Carl Quimby Christol

Carl Quimby Christol, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science, a faculty member for almost 40 years at the University of Southern California, died at his home in Santa Barbara on February 22, 2012, of natural causes at the age of 98. One of the world's foremost authorities on the international law of outer space, Professor Christol was a prolific scholar greatly admired by colleagues and students around the world.

Carl Christol was born June 28, 1913 on the farm in South Dakota that had been homesteaded by his grandparents in 1881. He grew up in Vermillion, South Dakota, raised by his parents Winifred Quimby Christol and Dr. Carl Christol. His father, who had a doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1905, was a Professor of European History at the University of South Dakota. Christol graduated from the University of South Dakota magna cum laude in three years with two majors, government and history, in 1934, at the age of 20.

He continued to pursue interdisciplinary studies at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy where he had the opportunity to study with Roscoe Pound, Manley O. Hudson, Julius Stone, Felix Frankfurter, and George Grafton Wilson. After receiving his Masters degree from the Fletcher School in 1936, he spent a year studying at the University of Geneva and the European Institute of Higher International Studies from which he received a certificate in 1938. In Geneva he studied with Hans Kelsen, Hans Wehberg, Maurice Bourquin, Pittman Potter, and John B. Whitton. The American Friends Service Committee and the Swiss-American Exchange of the Institute of International Education awarded him scholarships to support his studies. While based in Geneva, he attended many League of Nations meetings.

His military service also influenced his perspective on law and politics. At the end of his senior year of college, he was awarded the South Dakota ROTC prize and in 1934 commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry. He served in the army, retiring as an Army Colonel; he was the recipient of the Bronze Star. He served in the Infantry between 1941–46 including the Battle of the Bulge in Germany and making initial contact with Russian Forces east of the Elbe River in 1945. He often noted that his World War II experiences in Germany sparked his strong interest in human rights

He decided to pursue a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago, which he received in 1940. The title of his dissertation was “Transit by Air in International Law.”. His mentor was Quincy Wright, and he served as his research assistant. Christol also took courses from Charles E. Merriam, Leonard D. White, Harold Gosnell, T.V. Smith, Natan Leites, Edward Benes, and M. Borgese. Other students there at the same time were Gabriel Almond, Bernard Brodie, Claude Hawley, Frank Klingberg, David Levitan, and David Truman.

His LL.B degree was from Yale Law School (1947) where he studied 1940–41 and 1946–47 (his studies were interrupted by his military service). At Yale the professors with whom he studied included luminaries such as Edwin Borchard, Grant Gilmore, Friederick Kessler, Myres S. McDougal, Underhill Moore, Fred Rodel, E. V. Rostow, and Harry Shulman. His classmates included Nicholas Katzenbach, John Lindsay, William Scranton, Cyrus Vance, and Byron White. Later in the summer of 1950 he attended the Academy of International Law in the Hague.

He joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1949 and taught there until his retirement in 1987. With his appointment to the Stockton Chair of International Law at the US Naval War College, 1962–63, Professor Christol began to conduct his path-breaking research in the new field of space law. During his academic career, he became a pre-eminent scholar in this complex field. He was also one of the first jurists to specialize in international environmental law and international human rights law.

His publications spanned many areas of international law and politics including space law, air law, environment law, human rights, the law of the sea, US foreign policy, and national security issues. The author of nine books and numerous journal articles published in the United States and abroad, he is particularly well known for his scholarship on space law. His highly influential book The Modern International Law of Outer Space (Pergamon Press, 1982) is considered a classic in the field. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, President of the Institute of Space Law and Policy described it as a “…must read for every space lawyer.”Footnote ¹ His other books include: Introduction to Political Science (first published in 1957), Space Law Past, Present, Future (1991), International Law and U.S. Foreign Policy (2006, 2nd edition, 2004, first edition), Transit by Air in International Law (1941), Readings in International Law (1959), International Legal and Institutional Aspects of the Stratosphere Ozone Problems (1975), Satellite Power System (SPS) International Agreements (1978). His monograph, Space Law Past, Present, Future received the Social Science Book Award of the International Academy of Astronautics in 1992.

Professor Christol was an extraordinary pioneer in the law of outer space. For his remarkable contributions exploring new terrain, he received numerous awards. In 1998 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Institute of Space Law (IISL). Then president of IISL, Nandasiri Jasentuliyana said: “His early vision to extending law into this new environment will no doubt affect the future of mankind.”Footnote ² He was elected a Member of the International Academy of Astronautics (Paris) and was an honorary member of space law organizations in Japan and in Uruguay. He also served as member of the Advisory Committee on International Law of the US Department of State from 1970–75.

For decades he played leadership roles in international law organizations including the American Society of International Law, the International Law Association, the American Bar Association, and other important professional associations. During the 1970s he was the chair of the Space Law Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association, and was also the founding chair of the Los Angeles County Bar Association Committee on International Law. In the late 1990s he joined the Southern California working group to establish an International Criminal Court. In 2010 he was elected to the Board of the London based Institute of Space Policy and Law.

In the 1960s and 1970s Dr. Christol participated in conferences organized by Pacem in Terris II and the World Peace through Law Foundation in Switzerland, Algeria, Malta, and Japan. As a representative of the International Bar Association and the American Bar Association, he attended the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

Christol was a member and vice-president of the Court of Man Foundation, an organization that lobbied during the 1970s to establish a tribunal to hold governments accountable for gross violations of human rights. To promote the creation of this special court, he met with many jurists in Africa and Europe. His commitment to the promotion of fundamental principles of human rights inspired others to join the movement.

Among his many accomplishments were important international instruments: he helped draft five major United Nations treaties. Because of his vast knowledge and tremendous expertise, he contributed to the formulation of innovative policies concerning the rescue and return of astronauts in distress, the treatment of space objects including space debris, and the emerging jurisprudence of space colonies. During the 1980s he worked on the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea. During the process of drafting that instrument, he developed special interests in the international regulation of whaling and the common heritage of mankind principle.

As a member of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, he became an observer at the United Nations Law of the Sea conferences. While attending these meetings, he met Ambassador Arvid Pardo from Malta who was widely known for advocating the application of the Common Heritage of Mankind principle to the ocean. Later Christol arranged for him to join the faculty at the University of Southern California where they co-taught a graduate seminar on international law related to the ocean and outer space.

For decades he played an active role in key professional organizations and helped with the editing of major journals. A member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, he served as the President of the American Branch of the International Institute of Space Law. He was on the editorial board of Western Political Quarterly and helped edit International Legal Materials published by the American Society of International Law and The International Lawyer published by the American Bar Association. He also assisted with other journals such as the Journal of Space Law and the Australian International Law Journal.

His achievements were recognized on many occasions. He received the International Institute of Space Law Certificate of Merit. His last two books won the Social Science Book Award of the International Academy of Astronautics (Paris), an organization to which he was elected in 1984. When he retired, he was regarded as the leading authority in the United States and one of top several experts in the world in his area of specialization. For his work he received commendations and honorary membership in international legal bodies in Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Uruguay.

A beloved teacher at USC for nearly 40 years, his students were inspired by his cutting-edge courses and imaginative pedagogy. Although he taught primarily in the College, he was much in demand, often teaching in the Law School, the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and the School of Social Work. He offered Constitutional Law, Human Rights, and International Law. He took great pride in an undergraduate course he developed – The Politics of Peace: Human Rights. This was one of the first human rights courses in the liberal arts curriculum of a major university in the United States; the course inspired the creation of Human Rights Minor in Political Science. Christol often had students engage in role-playing exercises such as an international moot court which ensured highly interactive class sessions. For more than 25 years he was the adviser of an undergraduate pre-law honor society, the Blackstonians. He received many teaching awards including the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (1982), a university-wide award, and the 1981–82 Student Senate Outstanding Faculty Member Award. His teaching mattered to him tremendously, and he described the pleasure he took in it: “I loved working with my students, challenging them to think and watching them to learn.”Footnote ³ He influenced international law through all the students he inspired over the years. His former students included members of Congress, judges, attorneys, academics, and government ministers.

Christol interacted with several US presidents including Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. In 1977 President Gerald Ford delivered a guest lecture in his international law course.

