Bellah, Robert Neelly (1927–2013)

Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) was a US sociologist, theologian, educator, and public intellectual. A student of Talcott Parsons at the Harvard Department of Social Relations, Bellah first became well known in the late 1950s as an expert on Japanese culture and religion. In the 1960s he published “Civil Religion in America,” a controversial interpretation of the relationship between religion and politics in the United States which sparked a broad multidisciplinary debate. Before leaving the civil religion debate, Bellah stated his views in the book The Broken Covenant . In the early 1970s Bellah also promoted a radical version of hermeneutics, which he called “symbolic realism.” After a failed attempt to create a school of social sciences at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton together with his friend and colleague, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Bellah worked on a project on US morality and individualism which was eventually published in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society , two very influential and debated books. In the last years of his intellectual trajectory Bellah worked relentlessly on a theoretical project he had first envisioned in the 1950s: Religion in Human Evolution was both his swan song and his greatest accomplishment.