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State formation, parties and democracy. Studies in comparative European politics (2011)

State formation, parties and democracy. Studies in comparative European politics

(2011)–Hans Daalder–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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chapter one | introduction - my life in comparative politics

The making of a political scientist

I was born in 1928, reason enough to make one turn to the discipline of political science. My first political memory is the Reichstag fire of 1933. I had an older brother with communist sympathies, who went to the Soviet Union in the early thirties, only to return five years later with a life-long fear of the GPU (the acronym for the Soviet secret police between 1922 and 1934) and its successors. Growing up in the shadow of totalitarianism and living in my teens for five years under German occupation in the Netherlands, I learned to fear arbitrary power; all the more reason to treasure the return of democratic institutions, yet also to keep a lasting awareness of their possible fragility. And to lead also to a life-long pre-occupation with issues like: how had democracy developed? Why did democracy persist, while it broke down in other states? What political systems did different countries have, and how did they function?

When I started as a university student in 1946, there was as yet no political Science in the Netherlands. I found it difficult to choose between law and history. But then I learnt that the University of Amsterdam was to establish a new Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. Both law and history were to be part of the curriculum, but also a host of other disciplines: economics, sociology, social psychology, media studies, international law, international relations. And: political science! A major problem became the lack of co-ordination between these different subjects. Professors in charge insisted that students should reach relatively advanced levels in their own discipline. Cumulative requirements meant that fewer than 10% of the more than three hundred students who enrolled in the opening year 1947 reached the final, still pre-doctoral degree. It took them an average of nine years.

I was one of those who got through and I eventually profited from the wide range of disciplines that the programme required. I was ahead of most students, having an initial year in history already behind me, and was lucky in landing an assistantship with the first Dutch Professor of Political Science in modern times, Jan Barents. He had a doctorate in law as well as philosophy, had been a journalist and was for a short time director of the research institute of the Dutch Labour Party. He had a sharp, critical mind, was extremely well-read, and focused not only on Dutch political life, but also on international politics. He was close to the founders of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), for which he organized the first International Congress in The Hague in 1952. There and then, I saw leading political scientists from many countries perform for the first time, including Raymond Aron, Carl Friedrich, Karl Loewenstein and many others. I was given the task to brief the press, which meant that I rapidly had to familiarize myself with the large number of papers presented.

The curriculum for political science - which I repeat was only one of the main subjects in the Amsterdam University programme - was modern. One had to study the great political thinkers, modern political theory, Dutch politics, the political systems of the major powers, and special subjects like political parties, electoral analysis and bureaucracies. Barents excelled in small seminars, forcing us to submit papers: seminar introductions, a shorter thesis analyzing the political system of another country, a full-fledged thesis at the end. I chose Britain for the country paper, and the problem of Marxism and nationality for the major thesis. Thinking of the possibility to elaborate the latter into a doctoral dissertation, I concentrated as far as possible on related subjects for equally compulsory theses in other disciplines: e.g. national self-determination for international law cum international relations and Marxist theories of imperialism for economics. I read Marx and later Marxists thoroughly, but decided eventually to drop the idea when Barents, my supervisor, demanded that I learned Russian, Polish and Yiddish in view of the important debates on nationality in Eastern Europe. Barents had earlier indicated that reading British biographies and autobiographies was one of the more agreeable ways to learn about politics. I had taken that to heart and decided on that basis to work on a dissertation on the organization and reforms of the British Cabinet since 1914.1.

Britain stood high for my generation. I had been an exchange student in England shortly after the liberation, a participant in a Special Course in Western Union at the University of Cambridge in the summer of 1950, and a British Council scholar at the London School of Economics during the calendar year 1954. There I came into contact with a much wider group of scholars than in Amsterdam. My supervisor was William A. Robson, Professor of Public Administration, a late Fabian, and also one of the first Presidents of IPSA. He took me with him to two conferences in 1954: the annual meeting of the British Political Studies Association and an IPSA Round Table on Comparative Government and Politics in Florence.

