Norman Birnbaum

Norman Birnbaum (July 21, 1926 – January 4, 2019) was an American sociologist. He was an emeritus professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and a member of the editorial board of The Nation. In 2017 he received Germany's highest award, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit.

He was educated in New York City's public schools, at Williams College, and earned a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1958, supervised by Talcott Parsons. He taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg, Amherst College, served on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the University of Bologna.

Birnbaum's pedagogical work included the introduction of sociology to the undergraduate curricula at Amherst and Oxford. A founding member of the editorial board of New Left Review, was active in politics on both sides of the Atlantic He had been an advisor to American trade unions and members of Congress, as well as to a number of social movements and political parties in Europe. He contributed regularly to a number of publications, including openDemocracy, El País in Spain, and the German daily Die Tageszeitung. He published his memoir, From the Bronx to Oxford and Not Quite Back, in 2018.