Christol had an international reputation. He lectured in at least 40 countries, taught courses in England and Germany, and was in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio conference and Study Center (1980). Among his other professional honors were holding the Stockton Chair of International Law at the US Naval War College (1962–63), and holding a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in International Law and Jurisprudence. Between 1979 and 1986 he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University. He also taught at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, three universities in Beijing, China, universities and institutes in Tokyo, Japan, the University of Korea in Seoul, with governmental military and foreign policy officials in Bangkok, Thailand and the University of Uruguay and Catholic University in Montevideo. He was a guest lecturer at the United Nations University Conference on arms control and disarmament in the Hague in 1984.

He began teaching at the University of Southern California as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science 1949–50. In 1957 with his promotion to Full Professor, he was given the title Professor of International Law and Political Science. He had a profound influence on the department. He laid the foundation for public law in Political Science by ensuring that it included a global perspective. He also served as the Chair of the Department of Political Science for six years. Christol retired in 1987 and was appointed Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 1990.

At USC he received the University's highest honors: the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award (1990), the Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (1982), the Raubenheimer Distinguished Faculty Award (1982), and the Phi Kappa Phi Distinguished Faculty Award for his book, The Modern Law of Outer Space (1987). The students also gave him many awards, e.g., the Student Senate conferred the Outstanding Faculty award on him in 1981.

Also an advocate, he was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and in the states of South Dakota and California. He practiced law with the Sherman Oaks firm of Fizzolio & Fizzolio, specializing in cases concerning university disputes: promotions, tenure, and other academic grievances.

In all of his numerous activities he demonstrated an unwavering commitment to community service. He served on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles County Heart Association. His involvement with this organization was a consequence of his pro bono work; he obtained a court order to compel a Southern California municipality to issue a permit allowing the Heart Association to solicit contributions on “Heart Sunday.” He was President of the United Nations Association of Los Angeles and also on the national board of this organization. For more than a decade he was chair of the Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church's Peacemaking Committee. When his daughter, Susan Deacon Christol, ran for public office, he campaigned for her.

Throughout his life he enjoyed sports and music. He was known for his tremendous enthusiasm for skiing, which he continued until he was in his late eighties. His love of swimming, every day and in many different countries, was the subject of a newspaper article when he swam on his 87th birthday.Footnote ⁴

Christol was married to his wife, Jeanette, for more than 50 years; she preceded him in death as did their son, Richard. Christol is survived by his daughter, Susan Christol Deacon, President and member of the Santa Barbara Board of Education, her husband, Jim Deacon, and grandsons Dekker C. Deacon and Kyle Z. Deacon of Goleta, California.

The late Professor Carl Q. Christol was a gentleman. He was a brilliant scholar, exemplary colleague, and fine citizen of the world. He will be remembered for his genuine concern for the welfare of others and the environment and for his lifelong pursuit of world peace and international human rights. He was beloved by all who had the pleasure of knowing him. He will be greatly missed.

—Alison Dundes Renteln, professor and chair, department of political science and professor of anthropology, law, and public policy, University of Southern California

James Chowning Davies

James Chowning Davies, scholar and teacher of political science, died on Friday, March 30, 2012, of age-related causes. He was 94. Jim, as he was known to his friends, colleagues and many admiring students, was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1918, the fourth of six children. He is predeceased by five siblings and his wife, Eleanor. He is survived by his daughter, Sarah and his granddaughter, Elizabeth. He graduated with a BA from Oberlin College, completed a year at law school at the University of Chicago before going into the army, eventually to serve in postwar Japan in the office responsible for rebuilding the education system. After another year in law school at the University of Texas, he switched to Political Science, earning his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952. His first teaching position was at Cal Tech and his first major paper was published in 1954. In 1963, Jim took a position as professor of political science at the University of Oregon serving as chair of the department from 1966 to 1969. He was a founding member of the International Society for Political Psychology and of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences and contributed importantly to The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known for its Chair, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, established in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson to report on the origins and causes of urban uprisings. Jim retired from teaching in 1983, but his scholarly writing continued more than ten further years. No memorial service is planned but donations in his memory may be made to the University of Oregon department of political science.

Jim's first major paper, published in The American Political Science Review, was “Charisma in the 1952 Campaign” (Reference Davies1954), inspired by Eisenhower's election in 1952 when the ex-general was riding on his image as the infallible victor of World War II. This project drew on survey data collected by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and might be seen, therefore, as an early product of the behavioral revolution. Yet the point of the paper was to develop a theoretical concept (“charisma”) and to illustrate and develop that concept by reference to the closest example at hand, rather than to produce an “instant history” of a particular election. Already on display in that article are Jim's deep knowledge of the classical literature, his own formidable conceptual and analytic abilities, his willingness to draw on even small numbers within an SRC sample to illustrate the processes that concerned him, and—most interesting in retrospect—his gravitation toward cognitive processes and the manner in which they function in interaction with particular contextual and, therefore, historical and political circumstances.

Jim's best known contribution was “Toward a Theory of Revolution” (Reference Davies1962). Still substantially before the developments within Biology that would lay the groundwork for a biological—thus evolutionary—understanding of humans' cognitive systems and behavior, and at a time when the cognitive revolution had barely begun, Jim was, once again, addressing an important subject matter from a model of how human motivations could interact with contextual and historical circumstances, a model that has a peculiarly modern ring to it. As he indicated to us, he believed (correctly, we think) that this was his most influential paper. In Jim's own—much later—words to us, the J-Curve paper

When we asked him what he thought was his most important contribution, Jim responded without hesitation:

Yet his book published the next year, Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior (Reference Davies1963) was, in fact, a sustained attempt to develop the broad paradigm within which he framed the J-Curve idea. Stylistically, it shows the same remarkable ability that he demonstrated in the J-curve paper for melding ideas about human nature with historical case studies (here of individual leaders as well as the circumstances confronted by the mass of people) and, necessarily, this required much subtle argumentation when moving from the historical record to what he suggests was going on inside peoples' heads. Difficult or not, this movement from a micro-level of analysis to a macro-level and back again is precisely what a developed political psychology must concern itself with, and Jim was fearless—and very persuasive—in taking that particular bull by the horns. There was, of course, criticism of the J-Curve, perhaps most forcefully by Snyder and Tilly (Reference Snyder and Tilly1972) to which Jim responded with his characteristic energy and persuasiveness. Developing the same theme, he had already published his widely read When Men Revolt and Why: A Reader in Political Violence and Revolt (Reference Davies1970).

It is instructive to examine Jim's theoretical instincts insofar as they appear to a contemporary eye reading Human Nature and Politics. Although the cognitive revolution was barely under way in the early 60s, Jim had a strong intuition, revealed in both the charisma paper and the J-curve paper, that cognitive systems can only be understood as involving an interaction between what the brain does (it “processes information”) and what is presented to the brain by its social and natural environments. In the early '60s, Jim did not develop the usefulness of thinking about the adaptive function of diverse aspects of brain architecture as the brain was molded by evolution through millions of years—but at that time nobody did. Jim's theoretical inspiration was Abraham Maslow's proposed “hierarchy of human needs,” an idea that was not developed in evolutionary (adaptive) terms by either Maslow or Jim. But how the various proposed “basic needs” provoked emotional and, thus, behavioral responses to environments was developed at some length by both Maslow and Jim in a clear parallel to the more explicitly evolutionary models that were to come decades later.

Still more interesting, in arguing that such hypothesized “basic needs” were innate in our brains and that behavior was much more than simply a learned response either to environmental “reinforcers” (in the Watsonian and Skinnerian tradition) or to “culture” (in the anthropological and sociological traditions), Jim's writing in the ‘sixties anticipated the evolutionary psychologists’ rejection of “the standard social science model” (Cosmides and Tooby Reference Cosmides, Tooby, Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby1992) that had dominated all the social sciences since Boaz, Mead and Watson. The distinctive insight of the new position—consistent with Jim's thinking—is that newborn brains are primed for particular emotional and thus behavioral responses by many thousands of years of natural selection, that they are not “blank slates” on which anything could be written with equal ease. Jim could not have specified his peculiarly modern starting point more clearly than he did on the first pages of the Preface to Human Nature in Politics (pp. vii-viii):

When we asked Jim how he would like his contribution to political psychology to be described, he said that he “would want to say that I was, in some aspects, a very early founder of the behavioral revolution in the Social Sciences.” That revolution was, of course, a very complex and multifaceted thing, but if Jim was an early behavioralist, his intuitions reached well beyond the “standard social science model” that characterized the thinking of most who then called themselves “behavioralists” and anticipated the revolution that, more than twenty years later, made explicit the connection between biology, cognitive science and the social sciences.

