Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Betta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as UC Berkeley Ford Professor of Sociology.

Bellah is author and editor of many essays and several books. His two most influential articles are “Religious Evolution” (1964) and “Civil Religion in America” (1967) the former of which he is currently transforming into a two-volume work tentatively titled Religion in Human Evolution.

Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader (2006). The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”

In 1985, stemming in part from “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, the University of California Press published the widely discussed Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. A cultural analysis of American society, Bellah co-authored Habits with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. In 1996, UC Press republished Habits with a new introduction, “A House Divided,” and again in 2007 with a new preface. As a successor to Habits, the same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American culture published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.

On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal.  The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads: 

The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.

In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and the University of Erfurt (Germany), organized a conference – “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present” – of distinguished international scholars focused on the moral dimensions and historical background of modernity. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary doctorate.

In 1970, at age 43, Bellah published an intellectual autobiography that serves as the “Introduction” to Beyond Belief. In 1990, he published “Finding the Church: Post-Traditional Disciples,” which updates his autobiography, for The Christian Century’s “How My Mind Has Changed” series. A 2005 letter Bellah wrote to the editor of the New York Review of Books entitled, “McCarthyism at Harvard,” provides a close look at one dramatic episode in his life – and his society. The “Epilogue” to Meaning and Modernity (2002), a Festschrift for Bellah edited by Richard Madsen et al., and the “Introduction” to The Robert Bellah Reader (2006), also supply a strong sense of his extraordinary intellectual odyssey. The University of Padua (Italy) Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini is currently working on a sociological biography of Bellah.

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