University Professor
B.A., Williams; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard

Biography

Professor Birnbaum joined the Law Center in 1979 after serving as chair of the Department of Anthropology- Sociology at Amherst College and has since taught seminars in Humanities and the Law, Social Sciences and the Law, and the American Future and the Public Interest. He is very involved in politics both here and abroad, most recently serving as an advisor to the Cranston and Jackson campaigns and as a consultant to several European political parties and unions. He is a founding committee member of the Campaign for America's Future and advisor to members of the Congress and Senate. He also served as an advisor to the Kennedy Presidential Campaign, a consultant to the National Security Council, an advisor to the United Automobile Workers, the chair of the Policy Advisory Council of the New Democratic Coalition, and as a member of the editorial board of Partisan Review. His writings include The Crisis of Industrial Society and Toward A Critical Sociology. In addition, he has taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science at Oxford University and the University of Strasbourg. He spent 1986 at the Science Center and Institute of Advanced Studies in West Berlin, with travel to the USSR. He was a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in spring 1991. In 1998, he was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the University of Bologna. His The Radical Renewal, The Politics of Ideas in Modern America, was published in 1988 by Pantheon Books. A collection of essays was published by Oxford University Press, entitled Searching For The Light (1993). Oxford University Press will publish, in the year 2000, his After Progress: A Century of American Social Reform and European Socialism. He is now at work on a cultural, political, and personal memoir. He is a member of the editorial board of The Nation and publishes frequently in the American and European press. He is chair, Scholarly Advisory Board, International Institute for Peace (Vienna).