Scholarly contributions
As the author of more than twenty-five books and editor of numerous other titles, Horowitz analyzed such diverse topics as the influence of Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church on American politics, the future of book publishing, and politics in Cuba. Horowitz was the founder of Studies in Comparative International Development. He was also chairman of Transaction Publishers.
Horowitz claimed to have been a student of Leftist sociologist C. Wright Mills, a Texas-born professor at Columbia University whose most significant books include, White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination. Horowitz edited a posthumous collection of Mills' work, Power, Politics, and People as well as The New Sociology, a collection of papers about him. A 2007 article challenged the integrity of Horowitz's editing, reported on his vexatious relationship with Mills's widow, and debunked his claims to have known Mills.
Over the several decades until his death Horowitz worked to develop a political sociology that can measure the extent of a society's personal freedom and State-sanctioned violence. As a result of his work, a standard for the quality of life in any particular nation or social system has been constructed based on the number of people arbitrarily killed, maimed, injured, incarcerated, or deprived of basic civil liberties. Horowitz tried to build a bridge between his current analysis of state power and authority and his earlier studies of comparative international stratification and development. He was key to introducing the phrase "Third World" into the lexicon of social research. Horowitz articulated the view that republication of previous publications in different formats is necessary in the social sciences to disseminate research results and make them useful to society.
Horowitz wrote about genocide: “First comes the act and then comes the word: first [the crime of] genocide is committed and then the language emerges to describe a phenomenon." He published lasting contributions on the subject, including Genocide: State power & mass murder; Taking lives: Genocide & state power; and "Genocide and the reconstruction of social theory: Observations on the exclusivity of collective death" in Armenian Review. Horowitz's last scholarly pieces on genocide were his preface to R. J. Rummel's Death by government, and his essay on state-sponsored terror, "Counting Bodies. The Dismal Science of Authorized Terror" in Patterns of Prejudice. In Summer 1994, a volume of essays in honour of Horowitz was published by Transaction Publishers.
In 1990, he published an autobiography, a brief "sociological biography" rather than one that is intellectual or intimate. This was Daydreams and nightmares: Reflections on a Harlem childhood, for which he received the National Jewish Book Award in 1991. It is an unromanticized look at growing up as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the streets of predominantly black Harlem, New York City, in the 1930s. Among his most recent books are Tributes: Personal reflections on a century of social research; and Behemoth: Main currents in the history and theory of political sociology.
A list of scholarly publications including more than two hundred works by Horowitz is found at the beta-version of Google Scholar.
