Background

Gabriel Abraham Almond was born on January 12, 1911, in Rock Island, Illinois, United States. He was the son of David Moses Almond and Lisa Almond. Almond's formative years were spent in a strict orthodox Jewish home. On the Sabbath, he sat with his father studying the Old Testament, the Bible in Hebrew and studies of Judaism.

Education

Gabriel Almond was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in 1938. He spent 10 years in the Political Science Department, where he started as an undergraduate in 1928. At that time, the university was achieving an international reputation and the generosity of wealthy local families enhanced its ability to attract and retain academic stars.

Almond studied under Harold Laswell, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Merriam. Merriam was determined to make the study of politics into a science and encouraged quantification and, to get at the wellsprings of political behavior, exploration of the connections between psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Graduate students were expected to do fieldwork. All this was quite novel at the time.

His thesis paper, Plutocracy, and Politics in New York City went unpublished until 1997 because the university's administrators did not appreciate its criticism of what Almond called "the idle rich" and its author's unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller, who was a major benefactor of the university at the time; however, for decades the thesis remained a kind of cult classic among students.

Career

Gabriel Almond's first academic post was as an instructor in political science at Brooklyn College (1939-1946). World War II saw him serving as chief of the Office of War Information (1942-1945), where he analyzed propaganda and worked on the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the purpose of which was to analyze the psychological effects of carpet bombing. Returning to academia in 1947 after working for the United States War Department in Washington, D.C., Almond joined the faculty at Yale University, teaching political science there until 1951. He spent the 1950s at Princeton University, returned to Yale in the early 1960s, and then moved to California. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1963 until 1976 and was head of the political science department from 1964 to 1968.

His reputation and his opportunity to make a mark on political science came with his chairmanship of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, a post he held from 1954 to 1964. The committee was in a crucial position to direct research, convene seminars and conferences, award grants and launch academic careers. It pioneered the study of political development in the new states, applying modern scientific theory and methods. It also generated a series of pioneering studies, published by Princeton University Press. Throughout his career, Almond pursued his interests in post-colonial nations, the effects of public opinion and religion on politics, Communism, and the study of political science. He wrote or edited about two dozen books on these and other topics.

Almond's first books reflected the influence of Merriam and relied on survey data. The American People and Foreign Policy (1950) was a study of public opinion, and The Appeals of Communism (1953) a study of the personality of Communists. This interest grew out of his wartime work in US intelligence, which involved interviews with captured members of the German Gestapo and intelligence personnel.

There then followed work on political development in the newly independent new states in Africa and Asia and the landmark study The Civic Culture (1963), co-authored with the young Sidney Verba. The study of political culture grew out of Almond's early interest in public opinion and national character and tackled large themes. How do beliefs influence individual political behavior and the performance of a political system? What kind of values helps or hinder stable democracy? To address these questions the authors administered surveys in five countries: Britain, the United States, Mexico, West Germany, and Italy in 1959 and 1960. The desired culture was one which balanced popular deference, which allowed governors the freedom to make decisions, and a participatory outlook, which set limits on the rulers. Britain emerged as the ideal of civic culture.

Achievements

• Gabriel Almond was one of the most influential figures in post-war political science. He was a pioneer of the behaviouralist approach in the subject and in the 1960s and 1970s the most renowned researcher on comparative politics, political development, and political culture.
  
  Recognition of his contributions to political science was marked by numerous awards and fellowships in the United States and abroad. In 1965-1966, he was the President of the American Political Science Association, the most prestigious position in the profession and received its James Madison Award. He also received the Karl Deutsch Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Plutocracy And Politics In New York City

    (This study of plutocracy and politics in New York City in...)

    1998
  • The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations

    (This classic text is a comparative political study, based...)

    1963
  • Appeals of Communism

    (This study, based on an extensive program of interviewing...)

    1954
  • Comparative Politics Today

    (Comparative Politics Today is the text that helped define...)

    1974
  • European Politics Today

    (The first comprehensive survey to include Western and Eas...)

    1999
  • The Politics of the Developing Areas

    (A pioneering venture, this book is the first major effort...)

    1960
  • Ventures in Political Science

    (This volume collects together some of Gabriel Almond's mo...)

  • Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development 1973

Views

Gabriel Almond's work was not without its critics. Attempting to facilitate comparisons between Western and non-Western societies, he developed a new set of structural-functional categories, which for a time became the rage in academic political science. Critics complained that he was doing no more than inventing a new vocabulary, e.g. "political system" for the state, or "functions" for powers. He was also charged with being ethnocentric. His models of civic culture and political development were dismissed for being too Anglo-American (he greatly admired Britain). His efforts to integrate different approaches to the study of politics also found its critics.

Almond admitted that he "moved relentlessly back and forth from theory to empirical research" and sought to relate his studies to the great questions of political theory.

Almond's work consistently tried to synthesize traditional approaches, drawing on history and philosophy, with the new "harder" approaches, relying on mathematics and experiments. He was skeptical of monocausal approaches and the premature closure of economic models of explanation. Well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was writing about the persistence of pre-revolutionary beliefs - liberal, ethnic and nationalist - in Eastern Europe, in spite of the systematic inculcation of Communist ideas.

Membership

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  In 1965-1966, Gabriel Almond was the President of the American Political Science Association.

  American Political Science Association , United States

Personality

Gabriel Almond was a learned man who sought patterns and regularities in political behavior across time and space and who took intellectual risks in making generalizations and comparisons. He also liked to work in teams and to use case studies as a method of formulating and testing theories.

Connections

Gabriel Almond married Maria Dorothea Kaufmann on April 29, 1937. They had three children: Richard J., Peter O., Susan J.

Father:

David Moses Almond

Mother:

Lisa Almond

Son:

Peter O. Almond

Daughter:

Susan J. Almond

Son:

Richard J. Almond

Wife:

Maria Dorothea Kaufmann

teacher:

Harold Dwight Laswell

Harold Laswell was an American political scientist, whose main interest was in the area of propaganda. In 1948, he described a view of communication that emphasizes the effect of a message on the recipients. He authored more than 30 books and 250 scholarly articles on diverse subjects, including international relations, psychoanalysis, and legal education.

He taught political science at the University of Chicago in 1922-1938, where Gabriel Almond studied. Almond also wrote Harold Dwight Laswell Biographical Memoir.

teacher:

George Mead

Gabriel Almond studied under George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago.

teacher:

Charles Merriam

Gabriel Almond studied under Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago.