In memoriam: Lucien Pye

Lucien Pye, the great MIT political scientist of Asia, has died at the age of 86. Story here.  Pye's work was of an earlier era of cultural analysis; his mid-1980s book, Asian Power and Politics, sought to find commonalities among various Asian political cultures.  Many of us have devoted many pages to attacking this kind of analysis, but like other great cultural analysts, Pye had a keen eye and a creative ability to characterize and syntehsize disparate phenomena.  Among other concepts, he coined the idea of the "one and a half party system," which from the perspective of mid-1980s East Asia, made a good deal of sense.

--Tom