Alex Inkeles

Alex Inkeles

Alex Inkeles, one of the pioneers of post-World War II sociology and a leading figure in the “modernization school” of the social sciences, passed away on July 9 2010. He was a professor of sociology at Harvard University from 1948 until 1972 and from that date on, was the Jacks professor of education at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. Inkeles, a charismatic lecturer and prolific author, worked with social scientists in different regions of the world to study the relationship between socioeconomic development and changes in people’s attitudes, values and behavior. He was the author of ten books and more than 150 scholarly articles, involving in-depth studies of The Soviet System an ambitious ground-breaking analysis of modernization in six countries explorations of the interplay of personality and social structure and studies of national character. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), the American Philosophical Society (1972), and the National Academy of Sciences (1981).Alex Inkeles grew up in one of the few Jewish families in the midst of a Sicilian neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. His family had emigrated from Poland and Alex attributed his later interest in sociology to the trips he made with his father to welcome and integrate new émigrés into American life. He received his A.B. in 1941 and an A.M. in 1946 from Cornell University. In 1949 he received a PhD from Columbia University. During Inkeles’s time at Cornell he joined Mosley’s intensive Russian course.As editor of the Cornell literary magazine his future wife Bernadette Kane rejected Inkeles’s short stories, full of family dynamics and class anger, but she took an interest in him. They married after their graduation from Cornell and were close companions in all ways until her death in 2005.During the Second World War Inkeles was digging trenches for telephone poles for the signal corps when orders came from Washington for him to report to OSS where he spent the remainder of the war reading Soviet newspapers and listening to Soviet radio. After the war Inkeles was one of the leading scholars of Soviet society. He used innovative techniques including extensive interviews with Soviet émigrés, to glean insights into the workings of the Soviet Union as a social system. His first book was “Public Opinion in Soviet Russia” (1950) winner of the Kappa Tau alpha Award. Later with Ray Bauer he wrote “How the Soviet System Works”.During his tenure at Harvard in the 50’s and 60’s, as well being a member of Harvard’s Russian Research Center and the Center for International Affairs, Inkeles was a leading figure in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. He taught a popular and influential course “Personality and Social Structure” which illuminated seminal thinkers such as Durkheim, Nietzsche and Marx as the course explored the complex ways that family, the school, the workplace influence people’s lives and values. In1964 Inkeles edited the seminal series “What is Sociology? An Introduction to the Discipline and the Profession,” Prentice-Hall.From the 1970’s onward, Inkeles studied modernization. He conducted his study of modernization in Argentina, , Chile, Israel, India, and Nigeria and Pakistan. His most widely acclaimed work, “Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries “(Harvard University Press, 1974), was one of the first sociological studies to use an extensive standardized survey research instrument to study the impact of participation in modern institutions (such as school and factories) on individual attitudes and values in widely divergent countries. The Inkeles questionnaire was used extensively in many follow-up studies around the world.At Stanford Inkeles devoted more time to his interest in national character. Among his honors Inkeles was a two time Fulbright scholar, a fellow at the The Russell Sage Foundation in New York, at The Eisenhower Foundation in Taiwan, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and The Center for the Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.His brother Abraham Inkeles, his sister Ruth Fallik, his daughter Ann Inkeles Holleb, his son-in-law Gordon Holleb and his grandson Daniel Inkeles Holleb survive Alex Inkeles. Contributions may be made to UNICEF in his name.