American political scientist Gabriel Almond - biography, activities and interesting facts

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:47

Gabriel Abraham Almond was born in Rock Island, Illinois on January 12, 1911 and died on December 25, 2002 in Pacific Grove, California. He was an American political scientist known for his comparisons of political systems and analysis of political developments.

Achievements

Almond (Almond Gabriel Abraham) received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1938 and taught at Brooklyn College from 1939 to 1946, except while serving with the US War Information Administration from 1942-45. After studying at Yale (1947-51 and 1959-63) and Princeton (1951-59) in 1963, he was appointed professor at Stanford, where from 1964 to 1968. headed the department. He was President of the American Political Science Association (1965-66) and received the James Madison Award in 1981

Gabriel Almond was one of the most influential figures in post-war political science. He became a pioneer of the behavioral approach in this area, and in the 1960s and 1970s, probably the most famous researcher in the field of comparative politics, political development and culture. Few students studying these subjects in the UK or US have graduated without reading it.work. In the late 1980s, after heart surgery, he was still publishing, intellectually inquisitive, and supervising research students at Stanford University.

Early Biography

Gabriel Almond was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He spent Saturdays with his father, studying Torah and Judaism. This influence remained with him to the end, although he renounced his religion. Important for Almond's intellectual development were the 10 years he spent at the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he began working in 1928, studying in his last year, and in 1938 he defended his Ph. D. thesis. At the time, the university was vying for an international reputation, and the generosity of we althy local families helped attract and retain academic stars.

Almond studied with Harold Laswell, D. G. Mead and Charles Merriam. The latter was intent on turning political science into a science, encouraging quantification and the search for links between psychology, anthropology and sociology in order to discover the sources of political behavior. Graduates were expected to do field research, which was new at the time.

Almond attended university for 3 years, which was not easy during the depression. In addition, studying in the humid summer heat in Chicago was sometimes unbearable - in order to read Max Weber in German, Gabriel had to take a cold bath. His fellow students were Ed Shiels, Herbert Simon and George Stigler, who later became the founders of theirdisciplines in sociology, politics and economics. It is hard to find any other institution that had such a constellation of talent in the social sciences.

Chicago political scientists who held academic positions elsewhere were viewed with suspicion at first, but came to dominate the discipline in the post-war years.

Academic work

Gabriel Almond's first assignment, interrupted by military service, was Brooklyn College. In 1947, he moved to the political science department at Yale University, then to Princeton, after which he returned to Yale, where he remained from 1959 to 1963.

The pulpit at Yale was brilliant but very turbulent, and he was happy to leave. Almond was poached from Stanford, another we althy private university that had only a mediocre political science department. He managed to attract excellent specialists, which significantly improved the position of the department.

Towards comparative politics

Almond's reputation and the prospect of making a mark on science led to his chairmanship of the Social Science Research Council's Comparative Politics Committee. He held this position from 1954 to 1964. The Committee played a key role in conducting research, seminars and conferences, providing grants and was an excellent place to start an academic career. There, Almond pioneered the study of the political development of new states by applying modern theory and scientific methods. This activity spawned a number of innovativeresearch published by Princeton University Press.

Gabriel Almond's early work reflected Merriam's influence and drew on polling data. The American People and Foreign Policy (1950) was a study of public opinion, and The Attractiveness of Communism (1953) was a study of communist personalities. Interest in these issues arose during his work in US intelligence, when he participated in the interrogation of captured Gestapo and German intelligence officers.

Stability of Democracy

Then followed a work on political development in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia and the famous study "Civic Culture" (1963) co-authored with the young Sidney Verba. Gabriel Almond was motivated to study the political culture by his interest in public opinion and national character. He covered broad topics. How do beliefs influence individual political behavior and the effectiveness of the political system? What values help or hinder stable democracy? To address these issues, the authors conducted surveys in 5 countries: Great Britain, USA, Mexico, West Germany and Italy in 1959-60. In his opinion, the desired culture was one that balanced the aspirations of the people, giving rulers the freedom to make decisions and imposing restrictions on them. Britain became the ideal.

The book had a masterful approach to comparative research, andthe authors prepared informative material on political culture. Familiarization with it has become mandatory for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and educators, as well as students studying comparative political science. It influenced Almond's determination to move beyond the narrow legal and institutional approaches that have dominated political science and country comparisons.

Criticism

The book was not without criticism. In an attempt to make comparisons between Western and non-Western societies, he developed a new set of structural-functional categories that for a time caused rage in academic political science. Critics complained that he simply invented a new vocabulary, such as replacing "power" with "functions" and "states" with "political systems". Gabriel Almond was also accused of ethnocentrism. His models of civic culture and political development were dismissed for their excessive Anglo-Americanism (he admired Britain).

His efforts to integrate different approaches to the study of politics have also found their critics. Oxford professor Sammy Finner rejected his bid to become "U Tant (UN Secretary-General at the time) of political science."

Search for patterns

Gabriel Almond admitted that he constantly vacillated between theory and empirical research and sought to connect his research with the main problems of political theory. He was a scientist who looked for patterns in political behavior across time and space and took onintellectual risks of generalization and comparison. Almond enjoyed working in teams and using case studies as a method of formulating and testing theories. An impressive product of this approach was the book "Crisis, Choice and Change" (1973), concerning the political development of different countries.

On the mistakes of the education system

Gabriel Almond was a modest man, but in his latest writings he reminded his younger colleagues that many of the so-called new ideas and approaches used in the 1970s and 1980s were anticipated by his generation much earlier. An advocate of scientific memory warned them that they were reinventing the wheel too often. From the mid-1970s, he became increasingly concerned about the consequences of the emphasis on methodological rigor in American schools, and complained that in the social sciences universities were producing too many technical specialists. Often the new generation of scientists had neither the knowledge nor the inclination to solve global problems. The investment required to teach at this level of formal theoretical and methodological rigor in many cases diminishes the ability to use these theories and methods to solve the significant problems of humanity.

He also deplored the fact that growing specialization had led to the fragmentation of science. In A Discipline Divided (1990), he explored how this sectarianism has led scholars to "seat at separate tables" today. At this stage, he was one offew who were able to speak with representatives of various directions.

Contribution to political science

Gabriel Almond in his works consistently tried to synthesize traditional approaches, based on history and philosophy, into new, more complex ones, based on mathematics and experiments. He was skeptical of monocausal methods and premature departure from economic models. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he wrote about the persistence of pre-revolutionary beliefs in Eastern Europe - liberal, ethnic and nationalistic - despite the systematic introduction of communist ideas. When Almond died, it seemed prophetic.

Recognized for his contributions to political science, he has received numerous awards and fellowships in the United States and abroad. In 1965-66 he was president of the American Political Science Association, the most prestigious position in his profession.

Private life

While collecting material for his work at the New York City Library, he met Dorothea Kaufmann, a German refugee who was studying at Columbia Teachers College. They married in 1937 and had three children.

Gabriel and Dorothea have been generous hosts, and over the years hundreds of international students and visiting scholars and their families have been warmly welcomed to their home in Palo Alto.