Richard Lachmann Add a review

Richard Lachmann (May 17, 1956 – September 19, 2021) was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY.

Lachmann is best known as the author of the book, "Capitalists in Spite of Themselves", which has been awarded several prizes, including the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. In this work, Lachmann shows that relations among elites rather than class struggle, or any other set of factors proposed by other historians, primarily determined the creation or non-creation of capitalism in early modern Europe. Later, he used his elite conflict theory to analyze the political crisis in the United States. He died after a heart attack in 2021 at the age of 65.