Eli Sagan  

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Eli Sagan (March 3, 1927 – January 4, 2015) was an American businessman who headed one of the nation's largest manufacturers of outerwear for young women, an autodidact in cultural sociology who wrote several widely reviewed books on the subject and a political activist who served on the national finance committee for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, a role that earned him a spot on Richard Nixon's Enemies List in 1973.

Writings and teaching

His extensive readings in anthropology and psychology led Sagan to write on the subject of cultural anthropology. He authored several books on the subject, including 1985's At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State, the 1991 work The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America, and his 2001 book Citizens & Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity and the Origins of Ideological Terror. he also wrote a book on the history of cannibalism in the early seventies.

In a review of At the Dawn of Tyranny in The New York Times, reviewer Andrew Bard Schmookler called the book "flawed in structure and... assumptions", but acknowledged Sagan's writing as "rich in substance and humane in spirit" and credited him for making a "serious contribution" to the field of evolutionary sociology.

Sagan was a visiting professor in sociology and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, The New School and Brandeis University. During the early seventies he also taught one course a week in anthropology at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Eli Sagan" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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