In many ways, Jim's thinking and writing was in advance of his time, but his intellectual contribution aside, he left a strong mark on his many students and colleagues who greatly appreciated his creativity, wry wit, and invariable interpersonal sensitivity. He will be remembered as one of the pioneers of the effort, now in full flower, to bring Biology into the social sciences but also—and perhaps even more lasting—as a great teacher, colleague and friend.

— John M. Orbell , Professor Emeritus, Institue of Cognitive and Decision Science, University of Oregon and Roshani Cari Shay, Professor Emeritus, Western Oregon University

Irving Louis Horowitz

Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University, and founder of Transaction Publishers, passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 21, 2012.

He died following complications related to emergency heart surgery on February 26. Born in 1929 in New York City, he received a BSS from New York's City College, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires, followed by a post doctoral fellowship at Brandeis University. At his death, he was Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University. Dr. Horowitz was also chairman of the board and editorial director of Transaction Publishers and chairman of the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

Dr. Horowitz's academic career was long and varied, beginning with an associate professorship at the University of Buenos Aires and then at Bard College. He was chairman of the sociology department at Hobart and William Smith College, before moving on to Washington University in St. Louis in 1963, where he was instrumental in the founding of Transaction magazine, which later became Society. In 1969, he joined the graduate faculty of Rutgers University, where he served as chairman of the Livingston College sociology department until 1973. In 1979 he was named the Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as a visiting professor at numerous universities throughout the world and was a member of many professional associations, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Horowitz received many awards for his contributions to public life.

He was a prolific writer. Dr. Horowitz's first published work (in 1952) was in philosophy, and his first book was The Renaissance Philosophy of Giordano Bruno. He has published nearly 50 books, many of which appeared in translation and multiple editions, as well as hundreds of articles and essays. Subjects ranged from political theory (Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason, recently reissued, and Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology) to academic affairs and public policy (The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, Ideology and Utopia in the United States) to publishing (Communicating Ideas, Publishing as a Vocation). He edited eleven volumes of Cuban Communism and is widely regarded as the authoritative voice on the subject. Dr. Horowitz's most recent work, just published, is Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative. Three major articles will be published in the next few months, including a major article addressing his relationship with and assessment of C. Wright Mills. The article will be published in the July 2012 issue of Contemporary Sociology, the book review journal of the American Sociological Association.

Howard Schneiderman, Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College, noted, “Irving Louis Horowitz was wary of all ideologies. He was a liberal of the old sort, when liberalism was a philosophical position found midway between fascism on the Right, and communism, on the Left. In his own writing he favored freedom over dictatorship, democracy over fascism and communism, and rational policy-making over ideological positioning on the Left and the Right.”

Irving Louis Horowitz left two major institutions that he was instrumental in creating and developing: Transaction Publishers, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, now entering its 15th year. He was chairman of the board and editorial director of Transaction. His letters and papers dating back to the founding of Transaction have been contributed to the Paterno Libraries of The Pennsylvania State University as The Irving Louis Horowitz Transaction Publishers Archives.

David Riesman called Dr. Horowitz, “simply a national treasure.” William Form, former editor of the American Sociological Review, has lauded him for “making a larger contribution to fundamental theory in social development and political sociology than any individual in the profession.” Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, noted that “the empire of truth and information that Transaction has built is a tremendous accomplishment.” The founder of The Free Press, Jeremiah Kaplan, identified Horowitz as “one of the most eminent social science publishers of our time.”

“As a publisher and editor,” Professor Schneiderman noted, “Irving Horowitz emphasized the truth and value of an author's work no matter what that person's values were, and as long as the research and writing met the highest standards of scholarship.”

Tom Radko, editor of The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, publisher liaison and general manager of Choice magazine, and Transaction Publishers Board member, said, “I have worked with words and books my entire professional life, but in a moment of profound loss, I am rendered speechless. It's not that the words don't come; it's that they cannot adequately express how significant a loss this means to me personally and to the scholarly publishing community as a whole.”

Dr. Horowitz is survived by his wife, Mary Curtis Horowitz. Mary is also the president of Transaction Publishers.

“Transaction is Irving's legacy, and now mine as well,” said Mary. “We are going to maintain and build Transaction, and continue publishing important books in social science, as he would have wanted.”

Mary has asked that gifts in lieu of flowers be made to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City or the Rutgers University Foundation. A memorial service will be held at a later date, and information will be provided well in advance.

—Mindy Waiser, Transactions Publishers

Felix E. Oppenheim

Felix E. Oppenheim, professor emeritus of political Ssience at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, distinguished scholar of political philosophy, died peacefully on October 28, 2011, in Amherst, Massachusetts, at age 98. Born June 14, 1913 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, he lived a remarkably full and fruitful life. He leaves his beloved wife of 62 years, Shulamith, and three children (Daniel, Claire, and Paul), seven grandchildren, and a great grandchild.

He leaves, as well, a significant contribution to philosophical discourse and the fond memory and deep respect of colleagues. Prof. Oppenheim studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, and held the Docteur en Droit from the University of Brussels (1938) and the PhD in Political Science from Princeton University (1942). He taught at the University of Delaware (1946–57), was a visiting faculty member in Philosophy at Yale University (1951–52), Research Associate in Philosophy at Stanford University (1954–55), Visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University (1960), faculty member at the New School for Social Research (1960–61), Visiting Professor of Political Science at Amherst College (1963–64), Visiting Professor at Instituto di Scienze Politiche of the University of Turin (1965), Visiting Professor of Government at Columbia University (1967), Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford (1970), and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst from 1961 until his retirement in 1983.

Oppenheim's published works included books: Dimensions of Freedom (1961) (Italian trans. 1964); Moral Principles in Political Philosophy (1968) (Italian trans. 1971) (Spanish trans. 1975); Political Concepts: A Reconstruction (1981). He published many journal articles, including “Outline of a Logical Analysis of Law,” Philosophy of Science, (1944) and “Rational Choice,” The Journal of Philosophy (1953) and analyses of Italian and of Belgian politics. In APSR he published “Relativism, Absolutism and Democracy” (1950), “Interpersonal Freedom and Freedom of Action” (1955), “The Natural Law Thesis: Affirmation or Denial?” (1957), “Degrees of Power and Freedom” (1960), “Instrumental Values and Ultimate Goals” (1962), “Defense of Noncognitivism Defended” (1971). He also published articles in other political science journals, for example, Public Opinion Quarterly, The Review of Politics, The Western Political Quarterly, The Journal of Politics, World Politics, and Political Theory. Among philosophy journals in which he published were: Philosophy of Science, The Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, The Philosophy Forum, and Ethics. He contributed essays to edited volumes by Sigmund Neumann, Carl J. Friedrich, Sidney Hook, Polsby and Greenstein, Brian Barry, and others. In 2001 Macmillan published Ian Carter and Mario Ricciardi, eds., Freedom, Power and Political Morality: Essays for Felix Oppenheim. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship (1956–57), a Fulbright Lectureship in Florence (1968, 1978), and appointments in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Bellagio Study and Conference Center.

In a memoir written in 1993, Felix recalled his “unhappy youth” growing up in Frankfurt, where many of his teachers could not reconcile themselves to Germany's having lost the war—he entered the Gymnasium in 1922. He was subjected to “virulent nationalism, militarism, and (in a more hidden way) anti-Semitism. The elements of the Nazi ideology were all there…” His mother was Belgian, and he spoke French fluently, which his classmates resented. He learned a love of Italy, starting with his first trip to Florence at age 15, presaging his later close ties to Turin University. In 1931 he began law studies, which “did not interest me at all, but I agreed that there was no future in philosophy.” When the Nazis came to power, a decree excluded Jews from university studies, so Felix moved to Brussels and, as the son of a Belgian mother, became a Belgian citizen. He entered law studies at the University of Brussels (of which his maternal grandfather had been Recteur), though still uninterested in the law. In 1938 he became docteur en droit, but never practiced law—he was immediately called to military service.

