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Finer’s Comparative History of Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. E. S. Hayward
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Extract

‘IF YOU WANT QUICK RESULTS, PLANT LETTUCE; ENDURING results take longer.’ So said Léon Walras, France's greatest nineteenth-century economist and predecessor at Lausanne of Pareto, whom Sammy Finer wrote about with admiration. Finer's last and greatest work in three volumes and over 1,600 pages will be published in May 1997 by Oxford University Press. Unlike his contemporary political scientists, Sammy Finer had the self-confidence and breadth of vision singlehandedly to take on an immense work and almost bring it to completion before death imposed its own premature conclusion. As a foretaste of its contents, the first Finer Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Keele on 10 May 1995, is published in this journal, with which he had an especially close affinity. It can only suggest, in the most succinct way, what is to come. I am confident that the study of comparative government will never be the same once the whole breathtaking work appears in all its magnitude.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , January 1997 , pp. 114 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1997

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References

1 Memorial Addresses delivered at the Commemoration held in the Codrington Library on Saturday, 7 May 1994, All Souls College, in memory of Samuel Edward Finer’. See also the biographical essay by Dennis Kavanagh in the Festschrift he edited with Peele, Gillian, Comparative Government and Politics. Essays in Honour of S.E. Finer, Heinemann, London, 1984 Google Scholar, Chapter 1.

2 Finer, S. E., ‘Almond’s Concept of “the Political System”: A Textual Critique’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1969, p. 7 Google Scholar.

3 lonescu, G., ‘New and Old Perspectives on Government’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 29, No. 5, 1994, p. 612 Google Scholar.

4 ibid., p. 614.

5 Government and Opposition, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 5–6; cf. 15–16. On Sidgwick’s battle with Marshall in Cambridge, see Collini, S., Winch, D. and Burrow, J., That Noble Science of Politics. A Study of Nineteenth Century Intellectual History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 S. E. Finer: A Memoir’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 29, No. 5, 1994, p. 582.

7 ibid., p. 585.

8 If ‘credit’ is the right word, it is due to Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge, 1979.

9 ‘The Conceptual Prologue’, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 100.

10 ibid., pp. 22–30.

11 ibid., p.25.

12 ibid, p.35.

13 Government and Opposition, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1983, p. 16.

14 ibid, p. 9.

15 ‘The Conceptual Prologue’, The History of Government, I, pp. 46–7.

16 ibid., p. 84.

17 ibid., p. 85.

18 ibid., p. 86.

19 ibid., p. 94.