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Maurice Zeitlin (born in Detroit, MI, February 24,1935-) is a former Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He has authored numerous scholarly books on topics spanning the civil wars in Chile, the Cuban working class (with Robert Scheer), for which he interviewed Ernesto “Che” Guevara several times, politics, labor unions, and economic policy, and is currently writing about the Nazi agenda and manifestations of Jewish “resistance to evil” during WWII.

Maurice Zeitlin graduated in June 1957 from Wayne University in Detroit with a B.A. in anthropology, and in July enrolled in the department of anthropology at UC-Berkeley, focusing his studies on the origins and evolution of the human species. The next year he transferred to sociology, however, to focus on the historically specific analysis of social structures and their contingent forms of social action. Under the mentorship of Reinhard Bendix, Zeitlin wrote his master’s thesis on the development of feudalism in Japan – from which came his first published article, “Max Weber andthe Sociology of the Feudal Order,” Sociological Review 8 (December 1960, 202-207). With Seymour M. Lipset as his adviser, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on labor and politics in pre-revolutionary Cuba. He received his PhD in sociology in January 1964.

From 1961 to 1964, he was an instructor in sociology and anthropology at Princeton University. As he had given speeches critiquing American policy toward the Cuban Revolution and had already published four articles on the Cuban revolution during 1961, and another five during 1962, and also had published an interview on September 14,1961 with the Cuban Minister of Industry, Che Guevara, Klaus Knorr, the Director of Center for International Studies, invited him to become a research associate of the Center and funded Zeitlin’s research in Cuba during 1961 and 1962. On Zeitlin’s return from Cuba, Mr. Knorr advised him to accept an invitation from the CIA to be “debriefed” about his observations of the Revolution – a conference which in the telling was lively.

In July 1964, Zeitlin was appointed assistant professor of sociology at this University of Wisconsin, Madison and became a full professor in 1970. During mid-1965 through 1966, he was on leave from the university as a Ford Foundation Fellow in Latin American Studies, where hecarried out research that eventuated in his book, Landlords and Capitalists -- whom he characterized in an original concept as a “coalesced bourgeoisie.” In the fall of 1976, Zeitlin joined the department of sociology at UCLA and was appointed four years later as Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Upon his retirement from UCLA on November 1, 2015, he was appointed Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology. In 1971-1972, he had been visiting professor of political science and sociology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the winter semesters of 1996 and 1997, he was avisiting professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Zeitlin founded and served as editor-in-chief of Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual, from 1978 through 1990, and was succeeded by Diane Davis, a former UCLA doctoral student (who by then had become the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design). Theda Skocpol, in her 1982Contemporary Sociology review of PP&ST’s inaugural volume wrote, “As the years go by [PP&ST] may find itself expressing a persistent. . . scholarly current, likely to be institutionalized only within the (itself somewhat beleaguered) discipline of sociology. Should this come to pass, however, Zeitlin’s annual will be all the moreimportant, provided that subsequent volumes. . . remain as diverse and creative as this very welcome first volume.” Among editorial boards, he’s served on were for New Critics Press, 1969-1973; Bobbs-Merrill Series of Studies in Sociology, 1969-75; International Sociological Association, 1977-1981; The Progressive, 1985-1996. He also served as contributing editor and Latin America editor at Ramparts Magazine, 1967-1973. In 1960, he and UC Berkeley graduate students Ruth Markovitz, Robert Scheer, Victor Garlin, Sol Stern and David Horowitz founded Root & Branch: A Radical Quarterly(whose first issue included Zeitlin’s interview with Che Guevara).

Zeitlin is the author, co-author or editor of fifteenbooks and over ninety peer-reviewed articles; a number of his Op-Ed pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, La Opinion, Newsday and various other newspapers. Perhaps his most well-known article for a general audience is “Who Owns America? The Same Old Gang,” The Progressive, Vol. 42, issue 6 (June 1978). It wasincluded, between 1978, its date of publication,and 1985, in eleven academic sociology anthologies, whose editors taught it to their students. This article also appeared in several labor union publications, among them RWDSU Record (Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union). “The Same Old Gang” was also published in McGraw-Hill’s Primus electronic data base; and it won the Project Censored Prize for one of the “Year’s Ten Best Censored Stories of 1978.” His testimony before the California Senate Committee on Industrial Relations, in San Francisco, Dec. 9, 1980, reprinted as "How we got here, and how to get out," in Voice of the Cement, Lime, Gypsum and Allied Workers, won The Year's Top "Censored" Story of 1981.

A number of his publications have been translated into such languages as Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Romanian, Farsi and Japanese.

His books include Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class, (Princeton University Press, 1967; 2nd ed., 1970, Harper and Row, with a special report on Cuba today by the author; The Civil Wars in Chile (or the bourgeois revolutions that never were) (Princeton University Press, 1984). Landlords and Capitalists: The Dominant Class of Chile, with Richard Earl Ratcliff (Princeton University Press, 1988; Talking Union, with Judith Stepan-Norris (University of Illinois Press, 1996); Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions, with Judith Stepan-Norris (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Among Zeitlin’s books, the most well-known may be: Cuba: An American Tragedy, with Robert Scheer (Grove, 1963); and Cuba: An American Tragedy, 2nd ed., (Penguin, 1964).

His three books published by Princeton University Press have been re-published in the Princeton Legacy Library, from “The distinguished back-listof Princeton University Press.”

Among Zeitlin’s edited books, the two most well-known may be: ''Latin America: Reform or Revolution? A Reader, with James Petras (Fawcett Premier Books,1968), and American Society, Inc: Studies of the Social Structure and Political Economy of the United States'' (Markham, 1970; 2nd ed., Rand McNally, 1977). Among his other edited books are: Father Camilo Torres: Revolutionary Writings (Harper and Row, 1972); Classes, Class Conflict, and the State: Empirical Studies in Class Analysis (Little, Brown, 1980) ''How Mighty a Force? Studies of Workers’ Consciousness and Organization in the United States'' (Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, 1983).

Among his many peer-reviewed articles, “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology 79, issue 5 (March 1974), 1073-1119, may be considered his most heterodox and provocative article, in which he showed that, contrary to the then accepted academic (and non-academic) consensus that large corporations were controlled by “managers “ or a “technocracy,” in reality they were controlled by “principal capitalists.” Perhaps his first peer-reviewed article on the Cuban revolution was his most controversial and well-known, “Political Generations in the Cuban Working Class,” American Journal of Sociology71, issue 5 (March 1966), 493-508.

A number of his peer-reviewed articles have earned awards for distinguished scholarship; among them, the American Sociological Association’s “Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship” for the article by Zeitlin and Judith Stepan-Norris, “Union Democracy, Radical Leadership, and the Hegemony of Capital,” American Sociological Review 60 (December 1995), 829-850. Zeitlin was awarded Woodrow Wilson Fellowships at UC Berkeley in 1958 and 1959; the Ford Foundation Fellowship in Latin American Studies, 1965-1967; the Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship, 1970-1971; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1981-1982. (Perhaps of interest is the following episode concerning the award of Zeitlin’s Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship. The Chancellor of the University intervened to deny his Fellowship and the Board of Regents thereupon refused to accept it, an action without precedent. The chairmen of 28 departments issued a statement criticizing the Regents’ action as a violation of Academic Freedom. Zeitlin had been a vocal critic of the American War in Vietnam. The Regents then rescinded their refusal and accepted the Fellowship, noting that the refusal had been the result of a “clerical error.”)