At the British Political Studies Association, the then editor of Political Studies Wilfrid Harrison asked me to recommend someone who could do a general article on the Dutch political system, as part of a series on the lesser known smaller European democracies. I offered to do it myself. Writing an article in English on one's own country for a readership whose understanding of politics is very much determined by the operative ideals and terminology of their own country, turned out to be one of the most intensive lessons in comparative study a young scholar might experience. It was published, after intense discussion with Harrison, in the early spring of 1955.2. Little did I foresee that this article alone was enough to bring me soon into contact with prominent scholars working on European politics: notably Val Lorwin, an American historian with a thorough knowledge of France who planned a study of Belgium; Stein Rokkan who did pioneering research work on Norway but was already on the way up to become the greatest Europeanist I have ever encountered; and that sceptical and original German exile in America, Otto Kirchheimer, then at the New School for Social Research in New York.

The IPSA Round Table in Florence brought together a number of older luminaries in the field of government studies including Carl Friedrich, Karl Loewenstein,

Robson, D.N. Chester, Max Beloff, Dolf Sternberger, Maurice Duverger and Léo Hamon with a small group of mostly younger American scholars (e.g. Roy Macridis, Samuel Beer, Robert Ward as well as that proverbial English maverick, the still young S.E. Finer3.) who after a meeting in 1952 had proclaimed the need for a less parochial, more scientific study in the field of comparative politics.4. In the discussions between the established older scholars and the younger upstarts tempers often ran high. One could not have hoped for a better introduction to the field. I befriended two younger men: Giovanni Sartori, then still an assistant, who was for all practical purposes the local organizer in Florence, and Serge Hurtig, then assistant to the Secretary General of IPSA, Jean Meynaud. Both were soon to become key figures in political science, in Italy and France respectively and beyond.

After a short period of research on the early history of the Dutch resistance newspaper Het Parool I returned to an assistantship with Barents. As a result of diabetes, he became blind. Relations became strained between us, which meant that I had to find another job. There were no academic positions in Dutch universities at the time, and I applied to some lectureships in Britain. On the recommendation of my LSE supervisor, Robson, I paradoxically landed a junior job in the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, a graduate training school directed towards mid-career civil servants from Third World countries. It forced me for a time to shift my academic interests to development studies rather than to Dutch or comparative European politics. In 1960-1961 I spent a post-doctoral Rockefeller fellowship in the USA (1960-1961), when the famous Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council under the leadership of Gabriel Almond was very much in its hey-day. The fellowship, spent at Harvard and Berkeley, gave me a year of free reading time. It also brought me into close contact with a number of leading American scholars, an experience that has had a profound influence on my work ever since.

Participant in three major international projects

Even before I came to the USA that year, I had felt that I should re-work my Political Studies article into a much fuller book in English on the Dutch political system. I explored the possibility of a joint book with Robert L. Morlan of the University of Redlands who had been a Fulbright professor at Amsterdam in 1956-1957.5. But at the same time Lorwin and I began to think of a comparative volume on the Netherlands and Belgium. This soon developed into a more ambitious plan. One of the more influential volumes on European political systems was a collective volume on Britain, France, Germany and Russia, published in 1958 under the editorship of Samuel H. Beer and Adam B. Ulam.6. Why not think of a companion volume on the political systems of the Smaller European Democracies? Lorwin and I made a list of countries to cover: Austria, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden - ten in all, eleven if Iceland were included as we later decided to do. After all, did not Iceland claim Althingi as the oldest parliament in Europe? We drafted a detailed outline, which we circulated to a number of com-

parativists and to possible authors for the country chapters. We received highly encouraging comments from leading scholars in the field of comparative politics and favourable reactions from a number of possible publishers (both commercial and university presses), as well as promises for the individual chapters from experts like Kirchheimer on Austria, Rokkan on Norway, Basil Chubb on Ireland, Roland Ruffieux on Switzerland, Pär-Erik Back on Sweden, besides Lorwin on Belgium and myself on the Netherlands.

