialist movement in the United States? Why are Americans the most religious people in the developed world? Who supported Joe McCarthy? The answers were always straightforward, commonsensical, and keenly observed.

In his most famous book, Political Man (1960), Lipset dispelled many naive notions about democracy. He advanced the idea of working-class authoritarianism—that poorer, less well-educated people are more intolerant and less willing to accept the norms of democracy. But so what? he said. “In spite of the workers’ greater authoritarian propensity, their organizations . . . still function as better defenders and carriers of democratic values than parties based on the middle class.” He also showed that trade unions are often corrupt and boss-ridden and function poorly as democratic organizations. Again, he asked, so what? “Many organizations may never fulfill the conditions for a stable internal democracy and still contribute in important ways to the democratic process in the total society.”

In another influential book, The First New Nation (1963), Lipset argued that the progressive values of equality and achievement have always been ascendant in the United States. They stem from the American Revolution, which cast off the conservative yoke of a hereditary class system, as well as the Puritan religious tradition. The United States is not the only Protestant-dominated country in the world, but it is the only one in which the dominant Protestant tradition is that of dissenting churches rather than an established church. That explains America’s unique religiosity as well as its individualism.

Lipset used the analogy of loaded dice. Once certain values are loaded by defining historical experiences, they will come up again and again to shape later events. Thus, he argued, the moderation of American class politics “is related to the fact that egalitarianism and democracy triumphed before the workers were a politically relevant force. Unlike the workers in Europe, they did not have to fight their way into the polity; the door was already open.”

“I don’t believe in education,” he said. “I believe in politics.”

Lipset made his case by contrasting the American and Canadian experiences because Canada was a country defined by its rejection of the American Revolution. He even wrote a book on the subject, Continental Divide (1990). Lipset’s ideas were so compelling, he could make Canada interesting to Americans.

In 1970, Lipset and coauthor Earl Raab published The Politics of Unreason, a history of right-wing extremism in America. In it, they noted that the extremist impulse here draws from the same sources as the democratic impulse, namely, an inexhaustible vein of populist antielitism. “It is perhaps the ultimate paradox,” they wrote, “that extremist movements in this country have been powerfully spawned by the same American characteristics that finally rejected them.” A rich and intriguing idea, that.

Lipset was full of rich and intriguing ideas. He also had many nonaca-demic virtues. One was a clarity of expression. Another was a generosity of spirit. He warmly encouraged generations of students, colleagues, and collaborators, even those of us who wandered away from academe. What Lipset created was not a following, exactly, more like a network, drawn together by a moderate temperament and shared democratic values. There is an African saying, “Every time an old person dies, a library burns down.” In Seymour Martin Lipset’s case, that is not true. He wrote, coauthored, and edited some 50 books and hundreds of articles. The library endures.