Liah Greenfeld

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Liah Greenfeld (born 1954) is 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"^[1] of contemporary sociologists and her approach represents the major alternative to the mainstream approaches in social science.^[2] Throughout her analyses, she emphasizes the empirical foundation of claims that she makes about human thought and action, underlining the importance of logical consistency between different sources of evidence as well as between the many interrelated hypotheses that come together to help us explain complex human phenomena. Because our thought and action are rarely limited to one, conveniently isolated sphere of human existence but rather occur within the context of more than one area of our reality at the same time (e.g. the political, the religious, the economic, the artistic, etc.) Greenfeld highlights the fact that an empirical study of humanity must necessarily be interdisciplinary.

Best known for her trilogy on nationalism -- Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013), Greenfeld has studied and written about the entire range of modern social reality, including art, literature, science, religion, love, mental illness, ideological politics, economic competition, and so on.