Two important developments intervened, however. Lorwin was a close friend of Robert Dahl. He made me meet Dahl when he was visiting the Berkeley department in the spring of 1961. Like so many, I had been greatly impressed by Dahl's A preface to democratic theory (Chicago, 1956). He told us that he intended to begin a new project, to analyze how the notion of opposition had developed as a legitimate institution, vital to functioning democracies. Not being as yet a scholar of comparative politics, he wanted to bring a group of country specialists together for a collective volume on Western democracies, later to be supplemented by a similar volume on opposition in non-democratic regimes. During an after-dinner walk in San Francisco he invited Lorwin and me to become members of the group on Western democracies, and write chapters on the two Low Countries. Others followed: Rokkan on Norway, Kirchheimer on Germany, Frederick Engelmann on Austria, Nils Stjernquist on Sweden, Alfred Grosser on France, Allen Potter on Britain, Samuel Barnes on Italy, Dahl himself on the United States. As convener and editor Dahl made it the most thorough analytical comparative project I have ever experienced. He arranged for a number of week-long conferences in the Rockefeller Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio on the borders of Lake Como, Italy. He prepared meetings with precise analytical questions, suggesting possible hypotheses to be criticized by the country specialists in writing before the meetings began. To see scholars like the all-knowing Europeanist Rokkan, the highly sceptical and tough Kirchheimer, the playful wit Lorwin, and the unique clarity of thought of Dahl himself was a unique experience. The eventual book Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (Yale University Press 1966) became a model of what can be achieved in comparative analysis by scholars of different countries under strong theoretical guidance. I regard my chapter ‘The Netherlands. Opposition in a Segmented Society’ as one of the best analyses of Dutch political developments I ever wrote.7. We asked Dahl to join us as one of the editors of the Smaller European Democracies Project, as we had also earlier asked Rokkan.

In the same year I published another article, ‘Parties, Elites and Political Developments in Western Europe’, in Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (eds.) Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1966), one volume in the series which issued from the work of the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics (reprinted as chapter 5 in this book) The parties volume contains true classics by Kirchheimer, Sartori and Rokkan.8. My paper touched on a great many matters that were to preoccupy me in later work on comparative European politics. It stressed the importance of the earlier elite setting for the later development of parties, the nature of centralization in state formation, the timing of social and economic development, the degree to which

parties were able to reach and permeate the main springs of power, their role in integrating new population strata, the interaction between national and local politics, the politicization of social cleavages, and the manner in which these were to interact over time. Readers familiar with his work9. will have no difficulty to see Rokkan's influence. Towards the end, the paper confronts some of the then classical writings in the field of party studies: Michels' iron law of oligarchy which was to turn its author increasingly against parties and eventually to embrace fascism; Duverger's distinction between internally and externally created parties; and the relation of parties to other political actors, like interest groups, the media, the bureaucracy and so on. I treated such subjects in much greater detail in other chapters reprinted in this volume, including chapter 7 ‘Parties and Political Mobilization’ (written in 1982 as a think piece for a project on The Future of Party Government at the European University Institute, directed by Rudolf Wildenmann), and chapter 9 ‘Parties: Denied, Dismissed, or Redundant? A Critique’ which grew out of my Stein Rokkan Lecture, given on 9 April 1992 in the University of Bergen (Norway) under the title ‘A crisis of party?’10.

Things went less well with the SED (Smaller European Democracies) project, for a number of reasons. Dahl's Oppositions-project to some degree deflected the attention of the key-editors, even though the overlap also facilitated the formation and initial meetings of the SED group. Some of the original country authors fell away, notably Otto Kirchheimer who died in 1965. The project became much more ambitious. Rokkan persuaded us to plan not for one book with substantial country chapters, but to produce single volumes for each of the countries to be covered, to be concluded at the end with a book to be written by the four editors jointly. Our original outline, already a demanding one, was supplemented by an elaborate list of tables, divided between ‘musts’ and desirable ones, drawn up by Rokkan.11. One author, Basil Chubb, said bluntly that he could not possibly get all that material together for Ireland; in the end he was the only member of the group who did produce a substantial country volume for the planned series. We received a grant from the Ford Foundation, including some funds for incidental research assistance for country authors, which fell woefully short of the extensive original research needed to meet the outline and tables. And then, to some degree, we chose our often younger authors all too well. Many of us soon were appointed to often new chairs in political science (as I was in Leiden in 1963), at a time when student numbers rose rapidly.

