Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
[5] From 1952 to 1954, he was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied economics, philosophy, and politics and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree.
During his first year of graduate school at the age of 24, he co-authored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons, first published in 1956.
2002 Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for Distinguished Career Achievement from the International Sociological Association.
It differs from the European social-psychological research on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, William McDougall, and Sigmund Freud.