Donald Nathan Levine (June 16, 1931 – April 4, 2015) was an American sociologist, educator, social theorist and writer at the University of Chicago, where he served as Dean of the College. Within sociology, he is perhaps best known for his work in sociological theory and his translations and interpretations of Georg Simmel's classical texts into English, which led to a resurgence of interest in Simmel's work in the discipline. He was also a central figure in Ethiopian Studies.
Biography
Levine was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1931. He attended the University of Chicago. There, he earned a BA in 1950, MA in 1954, and PhD in 1957. His intellectual development was greatly shaped by the teachers and curriculum of the "Hutchins College" at Chicago. As a graduate student, Levine's mentors included Robert Redfield and Richard McKeon. He also spent a formative year in Germany in 1952–1953 as the University's first exchange student at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. Except for five years abroad, Levine lived in Chicago ever since receiving his doctorate in Sociology. His dissertation focused on a comparison of the works of Georg Simmel and Talcott Parsons. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he spent three years in Ethiopia, which included teaching courses at University College of Addis Ababa.
He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1962 and started a program on African civilization. Over time, he served as a professor of Sociology there, and its dean of undergraduate college. He later held the Peter B. Ritzma chair in Sociology (Professor Emeritus) at the University. Levine died on April 4, 2015.
Career
Throughout his career, Levine remained engaged with four primary areas of work: undergraduate education, sociological theory, Ethiopian Studies, and the Japanese martial art of aikido.
Levine made distinctive contributions to the teaching of undergraduates throughout five decades of service at the University of Chicago. As chair of the staff of the Social Sciences 121-2-3 sequence in the 1960s, he reorganized the yearlong course into its current form as Self, Culture & Society. As founding Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division from 1965 to 1968, Levine also introduced programs, including the African Civilization sequence and the Public Policy concentration program, that remain vital to this day.
Subsequently, Levine initiated the concentration program in Environmental Studies. As Dean of the College in the 1980s, he led a searching reexamination of the College curriculum, which resulted in enriched research opportunities for students, strengthened programs in the teaching of writing and foreign languages, and an expansion of the Common Core from one to two years. Levine also created novel courses of his own, some described in his 2005 book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, which focuses on Chicago’s distinctive traditions of higher education. He received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1971, and won the Amoco Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996. In 1985 he was awarded a chair, the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship.
In the area of social theory, Levine published a hundred papers and five books. He was especially well known for his critical interpretations of Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, S.N. Eisenstadt, and above all Georg Simmel, in whose writings he is often credited for helping to inspire a renaissance of interest. His book, Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms is one of the definitive collections of Simmel's sociological contributions. He taught classical sociological theory to first-year students in Chicago's Department of Sociology for decades. He was elected Chair of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association in 1997, and for two decades served as editor of the University of Chicago Press's Heritage of Sociology series. Levine served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and Theory, Culture & Society.