This gave us many new tasks, and was compounded by the wave of student unrest in European university, including attempts at the politicization of curricula and of the gaining of power by what were basically activist minorities, which presented their demands under the guise of the ‘democratization’ of university government. This in turn was to lead to a rapidly increasing bureaucratization. Time that should have been spent on research was whittled away in bureaucratic procedures. I was asked by Edward Shils and Giovanni Sartori to take responsibility for a comparative project to analyze such developments, for which I called on SED colleagues for some of the countries. Eventually, we produced a substantial volume, Hans Daalder and Edward Shils (eds.), Universities, Politicians and

Bureaucrats. Europe and the United States, published with considerable delay by Cambridge University Press in 1982. It was small compensation at the expense of the SED-project planned with so much enthusiasm and intellectual input.

Yet, this picture does too little justice to the actual impact SED did have. Both the outline and the list of required tables were to lead to substantial research within countries. In the Leiden case, the indirect influence can be easily seen by the various projects initiated such as the study of important political elite groups, the rise of political parties, cabinet-parliament relations, coalition formation, the study of regional and local politics and so on. As editors, we did much more joint work than superficial observers may think. We worked together for half a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the spring of 1967, covering mainly five major aspects: state- and nation-building; the presence of strong societal divisions and separate subcultures and the manner of their co-existence; the growth of mass politics and political parties; cabinet-parliament relations and the formation of cabinet coalitions; and a special study of the problem of size in democracies. We had wanted to produce a joint volume to be based on more extensive material later. When these came in scattered over subjects and time, we presented our work tentatively at two important IPSA meetings (the triennial congress of IPSA in Brussels in 1967 where I was asked to organize a meeting on typologies of political systems, and a special Round Table in Turin in 1969). Rather than in one volume, our work found its way in different media: a special book by Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte on Size and Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), Rokkan's Citizens, Elections, Parties. Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1970; reprinted in the ECPR classics series in 2009), and contributions to journals, e.g. V.R. Lorwin, ‘Segmented Pluralism, ‘Ideological Cleavages, and Political Cohesion in the Smaller European Democracies,’ Comparative Politics, 3, 1971, 141-175 and part of my own work ‘Cabinets and Party Systems in Ten Smaller European Democracies’, Acta Politica, 6 (1971), pp. 282-303, reprinted in this volume as Chapter 6. Of course, the empirical material presented in this paper on cabinet coalitions between 1918 and 1969 is very dated, but one should realize that it predated the work of most major coalition theorists, whilst it deliberately sought to bridge empirical work on cabinet-parliament relations and party systems with the more abstract newer coalition theories, which even today often go their separate ways.

The rise of the consociational model

During my year at the Center, I was asked by the University of California Press to review a new manuscript, written by Arend Lijphart, an American-trained scholar of Dutch origin whom I had met only once before, when he came to Holland to collect material for a dissertation with Gabriel Almond and Karl Deutsch entitled The Trauma of Decolonization. The Dutch & West New Guinea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. The new manuscript treated the Dutch political system as a deviant case in the light of Almonds well-known typology which regarded countries with ‘a heterogeneous political culture’ as fundamentally unstable. Lijphart

offered ‘an extended theoretical argument based on a single case of particular significance to pluralist theory’, given that a ‘Politics of Accommodation’ (the happy title of the book) could counteract conflicts provided elites followed certain rules. It was one of the most intelligent manuscripts I ever read. Although I disagreed with some of the arguments, I warmly recommended its publication. Fortunately, my advice prevailed over that of another reader (as it happens the late Samuel Eldersveld) who had sent in a negative report.

