Iván Szelényi (1938-2026), a towering figure in sociology, one of the finest global intellectuals Hungary and Eastern Europe has ever produced, has died. Rest in peace and solidarity. He was my "Ph.D. grandad", the supervisor of my supervisor, and a constant presence in the background of my early academic career. He wrote more recommendation letters for me than I can count. Rec letters always on time. He read and reviewed my book. He inspired. He combined Marx, Weber, and Polanyi with an ease and elegance that's hard to match. He belonged to a kind of academic era and milieu that is disappearing, literally dying out. He was formed in and represented a university tradition that expected a scholar to master social theory, run serious empirical research, and speak to a public. Very few are left who do all three at his level. The academic system that produced people like him is being aggressively dismantled. He was the founding dean of social sciences and Max Weber Professor Emeritus at NYU Abu Dhabi, William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He served as president of the Hungarian Sociological Association and vice president of the American Sociological Association. UCLA honored him with its Luckmann Distinguished Teaching Award. The Hungarian state awarded him the Széchenyi Prize. Let us remember him the way I think he would want to be remembered in public: the impossibly well read, quietly witty professor at the front of the room, explaining the Western social theory canon. His brilliant Yale lecture course, Foundations of Modern Social Theory, is still online. With us for posterity: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…