EISENSTADT, SAMUEL NOAH

EISENSTADT, SAMUEL NOAH (1923–), Israel sociologist. Born in Warsaw, and educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the London School of Economics, Eisenstadt joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in 1948 and became chairman of the department of sociology in 1951. Eisenstadt's contributions have been chiefly in the fields of political and historical sociology, with special attention to the analysis of social structure and of bureaucracy. In 1973 Eisenstadt was awarded the Israel Prize for social sciences. His book The Political Systems of Empires (1963) analyzed the social structures of the major empires throughout world history; this work has been hailed as the most significant contribution to political sociology after that of Max Weber. Among his other works in this field are Political Sociology (1955), The Absorption of Immigrants (1954), and From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure (1956). The latter are comparative studies based chiefly on materials referring to problems arising from mass immigration, and the integration of the many different cultures which are found in Israel. Eisenstadt brought the analysis of developmental and general social problems into the framework of sociological analysis and comparative institutional study through his Essays on Comparative Institutions (1965) and his Comparative Social Problems (1964). He also published "Bureaucracy, Bureaucratization and Debureaucratization" in Administrative Science Quarterly, 4 (1959), 302–20, and Israeli Society (1967). Other books include Tradition, Change, and Modernity (1983), Transformation of Israeli Society (1986), and European Civilization in a Comparative Perspective (1987).

[Werner J. Cahnman and

Pearl J. Lieff]