For all my admiration of the book, I did not foresee that it was to become the cornerstone for building the consociational model of democracy. As SED-editors, we were contacted during our year at the Center by two other young scholars: Gerhard Lehmbruch who had finished a study on the basis of Switzerland and Austria he called Proporzdemokratie, and Jürg Steiner who treated Swiss democracy in opposition to the Westminster model of politics. The three (Lijphart, Lehmbruch and Steiner) were unaware of each other's work, for all the similarity in their approach. As rapporteur for the Typologies Session of IPSA in Brussels in September 1967, I invited both Lehmbruch and Lijphart to present their arguments. In a sense, this was the beginning of what was to become something like ‘a consociational democracy school’. I adopted the term ‘consociational’ myself for a paper I had written at the instigation of Rokkan which contained ‘a paired comparison’ of nation-building in the Netherlands and Switzerland (reprinted as Chapter 10 in this volume). I was later asked by the editors of World Politics to do an extensive review article of some six studies under the title ‘The Consociational Democracy Theme’ (see chapter 11 herein), a text that contains the fullest analysis on my part of this literature. In the meantime, we had been able at Leiden University to persuade Lijphart to fill a vacant chair for international relations. We were happy colleagues for a number of years, while we continued a polemic on the Dutch case for years to come (see also my second Harvard lecture in chapter 12 of this book). For all his theoretical contribution, I found that Lijphart attributed too little importance to long-term historical political processes. Before coming to Leiden, he had translated his The Politics of Accommodation into Dutch. The book (entitled Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek, Amsterdam, De Bussy, 1968) had a great impact in the Netherlands. It was to go through as many as nine editions, and republished more recently as a Dutch classic!

The establishment of the European consortium for political research

Within a year of Lijphart's arrival at Leiden, he and I were to become actively involved in the founding of the European Consortium for Political Research. Prime movers were, in different ways, Jean Blondel, Serge Hurtig and Stein Rokkan, with important backing from Warren Miller, that stalwart organizer of the Interuniversity Consortium of Political Research at Ann Arbor, Michigan, then consultant to the Ford Foundation. The influential officer of the Ford Foundation, Peter de Janosi, visited us at Leiden on an exploratory tour. This led to a meeting of scholars from eight institutions: Bergen (Stein Rokkan, the natural chairman); Essex (Jean Blondel, the highly active first Executive Director), Nuffield College

(Norman Chester), Strathclyde (Richard Rose), the Fondation Nationale des Science Politique (Serge Hurtig), Mannheim (Rudolf Wildenmann), Gothenburg (Jørgen Westerståhl) and Leiden (myself, with Arend Lijphart who was soon to become the founding editor of the European Journal of Political Research). This is not the place to describe the rapid development of the ECPR, especially after the invention by Rudolf Wildenmann of the Joint Sessions of Workshops format.12. I was associated with the Consortium for the next eighteen years, as the first Chairman of the Workshop Committee, as Chairman following Rokkan from 1976 to 1979, and for another nine years as a member of the Executive Committee, mainly concerned with publications. These were exciting years, seeing the advance of political science in one European country after another, accompanied by the development of more and more collaborative projects across frontiers, both physical and intellectual.

Originally, the Consortium did not have any research projects of its own. This changed around 1976, when the substantial grant of the Ford Foundation began to run out. After thorough discussions, we decided to take responsibility for four large-scale research projects: Models of Governing: The Problems of Overload, directed by Richard Rose; Recent Changes in the West European Party Systems directed by Hans Daalder, Mogens Pedersen and Rudolf Wildenmann; International Development, Regional Policies and Territorial Identities in West Europe led by Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin, and Problems of West European Urban Government under the responsibility of Ken Newton.13. These projects were financed by a large grant from the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, which included a substantial overhead for the ECPR Central Services. The Recent Changes project overlapped with my appointment as Professor and Head of the Department of Political and Social Sciences (1976-1979) at the European University Institute. It became my major research responsibility, soon reinforced by the appointment at this new Institute of two brilliant young assistant-professors, Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair. We could draw on a strong network of party specialists. Unlike the SED-project it was to produce both a general volume14. on outstanding problems in the literature on parties and a substantial number of country studies.15. Rudolf Wildenmann was to move on with a new project of his own under the heading The Future of Party Government when he was appointed at the European University Institute in 1980. Two chapters reprinted in this book were directly related to these two projects. The paper on Parties and Political Mobilization (mentioned earlier and reprinted in this volume as chapter 7) was prepared for the Wildenmann project in which I was not to participate afterwards. The other is the present chapter 8 ‘In Search of the Center of European Party Systems’. This was a product of the EUI Seminar I directed in my last full year at the EUI (1978-1979), when we confronted the paradox that both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have received ample attention in the party literature, but that for all its use in common parlance only few scholars have looked theoretically at party systems from the perspective of their centre. I tried to summarize our extensive discussions in this paper, which we intended to place in the 1983 general volume West European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (London, Sage, 1983). But the publisher wished us to cut some fifty pages

