Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,851

This is the grave of Lucian Pye.

Born in 1921 in Fenzhou, Shanxi, China, Pye was the son of missionaries. His father died in China in 1926, but his mother stayed until the mid-30s, when it was time for Pye to attend high school. They moved to Oberlin, Ohio for that. He went to Carleton College, graduating in 1943. He then joined the military, being assigned as an intelligence officer for the Marines back in China. After being mustered out, he went to Yale to work on his Ph.D. in political science, which he achieved in 1951. Not surprisingly, he became a sinologist, writing his dissertation on warlord politics in the 20s.

Pye was a pretty ambitious guy, but he chose perhaps an odd place to base himself–MIT. Obviously one of the greatest schools, but for political science? Well, he made it pretty great in that field. He would teach there for the next 35 years. He became a critically important scholar on comparative politics in Asia, with particular interests in modernization theory. He was particularly uninterested in quantitive studies, understanding that numbers do not explain human behavior. He was pretty blunt about this stuff, which of course warms my deeply qualitative heart. As his daughter lated explained about his father’s ideas: “Political scientists are all failed novelists…..academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture.” Preach it.

Pye also took on the McCarthyite era of political science. He pushed to make the field more receptive to the developing world and to actively study local cultures, though he could certainly overgeneralize through his interest in behavioral ideas. In some ways, Pye was part anthropologist. He pushed the field of political science away from overarching theories. Good. Overarching theories always obscure more than they elucidate and that includes Marxism. In fact, one of Pye’s goals was to find alternatives to Marxism. He founded the Committee on Comparatives Politics within the Social Science Research Council to explore alternatives.

I think I will take a moment here to expound on this a bit. I have long believed that we need a post-Marxist left. What we actually have now is a left that doesn’t read anything, so maybe we sort of have that, but the reality is that among people on the left who do read, it’s still Marxism and it’s held onto like a religion. The problem with this is that all religion is bullshit and you can convince yourself that someone holds The Truth if you want to, but you are doing that because you want to and not because it is The Truth. The thing about what Pye was doing though–and I am not really criticizing him for this–is trying to create a liberal alternative. But liberalism also has very sharp limitations and nowhere was that more clear than in the Cold War, when enormous crimes against humanity that challenged those of communism or fascism were handwaved away. Some of that almost becomes a secular religion in its own right defining itself against those nasty leftists. So…I don’t know, it becomes hard to advocate for specific ideas of social change against two groups of people who are in part defined by hating each other without subscribing to either side. I guess this is why the left internet hates me and why my interactions with deeply held liberals on this site are…..problematic.

A good Democrat, Pye became an important advisor on Chinese matters to Democrats, including John F. Kennedy and Scoop Jackson. He was certainly a hawk of the JFK-LBJ school, very much supporting the Vietnam War in its early years. Communism had to be stopped I guess. But he also moved toward supporting normalization of relations with Beijing and was head of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations for a time, including the period when the American table tennis team visiting China in 1971, a seemingly minor but important moment.

Anyway, Pye did all sorts of work in southeast Asia. He studied the appeal of communism in Malaysia. That led to 1956’s Guerrilla Communism In Malaya, Its Social And Political Meaning. He worked with the Social Sciences Research Council to establish important institutes in Hong Kong. He researched in Burma. He strongly opposed the Hamlet program in South Vietnam, the beginning of him questioning the war. The Hamlet program was so stupid–nothing will gain the hearts and minds like forcing them from their homes and basically putting them in concentration camps! He certainly never opposed the war exactly; he was an aggressive foreign policy guy at heart. But he certainly recognized it was a disaster in fact and was ambivalent upon American withdrawal and North Vietnam taking Saigon in 1975. He was a big proponent of psychology and especially Freudianism, which he tried to apply to a study of Mao that I am sure does not hold up today in any way, shape, or form. But it was the times.

Now, I don’t know much about Pye’s wife Mary, but I assume she was also a political scientist or similar academic with professional training like so many wives of male academics in these years. I say that because in 1985, he published a book that actually had his wife’s name on it. That was Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority. I am sure that his wife did a huge amount of work on the previous books too. I do know that they met back at Carleton and had been together basically forever by this time. Now, this was not so well received, in part because the kind of broad generalizations about peoples that Pye had specialized in earlier in his career when such things were respectable were becoming more problematic by the 80s. He was accused of trafficking in stereotypes in this book, which I am sure is true, though I have no reason to read this book. His last major book was The Mandarin And The Cadre: China’s Political Cultures, from 1988.

Pye died in 2008. He was 86 years old.

Lucian Pye is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pye was president of the American Political Science Association in 1988-89. If you would like this series to visit other APSA presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kenneth Waltz is in Cape Rosier, Maine and Aaron Wildavsky is in Lafayette, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.