In 1940, as a Belgian soldier, Felix became a German prisoner of war. He and the other “Flemish speakers” (in truth he was a French speaker and a Jew) were released after some months to live under German occupation (in Brussels). He escaped to France, then Spain, then Portugal, then a 12-day stormy crossing to the United States, then to Princeton, where his parents were living, and where they became a center for gatherings of European refugee intellectuals, including A. Einstein. There he entered Princeton as a PhD candidate. His dissertation was an application of logical analysis to legal thinking. In June 1942 he was awarded his PhD, by which time he had been drafted into the American army (to parallel his Brussels experience of diploma plus army four years earlier). As a soldier, he was able to become a naturalized citizen. After some odd assignments, he was placed in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, in the Western European section, to do analysis concerning Belgium. Then he was assigned to London, later to Paris, then for a year (1944—45) to liberated Brussels. There he had high level responsibilities (including dealing with the Belgian Prime Minister), during “one of the most interesting [years] in my life.” Friends called him “l'oeil de Washington” in Belgium. Five years after his first arrival, he returned to the United States at the very end of 1945.

Felix Oppenheim's memoir ends with his starting “ a ‘normal’ life, becoming successively professor, husband, father, and—last but not least—grandfather.” The good paterfamilias!

What of his scholarship? In their festschrift for Felix, Ian Carter and Mario Ricciardi write of his “patience and intellectual honesty” in more than 50 years of writing “numerous articles and four books devoted to the analysis of fundamental political concepts like freedom, equality, power and interests, to metaethics applied to political issues, and to international relations.” Clearly they admire a lifetime of work of “logical analysis and conceptual reconstruction.”

Oppenheim has written that “an adequate empirical language is a fundamental requirement for the resolution of both empirical and normative problems.” And Giulio Petri has said of Oppenheim's project that it “does not aim to construct a political theory, but only a suitable vocabulary for a theory… that aspires to be scientific, rational and empirical.” Norberto Bobbio, analyzing Oppenheim's position, insists on subtle distinctions from theories to which others see kinship (such as logical positivism), but finds that Oppenheim does hold that “there is a distinction between descriptive and normative concepts, and thus between facts and values.”

Oppenheim insists that his writings are not works of logical positivism, radical empiricism, or behaviorism. In his “Afterthoughts” to the festschrift, he explains: “I have attempted to reconstruct some of the basic political concepts—that is, to provide them with descriptive definitions in order to make them available for fruitful communication even among persons or groups with different normative views.” He does, however, insist on “the separability of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ on the conceptual level.” He sought to reconstruct key concepts, in light of his “objection against normative definitions of political concepts.” George Kateb, a friend who quite evidently disagrees with elements of Oppenheim's project, writes with deep respect of his “rigour in the pursuit of clarity” and “open-mindedness, despite strongly held views.” Kateb emphasizes “the passionate austerity of Felix's mode of writing; his commitment to getting things right at whatever cost… commitment to human well-being through precise thinking and the avoidance of muddle, rhetoric, propaganda, and wishful thinking.” And Amrita Basu writes that he “represented the best of Political Science in his refusal to be disciplined by our field,” for he was “as much a student of political philosophy as of international relations,” “equally at home in European and North American scholarly circles.”

Which opens a view of Felix Oppenheim, the man. Felix was not a dry, value-free person. Basu noted “his outrage against the abuses of power and a commitment to human freedom.” And Mark Kesselman observed that, while Felix's “commitment to analytical rigor” was apparent in his writing, knowing him personally revealed “his deep passion for truth and for lively conversation.” Also, his “utter disgust with hypocrisy, cant, or futile moralizing,” his inspiring “ability to combine rigor and passion.” Felix's profound knowledge of great music, art, architecture and literature, and his deep love of traveling, especially in Italy. He was a highly cultured human being, not just an intellect. Every spring from the time he retired in 1983, until he was close to 94, he taught and lectured at numerous Italian universities(in Italian!) including University of Florence, Rome, Bologna, Pavia, Salerno, Siena, and Milano. For Felix this period was the joy of his retirement years and his teaching career.

William Taubman has commented on Felix's love of good conversation, writing of “countless stimulating hours, from a perch on his lawn” discussing current events. To these discussions Felix brought “not only the wisdom of a philosopher, but the worldliness … of a man whose life spanned most of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, who encountered Nazism first-hand in Europe and watched Communism rise and fall while in America, who knew (really knew) right from wrong, but also knew how hard and complicated it is to do what's right in the world.” Similarly, Pavel Machala wrote of “Felix's sharp comments about an inexhaustible range of subjects,” and his “precise, clear judgment and his calm realism.” And Felix's former colleague, Jean Elshtain, characterized him as a gentleman, always “a kind and genuine interlocutor who liked to keep discussions going” toward a shared understanding, free of the “political madness” that, he thought, threatens us without precise definitions of terms. “If any man embodied the notion of ‘a gentleman and a scholar,’ it was Felix Oppenheim,” Carlo Robertson wrote. “As he aged Felix was a model for us all,” he concluded.

A fine person, a major political scientist, wise and witty to the end, even as body declined. Vigorous and determined, but gentle and modest, this good man surmounted serious challenges and lived an admirable life. Not only a was his life one of productive scholarship, but one marked by a joie de vivre evident to all who had the privilege of knowing and working with Felix Oppenheim.

—Lewis C. Mainzer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Howard L. Reiter

Howard L. Reiter, who spent 35 years as a well-known and highly respected political science professor at the University of Connecticut—including five years as department head—died at his home on January 10, 2012, following a long illness. He was 66.

I knew Howard for a very long time. I considered him a close friend and an extraordinary intellect. His insight and his creativity came across uncompromisingly in his published work. Selecting the President (1985) was a revelation in its tracing of the etiology and its interpretation of the significance of the party reform movement, a subject of direct interest to me. Counter Revolution (2011), co-authored with Jeffrey M. Stonecash, explored and explained the more incremental, less appreciated realignment of the northeastern states in a movement that paralleled changes in the South.

Howard published a wide range of articles, each of importance in its own right and each models of social science inquiry on the one hand and on another, each implicitly dealing with concerns basic to an understanding of democratic operations. Howard was gifted!

Perhaps most revealing of his approach to political questions can be found in an unusual setting, the introduction to the extraordinary analytic overview found in his Parties and Elections in Corporate America, 2nd ed. (1993). His conception he said was “radically” different from others who wrote on the same subject. His book, he wrote “ …begins with the premise that the American system is fundamentally flawed, that other systems would better serve the needs of the American people, and that the kind of party system we have is a major element of that flawed system.” He goes on: “It is a radical approach, and I make no apologies for it.” (XI) As for the “objectivity” and “neutrality” prized in the social services? Howard felt it did not exist.

I believe the essence of the man and arguably of his contributions is caught in this statement. He had an exceptional intelligence, an analytic ability to see beyond the immediate and the creativity to produce for our benefit writings of fundamental importance to an understanding of the operations, and alternatives, to the existing arrangement of democratic institutions.

—William Crotty, Northeastern University

I first met Howard shortly after I came to Boston, fresh out of grad school, some two decades ago. I was new to the area, new to teaching, and still quite new to political science. At some point (it must have been sometime in 1994), several of us – including David Hart and Dan Kryder – initiated an informal colloquium of Boston-area faculty focused on American politics and American political development. I can't remember exactly how Howard became involved. He was not a regular participant; his location in Connecticut did not allow for that. But we became fast friends from the start.

As a junior colleague, I looked up to Howard. It wasn't just his mastery of the field, or his amazing recall of stories, witticisms, events, and literature. It was, I think, his gentle and encouraging demeanor – combined with a sharp wit, generally aimed at himself. I recall asking Howard shortly after we met whether he was tenured at UConn (you can see what occupied my mind in those days). Yes, he responded, “they're stuck with me.”