from the book which was running over 500 pages. As I had already an introductory chapter in it which offered an overview of the literature on European parties and party systems, we decided that the centre piece had to go. Somewhat absent-mindedly, I sent it to the American Political Science Review which contrary to expectation not only accepted it in record time, but also gave it priority placement. I was congratulated on this ‘feat’ from various quarters, not least by ambitious younger colleagues. I was not then used to, and still reject, the modern belief that publications in refereed journals (themselves ranked in importance), ‘count’ more in research assessments and are regarded as more important than chapters in books, not to speak of books themselves. This may be true of some of the sciences, but remains a highly dubious, and definitely one-sided, measurement when applied to our discipline.

States, nations and bureaucracies

I have mentioned the paper (chapter 10 in this volume) in which at Rokkan's behest I had ventured to compare processes of state- and nation-building in the Netherlands and Switzerland. To some degree this was a follow-up of the SED-project where state and nation-building preoccupied both Rokkan and me. Rokkan pursued the subject on a much wider scale under the auspices of Unesco's Social Science Research Council. My paper was first published in French and English in the International Social Journal in 1971. It probably became better known when it appeared in the impressive two volume collective work Building States and Nations (London, Sage, 1973, 14-31), edited by S.N. Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan. I had met Eisenstadt first in 1963 at a meeting of the loose but influential network of scholars meeting as the Committee of Political Sociology under the aegis of both the International Political Science Association and the International Sociological Association, and our contacts became close in the decades to come. He asked me to participate in a symposium organized in 1985 in the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on ‘Historical Traditions and Patterns of Modernization and Development’ in May 1985. He told me to take care ‘only’ of Europe (with economic and social developments to be treated by another author). I decided to approach this assignment by focusing on differences in the formation of states in their relation to groups and to individuals. It combined the widespread focus on development with the comparative analysis at processes of democratization, in the nearest piece to political theory that I have ever attempted. It was published in another two-volume work edited by Eisenstadt, Patterns of Modernity (London: Frances Pinter, 1987) vol. 1, 22-43 (reprinted in this volume as Chapter 4). The Jerusalem Conference led participants to emphasize the need to follow-up with more detailed studies on narrower subjects. One subject singled out was a study of the different ways in which bureaucracies were formed in the processes of state formation and modernization in Europe. I was asked to submit a plan for a comparative project which could be incorporated into a program of the European Science Foundation on Center-Periphery Relations, directed by Walter Rüegg of the University of Bern. I drafted a substantial paper and sought the collaboration of Vincent Wright (long-time fel-

low at Nuffield College), an outstanding specialist on French politics and administration, co-founder with Gordon Smith of the London School of Economics of the lively journal West European Politics and, for a few years, not long after I had left, professor at the European University Institute. We approached a number of scholars in different countries, e.g. Juan Linz (Spain), Yves Mény (France), Sabino Cassese (Italy). Pär-Erik Back (Sweden), Mogens Pedersen (Denmark), Peter Gerlich (Austria), with Rüegg committed to Switzerland and myself to the Netherlands. We organized a number of workshops (at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1985, Castelgandolfo in 1986, and Bern in 1989). I submitted the project to the European University Institute which held off. Again a combination of university problems and other research commitments prevented most authors to deliver their individual papers, while others died or moved out. I decided to publish a version of the project paper in Dutch in a Festschrift for a departing Leiden colleague in Public Administration in 1988, and in English in a similar publication to honour Juan Linz (the version printed as chapter 3 in this volume). In the meantime, within the context of the European Science Foundation, a group of historians organized a comparative study of the development of bureaucracies since the Middle Ages. I was asked to present our theoretical outline to a meeting organized in Rome in 1990. It was translated by one of the directors of the project in French.16. It was to be the last gasp of our own comparative project.

