Reinhard Bendix

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellowship: Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley

Reinhard Bendix

The late Reinhard Bendix was born in Berlin, Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He began his academic studies at the University of Chicago where he received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. He began teaching in the College of the University of Chicago in 1943, and taught there for three years. The following year he taught in the Sociology Department of the University of Colorado, and in 1947 he joined the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1969 he was elected President of the American Sociological Association. From 1968 to 1970 he was Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Goettingen, Germany, and in 1972 he joined the Department of Political Science at Berkeley.

Bendix held guest professorships at Columbia University, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Constance, St. Catherine's and Nuffield Colleges at Oxford, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Heidelberg.

He was awarded a Fulbright grant and Guggenheim fellowship as well as a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He was a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Society. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leeds, Mannheim, and Goettingen, as well as the Berkeley Citation.

Bendix wrote in the areas of political and social theory as well as historical studies of society and politics. His interests were in interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretically informed scholarship. His first published work, Social Science an the Distrust of Reason (1951) began to build bridges between European and American sociological traditions. Subsequent works included Work and Authority in Industry (1956), Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960), Nationbuilding and Citizenship (1964), Kings or People (1978), Force, Fate and Freedom (1984), From Berlin to Berkeley (1986), and Embattled Reason, Vols. 1 and 2, (1988-1989). He was at work on a manuscript to be entitled, "Unsettled Affinities" at the time of his death.

Throughout his career, Bendix saw himself as someone who lives between cultures, building connections between academic disciplines in the United States and Germany. In his role as a teacher, he worked to promote scholarship and intellectual exploration. He taught, supported, and provided guidance to younger scholars. His last hours, on February 28, 1991, were spent teaching a graduate seminar.

In honor of Professor Bendix, the Institute of International Studies has 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.