Nathan Glazer (25 February 1923-19 January 2019) was an American sociologist and prominent neoconservative thinker.
Biography[]
Nathan Glazer was born in New York City, New York in 1923 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, and he was raised in East Harlem and The Bronx. During his studies at the City College of New York in the 1940s, he fell in with Marxist students who were hostile to Soviet-style communism; one of these students was Irving Kristol, who said that Glazer was never too radical. During World War II, Glazer came to see fascism as a greater threat to the world than capitalism, and he supported the US government; he was also barely critical of Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt in the Jewish magazine Commentary, which would become the home of neoconservative ideology. He came to work in the Housing and Home Finance Agency during John F. Kennedy's presidency, but, under Lyndon B. Johnson, he became a critic of the War on Poverty. He became a sociology professor at UC Berkeley in 1964, and he would teach there and at Harvard for several decades. Glazer became known for books such as Beyond the Melting Pot, which dealt with race and ethnicity, and he criticized some of the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. Despite being considered a neoconservative in his thinking on domestic policy, he remained a registered Democrat his entire life. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2019.