| acknowledgements
I am grateful to Peter Mair, who first proposed republishing a selection of my English-language writings more than two decades ago. He had a hand in the choice of chapters and the order in which they are presented, and helped earlier with the editing of some of them. He adds to the value of this book a challenging preface, in which he contrasts two different generations of scholars working in comparative politics and cross-national analysis - a gap which in his own work he has successfully bridged.
I have been privileged to have Dario Castiglione as editor of the ECPR Classics series, who assisted in bringing this book about with great courtesy and wisdom. The chapters, drawn from different books and journals which appeared over close to forty years, were originally scanned by Saskia Rademaker, and copy-edited by Theofanis Exadaktylos. I have admired the professional manner in which Mark Kench and his staff at ECPR Press have worked in the preparation of this and many other books.
In putting together the chapters for this collection I have been reminded of the good fortune I had, as a young scholar, to come in close contact and to collaborate with outstanding political scientists such as, in order of time, Carl Friedrich, Giovanni Sartori, Wilfrid Harrison, Val R. Lorwin, Otto Kirchheimer, S.E. Finer, Stein Rokkan, Robert A. Dahl, Edward Shils, Juan Linz, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Joseph LaPalombara, Arend Lijphart, Sidney Verba, Stanley Hoffmann and Mogens Pedersen and, not to forget, the stimulus I gained from younger scholars at Leiden and the European University Institute. I wish, finally, to thank the editors of the journals and books in which the original versions of the chapters appeared, and the publishers for granting permission to reprint them in this volume.
The Hague, The Netherlands.
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