I have been re-reading old email correspondence with Howard. What I see are emails from me to Howard asking his advice on various subjects and feedback on various pieces I have written. And from Howard: a stream of sage advice on what to read, on what such-and-such means, and on how to parse my words more carefully. Among other things, Howard was a grammar maven. He saved me from many embarrassments —a source of mirth for both of us.

Unfortunately, I have only several years of emails on my hard drive, which means that our correspondence is consumed with discussions about my mother's bout with cancer and then —coterminously—Howard's bout with cancer. What strikes me in these e-mails is his care for me, as I attempted to come to terms with my mother's demise, and his courageous and always modest struggle with the disease. I remember how our phone conversations became more difficult, as he began to lose his extraordinary acuity of mind. I remember when he had to cancel a trip to Boston last summer, by reason of a sudden onset of symptoms. I remember the page on his cancer blog that never got updated—Sunday, June 26, 2011, Sojourn at the Hugs. The sight of that page makes me so sad.

It is hard for me to reckon with the fact that my e-mails to Howard will no longer be returned. There will be no more “Regards, Howard.” But his e-mails will remain forever on my hard-drive. That is a twenty-first century way of saying that I will never forget him.

—John Gerring, Boston University

I was lucky to work with Howard on one book. That experience told me a great deal about what a knowledgeable and humble man he was.

Two experiences in particular were revealing. We met at an APSA meeting to explore the possibility of doing an analysis of change within the Northeast. I had read Howard's work for some time and felt more than a little intimidated by his depth of historical knowledge relative to mine. After some discussion we both realized that an analysis would have to cover over a century to convey the full range of change that had occurred. That prompted me to confess my unease with my historical knowledge. At that point Howard made one of the more generous and gracious statements I have ever heard from an accomplished academic. He said: “Look, I know a lot but tend to include too much and write too much. You write shorter books like I want to write. You ride herd on me about relevance and length and I'll fill in history when we feel like it is necessary.” It was a humble statement from an accomplished individual who was still interested in learning more about the craft of writing. As we progressed he did just what he had said, reviewing drafts and carefully suggesting historical events that I needed to include and responding to suggestions to shorten some sections. His focus on what we wanted to achieve and lack of ego were impressive.

While working on the book I was doing research on the dissent within the Republican Party as conservatives began to dominate during the 1960s. As I read the newsletters of the Ripon Society I became aware that Howard had written a great deal for the Society. His arguments were important expressions of the moderate unease about where the party was going. In my draft of that section I included quotes from him from the newsletters. I then sent him the draft. Much to my surprise when I got them back the material involving him had disappeared. After I figured out what was missing I insisted that most of it be included. In our conversations I realized that he just didn't want to call attention to himself. Again, I realized what a humble scholar he was. His goal was the story and he wanted as little attention on any role he played as possible. The experience with Howard was rewarding and instructive about the need to set aside your own ego. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with him.

—Jeff Stonecash, Syracuse University

A proper accounting of any academic career must recognize the others it gave birth to and nurtured. In this regard, Howard Reiter's was prolific. Many graduate students (like me) who knocked nervously on Howard's office door seeking advice during their first week at UConn left several years later a carefully tended Reiter product.

But Howard did not really care about quantity. He was more concerned with quality and the value he added. As an advisor, he spent hours with each of us individually, gently encouraging us to the completion of our graduate studies and into our careers. He had counsel for any situation—drawn from what a fellow mentee called his “magical advisor's utility belt.” As a teacher he was the greatest of motivators because you wanted to be like him. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics and told its stories beautifully, adding a nice sprinkle of his dry sense of humor for good measure. Later, as a colleague, his integrity and respect for the profession made you proud to be a part of this community of scholars. His influence on me was profound and, given that I am just one of many, his mark on Americanists' corner of the discipline surely equally so.

Howard had little time for inflated egos and pomposity. He went about his work quietly, but effectively and with great joy. For those of us who sometimes take ourselves a little too seriously, thinking of Howard is a nice reminder of the right way to do political science.

—Andrew J. Taylor, North Carolina State University

A renowned scholar of American political parties, Howard Reiter published seminal works on presidential nominations and factionalism. His early work, Selecting the President: The Nomination Process in Transition, was named one of Choice Magazine's outstanding academic books in 1986–87. Throughout his career, he published several articles on party factionalism for such respected journals as Political Science Quarterly and Party Politics. Most recently, he co-authored with Jeffrey M. Stonecash Counter Realignment: Political Change in the Northeastern United States (Cambridge University Press, 2011). In recognition of his substantial scholarly achievements, Reiter was named President of the New England Political Science Association in 2010 and held the post until 2011.

After earning his PhD from Harvard University in 1974, Reiter joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut and served as chair from 2003–08. Retiring in 2009, Reiter was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus. Reiter sat on several undergraduate honors thesis and graduate dissertation committees. Committed to mentoring students, Reiter served as an exemplary role model. With a rare combination of intellectual brilliance, humility and wit, Reiter was able to motivate his students to perform at their full potential and to ignite their intellectual curiosity. No matter what a student's interest might be, Reiter had an uncanny knack for identifying from memory the precise reference with which to begin research.

To both his teaching and research, Reiter brought compassion. He cared deeply about his impact on students and took advantage of his interactions with them to contribute to their intellectual and personal development. Committed to a more progressive society, Reiter exemplified the ideal of a public scholar. He was a frequent contributor to the newspaper's editorial page and local television news. His loss, while felt most painfully to those who knew him, will be of great significance to the discipline of political science and the greater public.

—Julie Walsh, American International College

We have lost an esteemed colleague and scholar on American politics with the passing of Howard Reiter. For years, Howard's scholarship on the history, structure, and activities of political parties helped define the field and provided insight into the evolving nature of the US political system.

Like others, I relied on Howard's work to keep me up to speed on the literature, to discern trends in the organization and operation of partisan movements, and to evaluate the political system's contribution to democratic elections and governance. His writings sparkled with clarity, careful, cogent analysis, and keen vision.

I knew Howard for many years professionally before I had the opportunity to get to know him personally. In 2007, I participated on the APSA's People-to-People visit to China. Howard and his wife Laura were also on the trip. My wife and I really enjoyed their company. There, I saw another side of Howard: warm, caring, and fun to be with, a great conversationalist, self-effacing, a person who obviously enjoyed life.I will miss him but feel privileged for having known him.

—Stephen J. Wayne, Georgetown University

Howard Reiter was a great scholar and wonderful colleague —the all too rare member of our profession who deeply valued pursuing important political questions intrepidly with a group of scholars who shared his interest and greatly valued his friendship. He was one of the few people I have met during my three decades as a political scientist who demonstrated that academic community is not an oxymoron.

I first met Howard at the 1985 APSA meeting in New Orleans. We were the discussants on a panel on party development, where we forged personal and academic ties that would persist until Howard lost his courageous struggle with cancer. I was anxious to meet this fellow Reiter, who was most familiar to me as a member of the National Governing Board of the progressive GOP auxiliary, the Ripon Society. I wanted to express my gratitude for a 1970 essay he published in Commonweal that shed fascinating light on Richard Nixon's “purge” of the liberal Republican Senator Charles Goodell in the Senate elections of that year; Nixon's decisive support of Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, Reiter presciently observed, foretold of the “party takeover…of Conservative Republicans that Goldwater urged.” The fellow I met in New Orleans had traveled quite a distance from the champion of the Ripon Society I cited in my early work on presidents and parties. He had just published a highly regarded book on the presidential nomination process and begun a long rewarding career at the University of Connecticut. But Howard's political roots were still evident in his love for politics and his insight that the maneuvers within parties were as fascinating and important as the dynamics between. These were the qualities that distinguished his impressive scholarship.

I had the opportunity to witness the full extent of Howard's mastery of intraparty struggles during his visit to UVA's Miller Center in March, 2006. I had invited him to give a colloquium on his ambitious project on party factionalism, a long march through nominating conventions from the Jacksonians through contemporary developments in the Democratic and Republican parties. After introducing Howard, I sat and watched – with awe and delight – a typical Reiter tour de force. With attention to data he had meticulously gathered, Howard engaged academics and interested members of the Charlottesville community with carefully rendered details of the Whigs fighting over slavery, Democrats struggling over Jim Crow and the welfare state, and Republicans battling to determine whether it would remain a big tent or a cathedral of conservatism that defied pragmatic adjustments to a large diverse electorate. Gently pushing back against the tough questions of a skeptical audience, Howard won us over to his argument, rooted, I suspect, in his days as a Ripon Society stalwart, that intraparty factions are aroused not by petty squabbles but, rather, by fundamental disagreements about what the parties should stand for.

