BENDIX, REINHARD

BENDIX, REINHARD (1916–1991), U.S. sociologist. Born in Berlin, Bendix left Germany after Hitler's rise to power and emigrated to the U.S.A. In 1943 he began his academic career as an instructor at the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Colorado (1946–47) and then at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1956 he became full professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology. In 1959 he was elected president of the American Sociological Association. He served as director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Gottingen, Germany (1968–70), and in 1972 he joined the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. Bendix approached sociological problems typologically. His first published work, Social Science and the Distrust of Reason (1951), began to build bridges between European and American sociological traditions. He used the theories of Max Weber as a basis for his sociological explorations and refined and advanced them considerably. His book Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960) is largely biographical but his primary interests, as is shown in most of his books and numerous articles in sociological journals, were in political and industrial sociology, social stratification, and sociological theory.   His book Class, Status and Power (1953; 19672), a collection of readings in stratification edited jointly with seymour martin lipset , became a standard work in the field. A later publication was Social Mobility in Industrial Society, which he also co-authored with Lipset. His best-known book, for which he received the MacIver award, is Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (1956). It is based on historical data from England, the United States, Russia, and East Germany. Another work, Nationbuilding and Citizenship (1964), analyzes the processes leading to the formation of new nations. Bendix was the author of numerous scholarly papers, chiefly on topics of a theoretical nature. Throughout his career, Bendix saw himself living between cultures, building connections between academic disciplines in the United States and Germany. In his honor, the Institute of International Studies established the Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellowship for graduate students in the field of political and social theory or historic studies of society and politics. Other books by Bendix include: Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (1978); Force, Fate, and Freedom (1984); From Berlin to Berkeley, (1986); Embattled Reason, Vol. 1 (1988); Embattled Reason, Vol. 2 (1989); and Unsettled Affinities (1993, published posthumously). (Werner J. Cahnman / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)