18 Facts About Richard Lachmann

Richard Lachmann was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY.

Richard Lachmann died after a heart attack in 2021 at the age of 65.

Richard Lachmann was born in New York to Jewish parents who had escaped from Nazi Germany.

Richard Lachmann graduated from the United Nations International School becoming one among the first cohorts to receive an International Baccalaureate.

Richard Lachmann attended Princeton as an undergraduate and Harvard for his PhD, studying historical sociology at both universities.

From 1983 to 1990, Richard Lachmann served as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Richard Lachmann recalled that after reading Marx's "Capital" he had the feeling that in this work were the answers to his questions, in the form of historical analysis.

At Harvard, which gave graduate students almost total freedom to design and pursue their own research projects, Richard Lachmann could focus on the question that interested him most: the genesis of capitalism.

Richard Lachmann believed that only if we understand the origins of this social formation, can we fully understand the current trends of its development.

Richard Lachmann analyzed the interactions of conflict at the national level, and at the local level.

The most critical was a well-known British historian, an expert on agrarian history of England, Joan Thirsk, whom Richard Lachmann had critiqued in the book for neglecting to take the high inflation of that era into her analysis.

So, Richard Lachmann criticized Robert Brenner, who saw Britain as a Goldilocks case where peasants were strong enough to liberate themselves from serfdom but not strong enough to appropriate all of the growing agricultural surplus.

The gentry took advantage of the crown's weakness, and, as Richard Lachmann showed in From Manor to Market, established capitalist relations in the countryside.

Richard Lachmann was applying his elite conflict theory to the contemporary United States.

Richard Lachmann found that since the 1980s national and state level elites combined through mergers and changes in governmental regulations.

Richard Lachmann argued that even if a new hegemon doesn't emerge, the US will not be able to mobilize the resources and channel state power to ensure that it can govern the world geo-politically or manage the global economy.

Richard Lachmann discusses how the strengths and weaknesses of work in those areas suggest ways in which historical sociology can be developed most fruitfully.

Richard Lachmann was researching media coverage of war deaths in the United States and Israel from the 1960s to the present.