WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- Former Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso gave the Inaugural Seymour Martin Lipset lecture in Washington Monday.
First of an annual series organized by the National Endowment for Democracy, the lectures honor Lipset, a leading American sociologist and one of the intellectual founders of the influential neo-conservative group.
Lipset, a graduate of City College New York in the 1930s, was a former Trotskyite and Socialist who sought to answer the question why no socialist movement had ever succeeded in the United States. To answer it, he devised the theory of 'American Exceptionalism', arguing immigrants came to the U.S. to excel and quickly found opportunity and prosperity in a fast-growing society with an ever open frontier and no entrenched feudal class to repress them.
A Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Lipset was also awarded the Democracy Service Medal in a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy Monday.
