Alvin Ward Gouldner was born on July 29th, 1920, in New York and died on December 15th, 1980. He was professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis (1959–1967), at the University at Buffalo (1967–1972), President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1962), professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam (1972–1976) and Max Weber Professor of Sociology at Washington University (from 1967).

His early works such as Patterns in Industrial Bureaucracy can be seen as important as they worked within the existing fields of sociology but adopted the principles of a critical intellectual. This can be seen more clearly in his 1964 work, Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of Value Free Sociology, where he claimed the sociology could not be objective and that Max Weber had never intended to make such a claim.

He is probably most remembered for his 1970 work The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. This work argued that sociology must turn away from producing objective truths and understand the subjective nature of sociology and knowledge in general and how it is bound up with the context of the times. This book was used by many schools of sociology as analysis of their own theory and methods. Gouldner, however, was not the first sociologist to be critical of objective knowledge of society; see, for example, Adorno's Negative Dialectics.

Subsequently, much of Gouldner's work was concerned with critiquing modern sociology and the nature of the intellectual. He argued that ideology often produced false premises and was used as a tool by a ruling elite and that, therefore, critical subjective thought is much more important than objective thought.