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Ghiţa Ionescu 1913–96: Freedom and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Extract

Ghiţa Ionescu's Formal Academic Career Began When He reached the London School of Economics in 1963, at the age of fifty. Within three years he had published three books and become the founder-editor of Government and Opposition. He went on to edit the journal for the next thirty-one years and to bring the total number of his books to fourteen, five of them comprising a brilliant series on the East European communist states and the rest mainly on the challenges, both internal and external, facing the liberal democracies in advanced industrial society. He became Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and chairman, for over two decades, of the Research Committee on European Unification of the International Political Science Association. He inspired and energized countless students and colleagues. The main purpose of this article is to explore the significance of these achievements. But first, a word about the motive forces behind them.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1996

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References

1 Ionescu, Ghita, Communism in Rumania 1944–1962, London, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 4647.Google Scholar The spelling ‘Rumania’ was normal in the 1960s, but ‘Romania’ has since become standard and is used in the text of this article.

2 ibid., pp. 61–2, 143.

3 Campbell, John C., The Independent, 6 07 1996.Google Scholar

4 Ionescu, Ghita and de Madariaga, Isabel, Opposition: Past and Present of a Political Institution, London, C. A. Watts, 1968;Google Scholar paperback, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972, p. 16.

5 Schapiro, Leonard, ‘Foreword’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 1, No. 1, 10 1965, p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ionescu, Ghita, ‘What is Political Thought Thinking of Now?– Reading Notes 1964–1980’, in A Generation of Political Thought, fifteenth anniversary issue of Government and Opposition, Vol. 15, No. 3/4, Summer/Autumn 1980, p. 405.Google Scholar This article gives a flavour of the Notes throughout that period.

7 See Mayne, Richard, ‘Europe’s éminence grise’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 07 1996, p. 31.Google Scholar

8 Communism in Rumania.

9 Campbell, op. cit.

10 Ionescu, Ghita, The Reluctant Ally: A Study of Communist Neo‐Colonialism, London, Ampersand, 1965.Google Scholar

11 ibid., p. 139.

12 Ionescu, Ghita, The Politics of the East European Communist States, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967, p. 286.Google Scholar

13 Communism in Rumania, pp. 346, 348, 351.

14 Ionescu used this term in his Leadership in an Interdependent World: The Statesmanship of Adenauer, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev, Harlow, Longman, 1991, p. 289.

15 Ionescu, Ghita, The Break‐up of the Soviet Empire, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965;Google Scholar hardback Westport Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1984 (from which page references are given), p. 150.

16 ibid., p. 84.

17 op. cit. (n. 12, above); citation from Finer, S. E., ‘Foreword’, in Parry, Geraint (ed.), Politics in an Interdependent World: Essays presented to Ghila lonescu, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1994,Google Scholar p. x.

18 Ionescu, Ghita, Comparative Communist Politics, London, Macmillan, 1972,CrossRefGoogle Scholar published in association with Government and Opposition in the series of Studies in Comparative Politics, edited by S. E. Finer and Ghita Ionescu. In addition to Ionescu and Finer themselves, the authors of the series included Apter, David E. and Joll, James, Brown, A. H., Crick, Bernard, Dodd, C. H., Mackenzie, W. J. M., Wallace, William and Williams, Roger.Google Scholar

19 Cited in The Politics of the European Communist States, p. 87.

20 loc. cit.

21 ibid., pp. 55–64.

22 Opposition, p. 17.

23 The Politics of the European Communist States, p. 165.

24 Ionescu, Ghita, ‘Eastern Europe’, in lonescu, G. and Gellner, Ernest (eds), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristies. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.Google Scholar

25 Comparative Communist Politics, pp. 31, 33.

26 ibid., pp. 58–9.

27 op. cit. (n. 17, above), p. xi.

28 op. cit. (n. 4, above).

29 Ionescu, Ghita, Centripetal Politics: Government and the New Centres of Power, London, Hart‐Davis, MacGibbon, 1975.Google Scholar

30 Bernard Crick’s formulation, which the authors cited on p. 127 of Opposition.

31 op. cit. (n. 29, above).

32 Ionescu, Ghita, ‘Introduction’, in Ionescu (ed.), The Political Thought of Saint‐Simon, London, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 54.Google Scholar Ionescu admired Saint‐Simon’s foresight in perceiving, already by the first years of the nineteenth century, many of the coming attributes of industrial society.

33 Centripetal Politics, p. 8.

34 ibid., p. 128.

35 ibid., p. 206.

36 ibid., p. 160.

37 Ionescu, Ghita (ed.), The New Politics of European Integration, London, Macmillan, 1972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Introduction’, in ibid., pp. xiii, xiv.

39 Ionescu, Ghita (ed.), Between Sovereignty and Integration, London, Croom Helm, 1974.Google Scholar

40 ‘Introduction’, in ibid., pp. 9, 22, 23.

41 Ionescu, Ghita (ed.), The European Alternatives: An Enquiry into the Policies of the European Community, Alphen aan den Rijn, Sijthoff & Nordhoff, 1979.Google Scholar

42 Leadership in an Interdependent World.

43 Adenauer, Konrad, Memoirs, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966, pp. 416–7,Google Scholar cited in ibid., pp. 63–4.

44 See Friedrich, Carl J., Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice, London, Pall Mall Press, 1968.Google Scholar

45 Ionescu, Ghita, Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness: An Enquiry into the Involvement of Human Beings in the Politics of Industrial Society, Harlow, Longman, 1984, p. vii.Google Scholar

46 Rousseau, J. J., Du Bonheur Public, cited in ibid., pp. 62–3.Google Scholar

47 Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness, op. cit., p. 17.

48 ibid., pp. 4, 180–1.

49 ibid., pp. 8, 231.

50 London, Macmillan, 1921 (originally in Spanish, Madrid, 1912).

51 Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness, op. cit., p. 11.

52 ibid., p. 111.

53 op. cit. (n. 17, above). The contributors were Benjamin R. Barber, Klaus von Beyme, Michael Biddiss, Ronald Dore, S. E. Finer, Ernest Geliner, Karlheinz Neunreither, Emile Noël, Geraint Parry, John Pinder, Susan Strange and Roger Williams.