I cannot fathom that Howard is gone. That we will no longer have dinner and share our obsession with party politics and political history, that I will not be able to hear him hold forth on Mitt Romney's travails in winning over true believers, that my work will no longer benefit from his unfailing tough love – the constructive challenging questions that only someone of Howard's kindness and perspicacity could ask. I feel very fortunate to have known him all these years, but will miss him all the more for having enjoyed his warm friendship and wise counsel.

—Sidney M. Milkis, University of Virginia

Note: A similiar In Memoriam piece is published in the New England Journal of Political Science

David Morris Welborn

David Morris Welborn of Knoxville, Tennessee, passed away on the Friday afternoon of October 14, 2011. At the time of his death Professor Welborn had been retired for 15 years from the University of Tennessee where he had been honored with the prestigious title of Emeritus Professor.

Professor Welborn was born in Cooksville, Texas in 1934, and grew up in Paris, Texas. He graduated from Paris Junior College in 1953 and received his BA degree from the University of Texas in 1956, and his PhD degree from the University of Texas,Austin in 1962.

Welborn served on the faculties of Indiana University (1959–61), Texas Tech University (1962–64), and Northern Illinois University (1966–67). He served as Intergovernmental Relations Advisor for the Federal Water Pollution Control Board at the U.S. Department of the Interior (1967–68). Welborn then joined the faculty at the University of Kansas (1969–72) before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee in 1973 where he remained throughout the remainder of his life. During his distinguished career, he served as president of the Southwestern Political Science Association, as a congressional fellow of the American Political Science Association, and as a public policy fellow for the American Society for Public Administration. Two years after he retired in 1996 he was named by the University of Tennessee as a faculty member who had “attained distinction and recognition, both within and beyond the University of Tennessee, for scholarship and public service.” He served on the Advisory Committee of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy even after his official retirement. In this capacity, he coordinated a major research project for the Center that focused on party leadership in the US Senate during Baker's service as Republican leader. That project involved conducting nearly four hundred interviews with Baker and people who worked with Baker, for Baker, or were somehow affiliated with Baker including those involved in Baker's campaigns for election or reelection. Welborn received other numerous professional honors and awards during his career and published numerous academic books, including Regulation in the White House (1993), Intergovernmental Relations in the American Administrative State (1989, with Jesse Burkhead), Regulatory Policy and Processes in the States (1980, with Anthony E. Brown), and Governance of Federal Regulatory Agencies (1977). Welborn also published numerous peer-reviewed articles in some of the most respected political science and public administration journals including, among others, Public Administration Review, Public Administration Quarterly, Administration and Society, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Journal of Public Law, State Government, and Publius. He also contributed chapters and excerpts to books such as Administrative Law (1966, edited by Walter Gelhorn and Clark Byse). If there was a theme that could tie all or most of these works together it is that the sometimes asserted dichotomy between politics and administration is a false one. There is no and can be no administration sans politics. Moreover, Welborn demonstrated that a president's activities (particularly those of Lyndon Johnson) included the molding and supervision of regulation as a major component. In addition, his 1988 article in the journal Publius outlined a model of federalism, called “conjoint federalism” that is arguably still in effect today. In the article, Welborn asserted that state actions were more nationally controlled than under previous models of intergovernmental relations, such as cooperative federalism and, further, that conjoint arrangements are a more realistic means for attacking problems such as environmental problems. Welborn's curriculum vitae entries for conference papers, research grants, awards, and public service activities are far too numerous to recite here without leaving a dearth of space to describe the man and his effect on those who spent time with him which was invariably positive and indelible.

On a personal note, it was the fall of 1989 when a much intimidated student (that being me) entered the graduate program in political science at the University of Tennessee with the short-term goal of earning a Master's degree and the long-term goal of obtaining a doctoral degree. I arrived at the first meeting of my first seminar a little early to get comfortable and hoping to see other beginning students just as anxiety-ridden as myself. Unfortunately for me, this did not occur as most of the students that arrived had already been in the program for a year or more. The instructor had a reputation for having very high expectations of students, especially graduate students, whom he expected to come to class having read and understood all assigned material so that they could make a substantive contribution to the seminar. In fact, he had been known for calling students out in front of the class and chastising them for not having read the assignments or for not being fully prepared to discuss the topics, but never in a mean way. This was running through my mind when Welborn strode into the class wearing a suit and one of his signature bowties. He began to speak with a Texas-bred dialect in a voice that carried well throughout the hallways of the building where the political science department was located. Although the more experienced students dominated discussions during that initial term, he never let me or anyone else off the hook.

There is one incident in particular that I shall recount, though by doing so I risk the potential criticism that I have made this memorial more about myself than my mentor. It will help readers who have never had the pleasure to meet him to get a clearer picture of the man and the effect he had on those under his tutelage. One semester during my second year in the program I was so overwhelmed by responsibilities that I came to one of his classes without having read the assigned material. I walked through the classroom door with a healthy dose of paranoia. At one point, as I feared, Welborn asked me a pointed question about the author's intent from one of the assigned readings. I offered a response that was one hundred percent guesswork. To my great relief, I was correct and Welborn said so as he went on to tie that article to the conclusions drawn from another article. I never told him about my lack of preparation that day, even though we eventually developed a close working and personal relationship. The reason for my not admitting to him at that time that I had not read the assigned material, aside from the natural embarrassment that I would have felt from a verbal reprimand in front of my peers, was the same reason for not confessing it to him years later when it no longer mattered. I did not want to disappoint him. This is what I mean by the positive and indelible effect he had on his students. He certainly had had that kind of effect on me. He made us want to learn and not just pass the course. That was the only time I ever went to his or any other instructor's seminar unprepared. I went on to take several of his courses, partly because some were in my chosen concentrations and partly because I had grown comfortable with his approach in his seminars. In fact, I added the field of public administration to my fields of study specifically because of Welborn. He had shown me how a discipline many consider boring was relevant to pretty much all other disciplines, at least those related to political science.

Eventually I selected Welborn to be the chair of my Master's thesis committee. During that process, he encouraged me to apply for early admission into the doctoral program. Consequently, I did not have to complete the thesis and would receive the Master's degree upon my completion of the PhD comprehensive exams. Regardless, I chose to complete my MA thesis under his supervision which was on the subject of intergovernmental relations during the 1980s. I mention the topic here because my later intention was to eventually expand it into a dissertation. This plan would have accelerated completion of my doctoral degree so that I could finally get out into the “real world” and begin my career in academia. I had already chosen Dr. Welborn to serve as the chair of my dissertation committee when, God love him, he totally wrecked my plans. That requires a bit of exposition.

Former Senate majority leader Howard Baker (who also later served as Ronald Reagan's chief of staff) donated his professional papers to the University of Tennessee at about the time I was finishing up my thesis. Professor Welborn was put in charge of the Howard Baker Oral History project, which had been founded to complement the donation of the professional papers. One day soon after, Welborn saw me in the hallway outside the political science office and asked me to step around into his office. It at first felt a little like being called into a principal's office when he began speaking, “Eric, I would like you to do your dissertation on party leadership in the U.S. Senate.” I began to tell him of my desire to expand my Master's thesis into a dissertation and the reasons for my wanting to do so (essentially to get the heck out of there). His response was, “Eric that is a most excellent idea.” But he continued, “Eric, I would like you to do your dissertation on party leadership in the U.S. Senate.” And that was that.

Despite the delay this change in direction caused, I trusted that Welborn's supervision would ensure that my dissertation would be a superior product than that I may have produced with another committee chair. This belief was later vindicated because, despite my getting draft chapters back from him with the margins filled with suggested edits, or perhaps because of it, I became a much better writer. I am certain that I speak for all of his former students whose theses and dissertations he supervised when I say Welborn's tutelage made his other students better researchers and scholars. I still communicate with some of them and they have told me they felt the same way.

