Robert Morrison MacIver

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Robert Morrison MacIver (April 17, 1882 - June 15, 1970), was a U.S. (Scottish-born) sociologist.

[edit] Life

Born in North Beach Street, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, to Donald Maciver, a general merchant and tweed manufacturer, and Christina Maciver (ne Morrison) he graduated from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. On 14 August, 1911 he was married to Elizabeth Marion Peterkin in the Palace Hotel, Union Street, Aberdeen (the bans having been registered through Trinity Congregational Church, Aberdeen). At this point Maciver was a University Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He left Aberdeen for a post in Toronto in 1915, and remained there -- doing wartime administrative work as well as teaching political philosophy, until moving to Barnard College of the University of Columbia in 1927. He was Lieber Professor there, 1929-1950. In his - rather long - period of formal education he had never made any formal, academically supervised study of sociology, his distinguished work in sociology and in critical discussion of crucial issues of the interpretation of research data, and issues of the state, society and community, were distinguished on his acumen, his philosophical understanding, and extensive study of the major pioneering works of Durkheim, Toennies, Max and Alfred Weber, George Simmel et al., in the British Museum Library, London, while resident as a student in Oxford.

He was subsequently to be elected president of the American Sociological Association.

[edit] Works

• Community, (1928)
• Society 1st Edition (textbook), (1931)
• Society 2nd Edition (textbook), (1937)
• The Web of Government, (1947)
• Society 3rd Edition (textbook), With Charles Page, (1949)

[edit] Sources

Entry in: A Dictionary of Sociology, George Marshall (Ed.), 1998, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280081-7