I just read a post by Branco Milanovic, a prominent economist, in his (very good) globalinequality blog. In it, he makes an interesting point about the lives of famous economists. Those, he says, live orderly and boring lives, spent mostly within the cloistered walls of academia, with no real sense of the actual world out there. But, if their the great economists’ lives are not exemplary, how could they produce meaningful things, and suggest workable solutions, for our contemporary world? Milanovic asks: Don’t we need exemplary lives for greatness in the social sciences?
To be honest, I don’t know much about the great economists’ personal lives, but I know something about the lives of the great political scientists who advanced the field of comparative politics in recent decades – and I was lucky enough to have personally met, and learned from, quite a few of them. The truth is that, as university professors, most (all?) of them had non-exemplary lives. But, what was exemplary in their lives were the early-age experiences most of them went through, which then indelibly formed their personalities, work interests, and theories.
Case in point: A few years ago, two political scientists, Gerardo Munch and Richard Snyder interviewed 15 great scholars in comparative politics and they found one key attribute they all had in common: Their rich early life experiences, which both sparked interest in politics and made them normatively committed to the democratic cause.
The great American political scientists Gabriel Almond, Barrington Moore Jr., Robert Dahl, and Samuel Huntington (all born in the 1910s and 1920s) underwent through their youths the social traumas of the Great Depression and World War II.
Another group of greats, mostly born in the 1930s, besides the trauma of war, have had their lives also marked by historical developments in their native lands.
Arend Lijphart, a Dutch, became concerned about how to reconcile conflicting parts in society by looking at the political compartmentalization in the postwar Netherlands.
Juan Linz experienced the Spanish civil war as a boy and the Franco regime as an adult, hence his subsequent focus on authoritarian regimes.
Giovanni Sartori was anxious about how the increasingly stronger Communist Party in postwar Italy would polarize Italian politics and undermine liberal democracy.
Guillermo O’Donnell, who grew up in Argentina during the 1950s, lived through Peronism and the subsequent military dictatorship in his native country.
Adam Przeworski, who was raised in communist Poland during the 1940s and 1950s, was forced by the dictatorship that ran his country to go into exile abroad.
An even younger generation of political science greats, grew up in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, and were heavily influenced by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. In this group belong scholars such as James Scott, David Collier, Philippe Schmitter, David Laitin, Theda Skocpol, and Al Stepan. In these cases, as in all previous ones, it was the personal experiences those scholars had as active citizens living in interesting times that helped them formulate the core research questions on which they would later focus on.
After having interviewed all those scholars, Munch and Snyder suggested a provocative hypothesis, namely: The quality of a social scientist’s scholarship depends on the [exemplary] quality and richness of that scientist’s life experiences. If it is true for the great political scientists, I suppose it must also be true for the great economists.
Source
Gerardo L. Munch and Richard Snyder, Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
