Ivan Szelenyi

William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology

Ivan Szelenyi, M.A., University of Economics-Budapest, Ph.D., Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1973, Yale Faculty member since 1999, you are one o the world’s eminent sociologists, specializing in the comparative study of social stratification across cultures over time. You began as a keen critic of Communism, but after its denouement became as well known for your ironic theorizing about capitalism, especially of the post-socialist kind. Your courageous and brilliant book with George Konrad, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, exposed the pretentious claims to equality of even the most earnest state socialism. Taking note of Marx’s question, “Who educates the educators?” you showed that the intellectuals running post-revolutionary societies will make sure that socialism makes sure, first and foremost, to not only educate but to enrich and empower themselves. Jailed for your effort, you devoted the rest of your career to explaining exclusion and inequality wherever and however it occurs.

You have studied urban and rural villagers, explaining how peasants almost invisibly became entrepreneurs under socialism and how regimes workers were reward with housing even if not with money. You exposed and explained the deplorable treatment of the Roma people, aka Gypsies, throughout Eastern Europe, describing them as a new ethnic underclass in the making. You have shown how post-communist societies made capitalism without capitalists, how many in the old nomenclature managed to maintain power and become a new propertied ruling class. You are finishing a book, How to Become a Billionaire, that mocks conservative claims for the moral superiority of capitalism.
 
Once denigrated, you are now honored by Hungary, your country of birth. You are an Honorary Citizen of the city of Budapest and have received the Szechenyi Prize, recognizing outstanding contributions to academic life by the President of the Hungarian Republic, and the Karl Polanyi Prize for the best publication of the year from the Hungarian Sociology Association. You have been honored in the United States by being elected Vice President of the American Sociological Association and you hold honorary doctorates from three universities abroad—The University of Economics in Budapest, from Flinders and from the University of Nurnberg.

Cosmopolitan man of the world, wherever you have worked and lived, you have been a leader, an inspiration, a go-to person, a turn-around guy, chairing and enhancing departments around the world, from Flinders in Australia to Madison, Wisconsin to the CUNY Graduate Center in New York to UCLA and finally here at Yale, where you began the arduous and ultimately successful task of rebuilding a vulnerable department. Now in a few weeks, you begin your new position of leadership as the Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYU-Abu Dhabi. As you retire from Yale, having stopped on your global journey for over a decade to help revitalize us, we look forward to the further expansion of your intellectual and administrative leadership in the 21st century world.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans