OBITUARY

maestro de politólogos: juan linz(1926–2013)miguel de lucaUniversidad de Buenos Aires-CONICETE-mail: migueldeluca@yahoo.com

doi:10.1057/eps.2013.47; published online 28 March 2014

World-renowned political soci-ologist Juan José Linz Storchde Gracia was born in Bonn,

Germany, on 24 December 1926, in aGerman–Spanish family. He spent hischildhood in the Bavarian Forest, but thenwent with his Spanish mother to Madrid,where he was raised, becoming a Spanishcitizen. After finishing his secondary edu-cation (bachillerato) in 1943, he enrolledin the Law School and also in the newlycreated Faculty of Political Science andEconomics of the University of Madrid. Hereceived his undergraduate degree in1947 from the University of Madrid andhis Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia Uni-versity in 1959, writing his dissertationunder the direction of Seymour MartinLipset. He served on the faculty at Colum-bia University (1961–1968) and YaleUniversity (1968–1999), becoming a pro-fessor emeritus at Yale in 1999.Linz was an enthusiastic and influential

participant in a host of professional socialscience associations. Alongside SeymourMartin Lipset, Raymond Aron, SteinRokkan and Shmuel Eisenstadt amongothers, he was a founding member of theCommittee on Political Sociology (CPS) ofthe International Sociological Association(ISA) and the International PoliticalScience Association (IPSA) (1960). He

served as CPS chairman (1971–1979),as a member of the ISA Executive Com-mittee (1974–1982), as chairman of theCouncil for European Studies (1973–1974) and as president of the World Asso-ciation for Public Opinion Research(WAPOR) (1974–1976).

For his research, Juan Linz receivednumerous tributes and accolades. He heldhonorary doctorates from the Universityof Granada (1976), Georgetown Univer-sity (1992), Universidad Autónomade Madrid (1992), Philipps-UniversitätMarburg (1992), the University of Oslo(2000) and Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea(2002). He was elected member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1976. In 1987, he received Spain’shighest honour given to individuals, enti-ties or organizations that make notableachievements in the sciences, humanitiesand public affairs: the Premio Príncipede Asturias de las Ciencias Sociales. In1993, theWAPOR awarded him its highestdistinction, the Helen Dinerman Award.In 1996, Linz received what is popularlyknown as the Nobel Prize for politicalscience, the University of Uppsala’s JohanSkytte Prize, for his ‘global investigationof the fragility of democracy in the faceof authoritarian threat characterized bymethodological versatility and historical

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and sociological breadth’. In 1998 hewas elected a Corresponding Fellow of theRoyal British Academy, and in 2003 hereceived the Karl Deutsch Award, the mostprestigious award granted by the IPSA.Linz conducted research with magister-

ial talent and an interdisciplinary approachthat ventured into the realms of historyand sociology, and was directly inspiredby many of the classics of social science,including the work of Max Weber, VilfredoPareto, Georg Simmel, Robert Michelsand Émile Durkheim. His theoretical andempirical contributions to scholarlyresearch concerned a broad set of ques-tions at the intersection of society andpolitics, including political parties and elec-toral attitudes, cultural minorities andregional nationalism in relation to nationbuilding (especially in the Basque regionof Spain), federalism, business and localelites in Spain, various religious forms andpolitics, the relation between the State,ruling elites and society, the sociologyof fascist movements between the twoworld wars and a host of other topics.Principally, however, Juan Linz was

widely recognized as a preeminent politi-cal sociologist for his seminal work onnon-democratic political regimes, regimechange and democratization, and politi-cal institutions and democratic politics.Drawing on his first-hand knowledge ofFrancisco Franco’s Spain, Linz was thescholar who originally developed, in1964, the authoritarian regime ideal-typeand questioned the totalitarianism-democracy dichotomy that prevailed afterWorld War II in the comparative study ofpolitical regimes. In ‘Totalitarian andAuthoritarian Regimes’ (1975), his 236-page contribution to the Greenstein andPolsby’s Handbook of Political Science,Linz designed a remarkably systematicand broad typology of authoritarian andtotalitarian regimes, which other scholarshave utilized intensively since its appear-ance. In the introductory volume Crisis,Breakdown and Reequilibration to his

four-volume The Breakdown of Demo-cratic Regimes (1978), co-edited withAlfred Stepan, he formulated a newapproach to studying the crisis of democ-racies that challenged Marxist theories(that highlighted economic causes), aswell as other approaches (that focusedon opposition groups) to explain whydemocratic regimes collapse. In his paperon presidentialism (1985), eventuallypublished in the two-volume collectionhe co-edited with Arturo Valenzuela,The Failure of Presidential Democracy(1994), Linz launched a debate in com-parative politics about the institutions ofpresidential democracy, arguing that pre-sidential democracies were more prone tocollapse than parliamentary ones. In Pro-blems of Democratic Transition and Con-solidation (1996), a co-authored bookwith Alfred Stepan, Linz contributed tothe study of the transition to, and consoli-dation of, democracies in different areasof theworld (Southern Europe, South Amer-ica and post-Soviet Europe). In the doing,he introduced a novel focus on ‘stateness’problems emerging from nationalist con-flicts and stressed how the type of old non-democratic regimes affected subsequenttrajectories of democratization.

Linz published nearly 300 book chap-ters, articles and short pieces such asencyclopaedia entries and book reviewsthat have been translated into Spanish,

‘…Juan Linz was widelyrecognized as a

preeminent politicalsociologist for his

seminal work on non-democratic political

regimes, regime changeand democratization, andpolitical institutions and

democratic politics’.

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Italian, German, French, Japanese,Chinese, Korean and Turkish. Threeexceptional sources on Linz’s thought andwritings are his intellectual autobiographyin Comparative European Politics: TheStory of a Profession, edited by HansDaalder (1997), his deeply interestingand extensive interview with RichardSnyder in Passion, Craft and Method inComparative Politics (2008), and theintellectual biography by José RamónMontero and Thomas Jeffrey Miley in theirrecently published seven volume selectedworks of Linz, adroitly edited in Spanishas Juan J. Linz. Obras Escogidas by theCentro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucio-nales in Madrid (2008–2013).Juan Linz passed away on 1 October

2013, in the Yale Health Hospital, NewHaven, Connecticut. Rest in peace, maes-tro de politólogos.

Juan J. Linz’s SelectedWorks

– 1964. ‘An Authoritarian Regime:The Case of Spain’. In Cleavages,

Ideologies, and Party Systems: Contri-butions to Comparative Political Sociol-ogy. Edited by Erik Allard and YrjöLittunen. Helsinki: Transactions of theWestermarck Society.– 1975. ‘Totalitarian and AuthoritarianRegimes’. In Handbook of PoliticalScience, Vol. 3: Macropolitical Theory.Edited by Fred Greenstein and NelsonPolsby. Reading, MA: Addison-WesleyPublishing Company.– 1978. The Breakdown of DemocraticRegimes. 4 vols. Edited with AlfredStepan. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.– 1994. The Failure of PresidentialDemocracy. 2 vols. Edited with ArturoValenzuela. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.– 1996. Problems of Democratic Tran-sition and Consolidation: SouthernEurope, South America and Post-Communist Europe. Edited with AlfredStepan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press.– 1998. Sultanistic Regimes. Editedwith Houchang Chehabi. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press.

About the Author

Miguel De Luca is Professor of Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires, Researcher atCONICET, and President of the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Político (SAAP). He holds a PhDfrom the University of Florence.

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