Herbert Gans

In 1940, at the age of thirteen, Herbert Gans came to the United States from Germany. He began a sociology career in the 1950s and has described much of his research as an immigrant’s attempt to make sense of his adopted homeland. In the preface to a 1982 edition of Levittowners, he described the true test of community: “not cohesion or a high level of participation, but whether, when problems arise, people do then come together, literally or figuratively, to solve the soluble ones effectively and democratically.”