Liah Greenfeld (22 August 1954 – 13 May 2026) was an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar engaged in the scientific explanation of human social reality on various levels, beginning with the individual mind and ending with the level of civilization. She has been called "the most iconoclastic" of contemporary sociologists and that her approach represents the major alternative to the mainstream approaches in social science.
Biography Liah Greenfeld was born in Vladivostok, USSR, in 1954. Both her parents (Vladimir/Ze’ev Grinfeld and Viktoria Kirshenblat) were physicians, educated in Leningrad, who worked in the first hospital opened in the port of Nakhodka. They asked to be sent to the Far East to be near her father's parents: her paternal grandfather, in the GULAG in the Arctic since 1938 and just released, was there in exile. This grandfather, , was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet diplomat and movie producer, political prisoner in both Tsarist and Soviet Russia. His wife, Greenfeld's paternal grandmother, a physician, exiled from Leningrad to Central Russia, joined him there. Greenfeld's maternal grandfather, Mikhail D. Kirschenblat, died in 1937 under torture during an interrogation by NKVD. He was a brother of , a prominent biologist and a cousin of Yevgeny Primakov, a future Russian Prime Minister. His wife, Greenfeld's maternal grandmother Emma, was arrested several months later as a “wife of the enemy of the people” and spent ten years in the GULAG. Greenfeld's parents, dissidents from the get-go, tried to emigrate to Israel since 1967, and were among the first “refuseniks” – the only ones in Sochi, where they lived at the time. They obtained the permission to leave in 1972.
In Sochi, before she emigrated to Israel with her parents, Greenfeld was first known as a child prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, receiving the Krasnodar Region's Second Prize for poetry (and a bust of Pushkin) at 16, and publishing a collection of poems, under a properly Russified alias, in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Greenfeld received her doctoral degree in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1982. In the same year, she came to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer at the University of Chicago. She moved on to hold positions of Assistant and later the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard during 1985–1994. In 1994 she joined Boston University as a University Professor and Professor of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology.
At various periods, Greenfeld has held visiting positions at RPI, MIT, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Lingnan University and the Open University of Hong Kong. She was a recipient of the UAB Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel. She received grants from the Mellon, Olin, and Earhart foundations, the National Council for Soviet & East European Research, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2002, she received the Kagan Prize of the American Historical Society for the best book in European History for her book The Spirit of Capitalism. In 2004, she was chosen to deliver the Gellner lecture at the London School of Economics, and in 2011, the Nairn Lecture at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia.
Trilogy of Nationalism Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
In her first book on nationalism: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity,Reviews of Nationalism Greenfeld examines the emergence and spread of nationalism in the first five societies which defined themselves as nations—England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States. She traces the birth of the idea of the nation to 16th century England. This idea, she argues, was brought about by the historical accident of the Wars of the Roses which created a vacuum in the upper strata of English feudal society leading to an unprecedented amount of upward social mobility. Such upward mobility was a new, bewildering (anomic), yet positive experience for many of the English people. It required justification because it could not be made sense of within the framework of their previous—feudal—consciousness. At that time, the word “nation” meant an elite. The English defined the English people – the word “people” was, at that time, defined as the lower classes –as a nation, elevating the entire population to the dignity of the elite. With this definition, our distinctly modern world was brought into being.
Nationalism, fundamentally, is the equation of the "people" with the "nation". It destroyed the traditional social hierarchy and, with national identity, granted people dignity, which was previously enjoyed only by the elites. National identity, as such, is a dignifying identity: it makes dignity the experience of every member of a nation. Once one experiences dignity, it cannot be given up. The fundamental equality of national membership also implies an open and inclusive social stratification which encourages all people to mobilize and to play the active political and cultural role formerly played only by the elites. The people become the bearer(s) of the sovereignty, replacing God and king, and have the freedom and right to decide their own as well as the common destiny. Popular sovereignty, together with fundamental equality of membership, as well as secularization, are the three core principles of nationalism.
Presupposing an open system of social stratification, at the core of nationalism lies a compelling, inclusive image of society and an image of a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members. Ruled by the people, national community is no longer an estate created by God and owned by the monarch. It requires an impersonal form of government, in distinction to earlier forms of government, called the state.
Greenfeld also argues that democracy is logically implied in nationalism because of the principles of popular sovereignty and equality of memberships. All modern states built under the influence of nationalism are, therefore, democracies. Depending on the initial definition of the nation (a composite entity or a collective individual) and the criteria of membership (civic/voluntary or ethnic), however, there exist three ideal types (in the Weberian sense) of nationalism – individualistic-civic nationalism, collectivistic-civic nationalism and collectivistic-ethnic nationalism. In the modern history of state-building, Greenfeld finds that individualistic-civic and collectivistic-civic nationalisms tend to result in liberal democracies (such as Britain, the United States and France), while collectivistic-ethnic nationalism seems to produce authoritarian democracies (such as Russia and Germany).
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth
In The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth,Reviews of The Spirit of Capitalism Greenfeld argues, nationalism, being inherently egalitarian, necessarily promotes a type of social structure needed to develop the modern economy—that is, an open system of stratification which allows for social mobility, makes labor free and expands the sphere of operation of market forces. More important, however, is the fact that, because of the members’ investment in the dignity of the nation which is necessarily assessed in relation to the status of other nations, nationalism implies international competition. In order to sustain national prestige, nationalism presupposes a commitment to constant economic growth when economic achievement is defined as significant for national prestige and among the areas of international competition—historically, for instance, Russian nationalists have not designated the economic sphere as a venue for international competition. Modern economy is thus not self-sustaining. As Greenfeld argues, it is stimulated and sustained by nationalism.
In both the first and second books, Greenfeld also stresses that the anomic situations (anomie) in each society of the very first nations – England, France, Russia, Germany, the United States—were the main reason for the idea of the nation to spread in these societies. Her study of Japan and more recent observations on Chinese society, however, provide a corrective to this argument. In the introduction to recently published book, Globalization of Nationalism, she suggests that societies under the influence of Chinese civilization, which, unlike monotheistic societies, does not prioritize the logic of no contradiction, tend to be capable of coping with the anomic situations without major crises.
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
In the third book of the trilogy, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, Greenfeld first lays out the philosophical premises and a methodology for studying human experience by attempting to overcome the mind/body or psychophysical problem. The reviewer of the book in the American Journal of Sociology, Karen Cerulo, writes: "Greenfeld builds her argument on a theoretical foundation that challenges long-standing conceptions of mind. She suggests that we replace dominant dualistic approaches in this realm—those that partition the material and the spiritual—and instead treat reality as a tripartite structure "consisting of three autonomous but related layers, with the two upper ones being emergent phenomena—the layer of matter, the layer of life, and the layer of the mind". As her argument unfolds, she focuses more specifically on the qualities of mind, identifying the biological elements from which mind grows and by which its development is constrained. She also explores the ways in which symbolic culture transforms and expands the biological mind, making it a far more complex and dynamic entity that reforms and reconfigures itself, ever emerging in relation to changing environmental events."