Lewis A. Coser

His The new conservatives: A critique from the left (with Irving Howe, 1974) was one of the first major works to define and analyse neoconservatism.

In 1954, with Irving Howe, Coser established the radical journal, Dissent. Upon his death in 2003, the author of his obituary in that magazine suggested that Coser "always felt himself a marginal man. He was Jewish and non-Jewish; an American and a European; a hardheaded social analyst, committed to rigorous honesty in judgment and deed, and a passionate advocate; a leftist and a critic of the left; a defender of the underdog and something of an elite intellectual mandarin."

Coser was active within the anti-Stalinist left, and was close to the independent leftists known as the New York intellectuals. A eulogy at Carlo Tresca's memorial service in 1943 was delivered by Angelica Balabanoff, the socialist activist and former Bolshevik. According to Coser's account of the funeral, "I was sitting near a burly Irish policeman who clearly didn't understand a word of Balabanoff's fierce Italian oratory. But at her climax he burst into tears."

Born in Berlin as Ludwig Cohen, his father was a successful Jewish industrialist. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris and in 1941 he left war-torn Paris for the United States where he married Rose Laub. In the Fifties, he enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, taking his PhD at the age of forty-one. Coser first taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California. He then founded the sociology department at Brandeis University and taught there for 15 years before joining the sociology department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Coser frequently worked with the eminent sociologist and his spouse, Rose Laub Coser.

Lewis Alfred Coser (27 November 1913 in Berlin – 8 July 2003 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a German-American sociologist, serving as the 66th president of the American Sociological Association in 1975.