Before this, I had used the general theme in two treatments on the Dutch case. One was a paper presented at a special symposium for the retirement of the Dutch historian Ernst H. Kossmann, who had done path-breaking work on the political theories advanced in Dutch universities in the 17th century. Kossmann was inclined to see the few absolutist thinkers in the 17th century as also the precursors of individualism, and hence as predecessors of modern democracy. In contrast to his view, I stressed the strength of pluralist and accommodationist elements in the Dutch Republic for the peaceful transition towards what Dahl has called a polyarchy (as the nearest empirical system to the ideal of democracy). When I was invited to be the Erasmus Lecturer in Dutch history and Civilization at Harvard in the autumn of 1989, I returned to that debate in the first of three official lectures required of the holder of that Lectureship. It has so far only circulated as a Working Paper of the Harvard Center for European Studies. It is published in a more definite way, together with the two subsequent lectures, as chapter 12 of the present volume.

The intellectual autobiography of comparative European politics

My retirement from the Chair of Politics in 1993 coincided with the holding of the Joint Sessions of the ECPR at Leiden University. I organized a special workshop to which I invited a number of the colleagues I had met over more than thirty years, asking them to look back at their own life in comparative politics. This led to a large volume, misnamed under pressure from the publishers' marketing manager Comparative European Politics. The Story of a Profession, London/New York: Frances Pinter, 1997. It contained biographical chapters on four major fig-

ures who had died before or when the book was in preparation, (i.e. Carl Friedrich, Stein Rokkan, Rudolf Wildenman and Samuel Finer), and twenty-three autobiographical chapters by those then still alive.17. Each author was asked what made him turn to political science and share in the development of comparative politics; what were the major political problems they dealt with; what their most important contributions in empirical research and theory formation; and when they looked back, what about their achievements and what would they have done differently if starting all over again?

It became a major book, with a very elaborate, integrated bibliography. It appeared in hardback (1997) followed by a paperback edition (1999). But except for the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics and Acta Politica, the book was rarely reviewed and overlooked by all leading American journals.18.

Other work since 1993

In a sense my work in modern political science ceased following my retirement from the Leiden chair in 1993, apart from putting together the autobiographies volume which includes a chapter on my own journey in comparative politics entitled ‘A smaller European's opening frontiers’. I wrote a substantially longer book of academic memoirs in Dutch entitled Universitair Panopticum. Herinneringen van een gewoon hoogleraar (Amsterdam, Arbeiderspers 1997), and younger colleagues brought together a volume of my writings in Dutch and English under the title Politiek en Historie (1990).19. I also published a collection of public lectures and other papers in Dutch entitled Van oude en nieuwe regenten. Politiek in Nederland (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 1995).

Stopping working on modern political science did not mean giving up the study of politics altogether. The real task of my retirement years has been the writing of a multi-volume biography of the Dutch Socialist Willem Drees (1886-1988), whose active political life spanned almost the entire 20th century, culminating in the immediate post-1945 years when he served as a Cabinet Minister for three years, and as Prime Minister for more than ten. He was a man with a unique understanding of politics. I learnt a great deal from him in direct conversation until he was 99, and continue to do so from research in his extensive archive and other relevant sources. This work is done in collaboration with a younger historian and co-author Jelle H. Gaemers. It is a laborious job, not least because as a former parliamentary stenographer in the first two decades of the 20th century, he continued to use short hand in many of his papers ever since. So far, we have published three volumes of the biography itself and a special volume on Drees and the monarchy.20.

I interrupted work on the last volume to write a short book on the Dutch political system by way of dialogues with fictitious grand-children in the internet age. It was aimed at the 10-15 age-range, and I called it Het boek van Opa Politiek (Grandpa's book on Dutch politics: Amsterdam 2006). In my wilder moments I have thought of setting up a project for similar books on other European countries to be written by colleagues of good old times. But then old Drees looks frowning over my shoulders, asking me from another world why I still have not finished the volume dealing with his later years.


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