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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
There Was Something Odd About The Order in which S. E. Finer published on so many unrelated subjects. This must have had something to do with the gifts of penetration, precision, concision and clarity manifested in his way of writing, as well as, from a different point of view, with his innate talents as a conversationalist, let alone a teacher. (Be it recalled in passing that he was the most brilliant English-speaking teacher of politics in his generation.) Hence his facility and success in tackling any subject.
1 Finer, S. E., Comparative Government, Penguin, 1970, p. 574.Google Scholar
2 Finer, S. E., ‘An Idiosyncratic Retrospect’ in Government and Opposition, Vol. 15, Nos 3/4, SummerAutumn, 1980, p. 358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Comparative Government, pp. 39–40; pp. 60–10. The facade democracy comprises various combinations of autocracy and oligarchy (p. 125).
4 ibid., p. 61 (my italics).
5 Finer, S. E., ‘Almond’s Concept of the Political System: A Textual Critique’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1970, p. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 S. E. Finer, ‘An Idiosyncratic Retrospect’, p. 358.
7 Easton, David, ‘Political Science in the United States’ in Easton, David, Gunnell, J. G. and Graziano, Luigi (eds), The Development of Political Science, London, 1991, pp. 283–4.Google Scholar
8 Sartori, Giovanni, ‘Comparing how and why’ in Dogan, Mattei and Kazangciii, Al (eds), Comparing Nations, Blackwell/Unesco, 1994.Google Scholar
9 In ‘Almond’s Concept of “the Political System”’, p. 7.
10 Finer, S. E., ‘Perspectives in the World History of Government – A Prolegomenon’ in Government and Opposition, Vol. 18, Number 1, Winter 1983, pp. 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 In the Blackwell/Unesco book called Comparing Nations (why nations?), op. cit., Professor J. R. Forrest takes as the subject of an ‘Asynchronic comparison’: The weaker states in post-colonial Africa and medieval Europe. This, to quote Bentham, is nonsense on stilts. Even the ‘regal States’, England and France, began to emerge in the 15th century, after feudalism. What was there during feudalism was the universality of the Church, to be shaken by the appearance in succession of the Carolingian and the Ottonian empires and the Holy Roman Empire. Neither the structures nor the actors, or the belief systems resembled those of the nation-states. But as far as the comparison with the weak post-colonial African States (i.e. nation-states as recognized by the UN) is concerned, it is dear that the Christian belief system was, in medieval Europe, the strongest element of continuity and universal support. The political institution could be less well articulated and organized precisely because die belief system was, for the whole duration of medieval Europe, so infallible. We know much less of a system of belief covering all die African weak states. The economic, post-colonial and even ‘industrial’ problems of the ‘weak’ African states have no element of proper comparison with medieval Europe.
