Todd Alan Gitlin (January 6, 1943 – February 5, 2022) was an American sociologist, political activist and writer, novelist, and cultural commentator.

He was married three times: his first two marriages, to activist and lawyer Nancy Hollander and to Carol Wolman, ended in divorce, and his third, to Laurel Ann Cook, lasted from 1995 until his death.

[2] On December 31, 2021, Gitlin went into cardiac arrest at his home in Hillsdale[5] and was hospitalized in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he contracted COVID-19.

[2] Gitlin became a political activist in 1960, when he joined a Harvard undergraduate group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons.

[15] In 2013, he became involved in the alumni wing of the Divest Harvard[16] movement, seeking the university's exit from fossil fuel corporations.

[17] During 1994–1995, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

He was a columnist for The San Francisco Examiner and the New York Observer, and a frequent contributor to TPMcafe and The New Republic online as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education.

He was co-chair of the San Francisco branch of PEN American Center, a member of the board of directors of Greenpeace, and an early editor of openDemocracy.

In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, a memoir and analysis combined, he develops a sense of the tensions between expressive and strategic politics.

During the George W. Bush administration, he argued that the Republican Party managed to accomplish that with a coalition of what he called two "major components—the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on."

[T]hose who still cling to gauzy dreams about untainted militancy need to remember all the murders committed in the name of various radical ideologies that accomplished exactly nothing for the victims of racism.