Gabriel Almond

Political scientist with chutzpah

Gabriel Abraham Almond, political scientist: born Rock Island, Illinois 12 January 1911; Research Associate, Institute of International Studies, Yale University 1947-49, Associate Professor of Political Science 1949-51, Professor of Political Science 1959-63; Associate Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University 1951-54, Professor 1954-57, Professor of Politics 1957-59; Professor of Political Science, Stanford University 1963-76 (Emeritus), Executive Head, Department of Political Science 1964-69; married 1937 Dorothea Kaufmann (died 2000; two sons, one daughter); died Pacific Grove, California 25 December 2002.

Gabriel Almond was one of the most influential figures in post-war political science. He was a pioneer of the behaviouralist approach in the subject and in the 1960s and 1970s probably the most renowned researcher on comparative politics, political development and political culture. Few politics students in Britain or the United States graduated without reading his work. In his late eighties, after major heart surgery, he still published, remained intellectually curious and supervised research students at Stanford University, California.

Almond's formative years were spent in a strict orthodox Jewish home. On the Sabbath he sat with his father studying the Old Testament, the Bible in Hebrew and studies of Judaism. That influence remained with him to the end, even though he gave up his religion. Crucial to his intellectual development were the 10 years he spent in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where he started as an undergraduate in 1928 and finished his PhD in 1938. At the time, the university was achieving an international reputation and the generosity of wealthy local families enhanced its ability to attract and retain academic stars.

Almond studied under Harold Laswell, G.H. Mead and Charles Merriam. Merriam was determined to make the study of politics into a science and encouraged quantification and, to get at the wellsprings of political behaviour, exploration of the connections between psychology, anthropology and sociology. Graduate students were expected to do field work. All this was quite novel at the time.

In three years, Almond had to work his way through university, no easy matter during the Depression. Studying in Chicago's oppressive summer humidity imposed its own burdens – sometimes the young Almond would have to immerse himself in a cold bath to read Max Weber in German. Among his fellow graduate students were Ed Shils, V.O. Key, Herbert Simon and George Stigler, all to become major influences in their disciplines of sociology, politics and economics. It is difficult to think of any other institution having such a constellation of talent in the social sciences.

At first the political-science products of Chicago were looked upon with suspicion when they took up academic appointments elsewhere, but eventually they came to dominate the discipline in the post-war years. Because the social-sciences specialisms at Chicago in the 1930s were located in one building, teachers and students were forced to mix and regard themselves as general social scientists.

Almond's first teaching appointment, one that was interrupted by war service, was at Brooklyn College. He moved to the Yale Political Science department in 1947, then to Princeton, before returning to Yale in 1959 where he remained until 1963. The Yale department was brilliant, but also turbulent, and he was happy to leave. He was headhunted by Stanford in California, another wealthy private university but which had only a middle-ranking political-science department. Almond managed to make some star appointments and greatly improved the standing of the department.

His reputation and his opportunity to make a mark on political science came with his chairmanship of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, a post he held from 1954 to 1964. The committee was in a crucial position to direct research, convene seminars and conferences, award grants and launch academic careers. It pioneered the study of political development in the new states, applying modern science theory and methods. It also generated a series of pioneering studies, published by Princeton University Press.

Almond's first books reflected the influence of Merriam and relied on survey data. The American People and Foreign Policy (1950) was a study of public opinion, and The Appeals of Communism (1953) a study of the personality of Communists. This interest grew out of his wartime work in US intelligence, which involved interviews with captured members of the German Gestapo and intelligence personnel.

There then followed work on political development in the newly independent new states in Africa and Asia and the landmark study The Civic Culture (1963), co-authored with the young Sidney Verba. The study of political culture grew out of Almond's early interest in public opinion and national character and tackled large themes. How do beliefs influence individual political behaviour and the performance of a political system? What kind of values help or hinder stable democracy? To address these questions the authors administered surveys in five countries: Britain, the United States, Mexico, West Germany and Italy in 1959 and 1960. The desired culture was one which balanced popular deference, which allowed governors the freedom to take decisions, and a participatory outlook, which set limits on the rulers. Britain emerged as the ideal of the civic culture.

The study was a remarkable feat of comparative study research and the authors produced a seminal text on political culture. It became required reading for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and educationalists as well as students of comparative politics. It also owed its impact to Almond's determination to go beyond the narrow legal and institutional approaches which had dominated political science and to compare countries.

His work was not without its critics. Attempting to facilitate comparisons between Western and non-Western societies, he developed a new set of structural-functional categories, which for a time became the rage in academic political science. Critics complained that he was doing no more than inventing a new vocabulary, e.g. "political system" for the state, or "functions" for powers. He was also charged with being ethnocentric. His models of civic culture and political development were dismissed for being too Anglo-American (he greatly admired Britain). His efforts to integrate different approaches to the study of politics also found its critics. The Oxford Professor Sammy Finer waspishly dismissed his attempt to be "the U Thant [then UN Secretary-General] of political science".

Almond admitted that he "moved relentlessly back and forth from theory to empirical research" and sought to relate his studies to the great questions of political theory. He was a learned man who sought patterns and regularities in political behaviour across time and space and who took intellectual risks in making generalisations and comparison. The Yiddish for "nerve" is "chutzpah" and he had it. He also liked to work in teams and to use case studies as a method of formulating and testing theories. An impressive product of this approach was Crisis, Choice, and Change (1973), a series of case studies in the political development of different countries.

Almond was a modest man, but in his final writings he reminded his younger scholars of how many of the so-called new insights and approaches being celebrated in the 1970s and 1980s had been anticipated by his generation years earlier. Too often they were reinventing the wheel, warned the upholder of scholarly memory. From the mid-1970s he grew increasingly worried about the costs of the emphasis on methodological rigour in American graduate schools and complained that the universities were producing too many hard-based, narrow technicians in the social sciences. Too often the new generation of academics had neither the learning nor the inclination to address significant problems:

The very investment that we must make in order to teach this level of formal theoretical and methodological rigour, in many cases reduces our capacity to use these theories and devices in confronting meaningful human problems.

He also regretted the way in which growing specialisation had led to a fragmented discipline. His A Discipline Divided (1990) examined how this sectarianism resulted in scholars "sitting at separate tables", a comment that now applies to most of the social sciences. By this stage he was one of the few who was capable of conversing with the different sects across the social sciences.

Almond's work consistently tried to synthesise traditional approaches, drawing on history and philosophy, with the new "harder" approaches, relying on mathematics and experiments. He was sceptical of monocausal approaches and the premature closure of economic models of explanation. Well before the collapse of the Soviet Union he was writing about the persistence of pre- revolutionary beliefs – liberal, ethnic and nationalist – in Eastern Europe, in spite of the systematic inculcation of Communist ideas. That looked prophetic by the time he died.

Recognition of his contributions to political science was marked by 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 the profession.

Gabriel Almond and his wife, Dorothea (a German refugee and child psychologist), were generous hosts and over the years hundreds of students and visiting academics and their families from many different nations were richly entertained at their home in Old Trace Road, Palo Alto.

Dennis Kavanagh