Guenther Roth
January 12, 1931 – May 18, 2019
Born in Germany in 1931, Guenther Roth came to the United States in 1953 and was naturalized in 1963. Receiving his Ph. D. from the U. of California at Berkeley in 1960, he established himself as a political sociologist with a comparative and historical orientation and as a scholar of classical social theory and its intellectual and social contexts. Many of his publications have dealt with the theoretical significance of Max Weber’s oeuvre and its empirical utility in historical and contemporary research. After his retirement from the Columbia Sociology Department in 1997, he published mainly as a political and social historian.