Irving Louis Horowitz

Horowitz was born in New York City on September 25, 1929, to Louis and Esther Tepper Horowitz. He was educated at City College of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), where he received his B.Sc. in 1951. He obtained his M.A. in 1952 at Columbia University, New York City, and his Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957.

Academic positions and consultancies

After beginning his career as an assistant professor of social theory at the University of Buenos Aires, 1956–1958, Horowitz spent the next forty-plus years at various academic institutions in India, Tokyo, Mexico, and Canada. In addition to his teaching positions, he was an advisory staff member of the Latin American Research Center, 1964–1970; and consultant to the International Education Division, Ford Foundation, 1959–1960.

From 1963 to 1969, Horowitz was professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Queen's University in Canada, and the University of California, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Argentina, Israel, and India; a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Scientific Information, 1969–1973; consulting editor for Oxford University Press, 1969–74, for Aldine-Atherton Publishers, 1969–1972; an external board member of the Radio Marti and Television Marti Programs of the United States Information Agency, beginning in 1985; chair of the board of the Hubert Humphrey Center, Ben Gurion University, Israel, 1990–1992; and served as an external board member of the methodology section of the research division, United States General Accounting Office. Horowitz's latest academic post was Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University, since 1992.

In 1951, Horowitz married Ruth Narowlansky, with whom he had two children; they were divorced in 1964. He married Danielle Salti in 1964; the couple was divorced in 1978. He married Mary Ellen Curtis in 1979. He died on March 21, 2012. In 1973, Horowitz was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Criticism of Marxist trends in sociology

Horowitz is noted for his 1994 work The Decomposition of Sociology, in which he argued that the discipline is in decline due to overly-ideological theory, a shift away from American sociology and toward European (particularly Marxist) trends which he labelled as "left-wing fascists" and "professional savages", and an apparent lack of relevance to policy making. He wrote: "The decomposition of sociology began when this great tradition became subject to ideological thinking, and an inferior tradition surfaced in the wake of totalitarian triumphs." Sociologist George Steinmetz challenged Horowitz. In a 2005 article in The Michigan Quarterly Review titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Irving Louis Horowitz", he wrote that "historical, cultural and geographic" context remained critical.