I stayed in touch with my mentor over the years following my graduation in 1996, the year he retired from the University of Tennessee. He often called me to chat, which I feel speaks to his dedication to students to whom he had no more formal obligations. He often asked me about some of the other students he had lost contact with for some reason or other. After I left graduate school he insisted that I call him “David” and would chastise me whenever I accidentally reverted to using the more formal “Dr. Welborn.” Indeed, he would make me repeat “David” over the phone several times in a row to help me get used to it and to assure me that it was his sincere preference. I always enjoyed our conversations because he usually gave me the inside scoop from things he learned from his direction of the Baker Oral History project. They were fascinating, informative, and often amusing stories, indeed, and the information he gave could not be gleaned just by reading the transcripts or even by merely listening to the recordings…especially times when the tape recorder had been turned off.

One could say his career did not truly end until March of 2010 when David called me and asked me to take the materials from the Baker project off his hands and fulfill his intention of editing the interviews and eventually writing a book about congressional leadership. In his words, he could no longer “do the heavy lifting.” I eagerly agreed to do it and drove from Las Vegas to Knoxville in my pickup truck. On my way toward Knoxville to his home to pick up the materials I had a lot of time to reflect on our relationship and I began to understand what was on his mind when he asked me to take over the project. After helping me to hone research and scholarly abilities, his frequently expressed confidence in me over the years had forced me to develop confidence in myself and that, in my view, led to ever more skills and abilities. Once back at my own home in Las Vegas, I began editing the Baker interviews. I often called David to inquire about some comment or recounted event from one or more of the interviews. I generally saved up at least a few questions before I would call him so that I would not pester him with each question as they occurred to me. I loved getting his responses because they reflected a wealth of knowledge far beyond the words of the interviewee. David frequently added “context” of which I was usually unaware.

I had a few questions saved up for him in the fall of 2011 when the devastating news came. My mentor and good friend had passed away. It felt like a punch in the gut. Whenever I had talked to David on the phone his voice and dialect reminded me of my grad school days. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I could no longer call on him, or he I, to just catch up or chat, often about a televised tennis tournament that happened to be getting broadcast at the time. He loved tennis and well into the 1990s he was known to beat opponents far younger than himself.

As I write these words, I sincerely hope that readers do not conclude that I somehow made this memorial about me. I offered the description of personal encounters to make the point I felt most compelled to make, which is that David had, I am sure, the same effect on each of the students whom he considered a “serious student,” most especially those whose Master's thesis or doctoral dissertation he agreed to supervise over the years. Many of us now have careers in academia which, despite David's impressive vitae, perhaps makes us his most important professional legacy. In relating a couple of personal stories, I sincerely hope I have communicated something about David Welborn, the man, as well as the scholar and teacher.

—William Eric Davis, College of Southern Nevada

James Q. Wilson

James Q. Wilson's death on March 2, 2012, made news. Scores of articles about Wilson appeared within days after the 80-year-old's passing. There was a front-page story in the New York Times. There were stories in The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and nearly every other major US newspaper. There were also essays in The Economist, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and many other magazines; reflections by Russ Douthat, George Will, and many other leading syndicated columnists; postings by think-tank leaders and big-time bloggers; and statements by present and former public officials in both parties.

As might be expected, the extensive public coverage of Wilson's death included partial outlines of his academic biography: In 1959, he received his doctoral degree in political science from the University of Chicago. He held endowed chair professorships at Harvard (1961–1987), UCLA (1987–1997), and Pepperdine (1998–2009), and a final post as a Distinguished Scholar at Boston College. Harvard and a half-dozen other universities bestowed honorary degrees on him. He won numerous major academic awards including ones from the American Political Science Association (the Charles E. Merriam Award in 1977; the James Madison Award in 1990; the association presidency in 1991; and the John Gaus Award in 1994), the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (the Bruce Smith Award), and the Policy Studies Organization (the Harold Laswell Award). He held board chairmanships, memberships, directorships, or academic advisory group leadership positions with, among other institutions, the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He authored or co-authored 17 books, including 13 editions of an American government textbook that, all told, sold more than a million copies. He also penned or co-penned several edited volumes and several hundred articles, a corpus that stretched from academic outlets like Administrative Science Quarterly to policy journals like The Public Interest and magazines like The Atlantic, plus scores of op-eds in leading newspapers.

Predictably, most of the public coverage that followed his passing, even the parts of it that included personal reminiscences or that quoted people who knew him, was mainly about Wilson the eminent and influential public intellectual. That is, it was about the Wilson who Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his friend and former Harvard Department of Government colleague, famously described to President Richard M. Nixon as “the smartest man in America.” It was about the Wilson who began adult life as a Denver-born Democrat, became a California-residing Republican, and, though rightly regarded as a political conservative (and a 2006 winner of the conservative Bradley Foundation Prize), served both Democratic and Republican officeholders, including six US presidents, as an advisor. It was about the Wilson who was the chairperson of President Lyndon Johnson's White House Task Force on Crime, the chairperson of President Nixon's National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention, and a member of many other public commissions or blue-ribbon bodies, including the President's Foreign Policy Intelligence Board in the 1980s, the President's Council on Bioethics in the 2000s, the Police Foundation's Board of Directors (1973–93 as its chairperson), the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation (right up to his passing), and many others. It was about the fraction of Wilson's ideas about crime, bureaucracy, regulation, and other matters, most notably his and Rutgers University criminologist George Kelling's “broken windows” thesis (ignoring minor crimes or public disorders often leads to more serious crimes and contributes to neighborhood decline), that had won wide public attention, influenced public policy, and affected public administration. It was about the Wilson who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 and was cited by President George W. Bush as “the most influential political scientist in America since the White House was home to Professor Woodrow Wilson.”

Wilson the eminent and influential public intellectual was a real genius and a laudable giant, but that was not the whole of the Wilson that I was blessed to know over the last 32 years. Even greater, in my view, were Wilson the deeply good family man and neighbor-citizen, and Wilson the devoted teacher, dedicated mentor, and pure scholar.

Wilson the deeply good family man and neighbor-citizen was resurrected and celebrated in the remarks about him offered by his family members and closest friends during the April 13, 2012, memorial service held at Harvard's Memorial Church. A two-time two-person college debate champion, Jim graduated from the University of Redlands and served in the US Navy. He married his high school sweetheart, Roberta. They were happily married for nearly 60 years. He was not a conventionally religious man, but he told me more than once how he thanked God for Roberta every day.

Jim is survived by Roberta and by their two children, Matthew and Annie, by his children's spouses, by a sister, and by many grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Somehow, for all his monumentally prolific public and professional pursuits, he spent several lifetimes of quality time with his children, time that included reading all the Sunday comics to them when young, never missing an important event in their lives, and leading them on many trips abroad as well as on other adventures.

Jim was also a model neighbor and community member. For instance, he coached a local youth soccer team even though his own kids did not play in it, and he served on the board of his local library even though he had ready access to more august collections. His private heroic exploits included leaping into action to save a neighbor's young son from choking to death; he administered the Heimlich maneuver which, as with so many other things, both academic and practical, he knew (and knew what to call) before most others did.

Jim loved to share the things that he loved with his loved ones. Those things included scuba diving (he was a professional instructor) and underwater photography (he was professional grade but did it purely for pleasure). He and Roberta co-authored a book, Watching Fishes: Life and Behavior on Coral Reefs (1985). He also loved cars, fast ones. I once described him as “an open-highway patriot,” and he smiled at the description.

As Harvard's Harvey Mansfield has suggested, Jim loved the things that many average Americans love, including America itself, hot dogs, and baseball. Transplanted to Boston during his decades at Harvard, he returned there from California during the last decade or so of his life, and resumed his on-site role as an insanely devoted part of “Red Sox Nation.” He pretended (we think!) to harbor deep superstitions regarding how his watching the Red Sox, or even having his feet on Boston soil, would cause them to lose. And, or so I have heard from other political scientists, some of whom played on his team, and others of whom played against it, for a few years in the 197os, he turned what had been a fairly low-key inter-Ivy faculty softball league into something that Ty Cobb might have recognized as competitive play.

