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Otto I.Q. Besser-Wisser: An Appreciation of the Pioneer of Post-Distanciationalist Politometrics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Dagobert D. Manteltasche
Dagobert D. Manteltasche*
Affiliation:
Central Institute for Questions and Answers, University of the Arctic Circle
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Extract

The death occurred on July 12, 1999, at a tragically young age, of Otto I.Q. Besser-Wisser, probably the most influential political thinker and analyst of our times.

He was born in 1906 on the island of Helgoland, where the bustling streets and crowded, busy marketplaces formed his early experience of life in a large and cosmopolitan urban metropolis. He was later to convert these young impressions into the central principles of physical and social distanciationalist politometrics, which have dominated Western political science ever since. In spite of its subsequent theoretical variations, refinements, and developments—in the form of neo-distanciationalism, post-distanciationalism, post-neodistanciationalism, and neo-postdistanciationalism—the essential core of Besser-Wisser's formulation is so simple, and yet so heuristically and ontologically valuable in the theoreticization of the politico-urban-time continuum, that it is puzzling that it took mankind two millennia to develop. The answer is, of course, that just as it took pure genius to uncover the principles of things such as gravity, the unconscious mind, the jet engine, and Guinness, so only someone of Besser-Wisser's uncommon genius and almost supernatural analytical perspicacity could go straight to the very heart of one of the simple yet eternal truths of the human condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 730 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1999

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