DAVID APTER

In: PS: political science & politics, Band 43, Heft 4, S. 797-798

Abstract

David Apter, with whom, sixty years ago, I enrolled in the graduate program of Princeton University's department of politics, died on May 4 of this year. Along with other graduate students of that era, we shared the conceit that we would change the ways in which the discipline went about doing comparative politics. The moment for striking out in that direction seemed propitious. World War II had introduced countless Americans, among them many future political scientists, to "exotic" countries where political institutions and behavior appeared quite unlike anything they had learned in their undergraduate courses. War itself led to an explosion of interest in nation-reforming in the case of defeated totalitarian systems, and nation-building in those parts of the world where empires were breaking up.