Jim was also an amazingly dedicated undergraduate and graduate student classroom teacher. He was an angel-on-the-shoulder thesis supervisor, dissertation advisor, colleague, co-author, editor, and co-editor. He loved to laugh at himself and with others, and his generosity was genuine and unfailing. The examples are endless, but to cite just a few personal favorites:

• • In 1980, on my first day as a Harvard graduate student, I went unannounced to his office. He told me that he was not planning to teach his famous Gov. 150 “bureaucracy” course that year. I expressed disappointment (or, on his embellished retelling, “I feared that this tough-looking South Philly kid was going to beat me up!”) The next thing I knew, I got a note telling me that the course was on after all.

• • In the mid-1990s, he came to the Brookings Institution for events with the public management center that I then directed there. At the time, several among his legions of adoring former graduate students were, like me, Brookings-affiliated Democrats: “Surrounded again,” he'd quip.

• • In 2001, when I was serving as the first “faith czar” in the White House, and having a rather tough time of it, Senator Moynihan would routinely check in with me and often take me to lunch; I knew that it was a kindness done at Jim's behest.

• • In 2003, when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he pushed through the VIP well-wishers to embrace and share a joke with John “Bridge” Bridgeland, a deputy assistant to the president whose Harvard senior thesis he had supervised 20 years earlier.

• • Over the last several years, he gallantly battled aggressive leukemia and other health problems. The illnesses did little to diminish his sunny outlook on life and his generosity of spirit. As near as one could ever get him to complain was to badger him into saying “I've been better, but I'm feeling just fine.”

• • One of the last things he wrote to me was a note praising Hofstra University's Meena Bose, the newest co-author of American Government: Institutions and Policies. He described Meena as a “god-send,” and her work on the twelfth and thirteenth editions as “brilliant.”

• • Just a few days before he died, though weak as a lamb, he rallied to do a conference call to thank Sue Marquis, dean of the Pardee Rand School, for establishing the James Q. Wilson Dissertation Award and the James Q. Wilson Public Policy Collection. “Overwhelmed,” he repeated.

While Jim did not eschew his status as a prominent public intellectual, he actively embraced the Talmudic precept that “the scholar takes precedence over the king.” He insisted that, even allowing for the overspecialization and methods-for-methods-sake manias that he believed had afflicted much of contemporary social science, the empirical-minded or philosophically literate intellectual (he strived to be both) who seeks only to know what may be “general, meaningful, and true” (a favorite Wilson phrase) about human behavior, politics, or government takes precedence over the policy-oriented public intellectual who purports to know how to solve or ameliorate this or that present-day public policy or administrative problem.

For all Jim's diverse intellectual interests, for all his real or perceived real-world influence, at the core of his professional and civic being he was a proudly card-carrying political scientist who always pursued knowledge more for its intrinsic than for its instrumental value. Indeed, he was supremely skeptical, and even at times slightly cynical, about what policy-oriented public intellectuals as such (often offering himself as Exhibit A) had to offer real-world public policymakers and administrators.

As I often tell students who are about to read a book by Wilson for the first time, “Don't miss the preface.” For in Negro Politics (1960), The Amateur Democrat (1961), and City Politics (1963, with Edward C. Banfield), as in many of the other books that he wrote or co-authored in the half-century thereafter, he professes that studying human behavior, politics, and government is its own justification and reward, and that no other justification or reward is or ought to be required.

To wit: In the preface to City Politics, we are cautioned that increased knowledge about city politics is unlikely to help solve urban problems. Still, such knowledge is worth pursuing because “the most intrinsically satisfying of man's activities is trying to understand the world he lives in. Politics, being one of the most difficult things to understand, is therefore particularly challenging. Responding to the challenge is, we think, its own justification and reward.” Similarly, in Varieties of Police Behavior (1968), he compares police operations in eight cities, uncovers three distinct styles of policing, and explicitly warns off readers who are seeking practical advice about how to enhance police performance or reduce crime.

In this vein, it is worth noting that it was actually not Jim but his superb “broken windows” thesis co-author, George Kelling, who in the 199os worked closely with the New York City Police Department. It was George who actively promoted the idea that police departments could be reorganized by design to effect measurable changes in what police did, how they did it, and how policing mattered to how much crime occurred within a given jurisdiction. Jim championed those policing innovations and related efforts, but, right up to his last articles on the topic, he stressed how many diverse, hard-to-manipulate, and hard-to-measure variables were “probably” or “possibly” related to inter-jurisdiction differences or fluctuations in crime rates.

By the same token, while Jim believed that, other things equal, “religion reduces crime,” in Crime and Human Nature (1985, with Richard H. Hernstein), in his 2005 Tanner Lectures at Harvard, and in another article he wrote in 2011, he emphasized that modern Japanese society, though far less religious than modern American society, yet had far less crime than American society did; that the more highly religious American South was always more violent than the less religiously observant American North; and that even the latest and best empirical and statistical research suggesting that faith-based programs cut crime were all quasi-experimental studies, many plagued by selection bias problems and other data limitations.

Many consider Jim's Bureaucracy (1989) to be his magnum opus, and I can understand why. But even in that masterful summary of the subject, he begins by telling his readers that they are unlikely to find in the book's pages any ideas that could be used to reform government agencies, let alone to make them, per the slogan later made famous by the Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” initiative, “work better and cost less.” Instead, he concludes the treatise with a “few modest proposals for reform.” As he had argued in The Investigators (1978), a book that parsed and compared bureaucratic behavior in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency, it is difficult, if not impossible, to effect meaningful changes in government agencies either from the outside in or from the top down, and any changes in agency operations made in those ways are likely to prove either precarious or perverse. But, he suggests, how intellectually satisfying it nonetheless can be to understand “what government agencies do and why they do it.”

Two books by Jim that are separated by a half decade and would seem to be on entirely different subjects are Thinking About Crime (1975) and The Politics of Regulation (1980). The former book, which argued against the sociological view that treated criminals as something other than rational actors, takes its place alongside his famous 1961 article, “Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organizations” (with Peter B. Clark) and Political Organizations (1973). Together, these three works pretty much welcome a rational choice view of complex organizations, public and private, and of human behavior, criminal and other. But, in The Politics of Regulation, an edited volume featuring chapters by many of his former graduate students, he does frank battle with rational choice theorists of bureaucracy-sort of. His concluding chapter, and his capstone statement on his view of both politics and political science, reads in part:

Jim entitled his 1988 keynote essay for the American Society of Criminology “Entering Criminology through the Back Door.” He thought of himself as having entered political science through the “front door,” and he joked about entering moral philosophy through a “trap door” that I had opened beneath him. In 1991, on the occasion of Jim's election to the APSA's presidency, I wrote an essay for PS: Political Science & Politics entitled “James Q. Wilson and Civic Virtue.” Therein I argued that “for Wilson, being a student of crime, like being a student of politics, means being a student of civic virtue or, more precisely, of the processes by which good character is or is not formed in the citizenry.”

Two years later, Jim wrote The Moral Sense (1993), kidding me that he wrote it “so as not to make you look dumb.” Essentially, the book attempts to identify the social, cultural, biological, and evolutionary bases of humanity's disposition to cooperate, cultivate kindness, and curtail cruelty. He considered that book to be the most intellectually trenchant that he ever wrote. I would not disagree.

Rather than semi-retire, from his late 6os right up to the last months before he died, he kept right on researching and writing: Essays on Character (1995); Moral Judgment (1998); and The Marriage Problem (2002). And, in recent years, he added to his corpus on American politics and government: Understanding America (2009, with Peter H. Schuck) and American Politics, Then and Now (2010).

I wrote some articles with Jim, contributed to some of his edited volumes, and had him contribute to some of mine. Best of all, with him to teach me, co-authoring the sixth through the thirteenth editions of his American government textbook was a two-decade long tutorial—and it ended too soon.

Boston College's R. Shep Melnick and the Brookings Institution's Pietro Nivola are two of the many other former graduate students who Jim held dear and who held Jim dear in turn. Though we each are rather closer to retiring than we are to beginning our respective careers, we deeply mourn Jim's loss, and we find it hard to imagine either ourselves or our field without him being among us, as ever.

Requiescat in Pace: May he rest in peace.

—John J. DiIulio, Jr., is the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-author (with James Q. Wilson and Meena Bose) of (Cengage, 2012).