The eminent Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer recently died at age ninety-five. Jackson Toby’s memorial of Glazer in the Wall Street Journal described him as a disillusioned liberal-turned-neoconservative who “came from an era when the field cared about describing the world, not changing it” and aimed for “a truthful depiction of social reality.”

A New York Times obituary claimed Glazer drifted toward “hard-won pragmatism” after becoming editor of the Public Interest, a journal dedicated to “the concreteness of empirical evidence.” Reflecting on The Lonely Crowd, the first breakthrough social science bestseller which Glazer co-authored with David Riesman, Tablet praises the book’s “methodological research [through] interviews [and] analysis.”

The subtext of all this is a critique of the Left, which is seen as perennially bogged down by ideology, in thrall to a political agenda. Avoiding the dirty mess of politics afforded Glazer the necessary distance to do sociology the way it was always meant to be done.