Martin Lipset was another one of those brilliant undergraduate students whose debating skills in particular and critical acumen more generally were honed at the Alcove One of the cafeteria of the City College of New York in the late thirties and early forties. The unifying factor of those 30-50 City students who congregated at Alcove One was not ideological purity (although they were all people of the left of varying and indeed conflicting stripes) but rather their strident opposition to Stalinism. Lipset came to Alcove One as a kind of Trotskyist but left the party after his first year at City. In an autobiographical essay published in 1996 Lipset suggests that his life work as a sociologist, more narrowly, as a political sociologist, had been motivated by three questions which he posed while an undergraduate student at City and as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University under the supervision of Robert K. Merton and Philip Selznick. Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006)