Learning About Politics in Time and Space: A Memoir (Ecpr Essays) - Softcover

Rose, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190730147X ISBN 13: 9781907301476

Verlag: ECPR Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Using skills developed since teaching himself to type at the age of eight, Rose describes his 20 years of working in newspapers, radio and television before publishing his first book.

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By Richard Rose

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Learning About Politics in Time and Space

By Richard Rose

ECPR Press

Copyright © 2014 Richard Rose
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-907301-47-6

Contents

List of Photographs, 
Introduction, 
Reflections From Experience, 
A Memoir, 
The Perspective of the Author, 
SOCIALIZATION OF A SOCIAL SCIENTIST, 
Chapter 1: The Roots of a Political Scientist, 
Chapter 2: Discovering Learning, 
Chapter 3: The Education of Amateur Political Scientists, 
Chapter 4: The Professionalization of Political Science, 
EXPERIENCING HISTORY FORWARDS, 
Chapter 5: England Then and Now, 
Chapter 6: America Then and Now, 
Chapter 7: Northern Ireland: Nothing Civil About Civil War, 
Chapter 8: Fallout From the Berlin Wall, 
LEARNING TO COMPARE, 
Chapter 9: Concepts Are More Than Words, 
Chapter 10: Communicating What You Know, 
Chapter 11: Public Policy and Political Science, 
References, 
Brief Curriculum Vitae, 

CHAPTER 1

The Roots of a Political Scientist

If someone asks — Where are you from? — almost everyone has more than one answer. You can name the city where you were born or where you live now; Londoners can give the name of their borough and a Viennese the number of their district. If travelling in the United States, saying you are from Europe can be sufficient to explain your ignorance of what the World Series of baseball is about. Saying you are from America can invite Europeans to ask if you know their friend who lives 2,000 miles from your home. History and politics have dealt older peoples of Central and Eastern Europe a more complicated choice: they can either give the name of the city or country in which they were born, for example, Breslau, then in Germany, or Wroclaw, the name it now bears as one of the largest cities in Poland. Naming your birthplace explains the soil in which you are rooted and nurtured, whereas your current residence shows where you have got to through choice or the vicissitudes of work and politics.

When asked where I am from, the answer I give depends on who asks, where, and why. The simplest answer, because of its multiple overtones, is to say that I come from a border state. If a precise answer is appropriate, then I say that I come from the States. This can then be elaborated by adding that I am from St. Louis like T. S. Eliot, and that Miles Davis came from across the river in East St. Louis. My explanation for not living in America now is that, since I couldn't get spit out of a trumpet, I went to Oxford. If asked in America where I am from, then I reply Missouri or St. Louis. If asked by a St. Louisan where I come from, then I reply, Clayton, the suburb of 15,000 in which I grew up.

If a cab driver in a European country asks me where I am from, the answer is usually Scotland. It is where I have lived for almost half a century and though not a state, it is an internationally recognised place. If a Scot asks me where I am from, the answer is Helensburgh, where the Highlands come down to the sea west of Glasgow. In pursuit of clearer international recognition, my academic base, the University of Strathclyde, has modified its name. Since few people know the meaning of 'strath'(a broad valley in Gaelic) and not many more know that the Clyde is the river that Glasgow straddles, it now calls itself the University of Strathclyde Glasgow.

The epigram — the past is another country — becomes more relevant the older one gets. Since I was born in St. Louis, the population of the United States has grown by more than 150 million people, while the British Empire, which once had upwards of a billion people nominally subject to its King and Emperor, has disappeared. Of the 28 countries that are now EU member states, most have experienced one or more changes of political regime, France has had four regimes, and Germany has become a paradigm example of a good European democracy.

The past is not so much gone as it is under foot. In the evocative German phrase it is one's Grund das Wesen, that is, the ground of one's being. It is the starting point for learning about politics. Socialization involves learning how to fit into your place of origins and what to make of the opportunities it offers. This is not only a question of what will grow best in the soil, but also what individuals make of their surroundings. Marcel Proust turned a small child's bedroom in his grandmother's house in a small French village into the first pages of his multi-volume search for time past. Aaron Wildavsky (1971) celebrated the fact that nobody ever told him he was wrong to go to a low-prestige local school, Brooklyn College, because it gave him the educational foundation to become a world famous academic. Only afterwards does one branch out.

Everyone, including people who become professors, learns about life in many ways besides reading a set list of books and crunching numbers in a computer. One learns from family and friends before going to school, and from books discovered in libraries as well as from textbooks. If you have eyes and ears and intelligence, there is a lot that can be learned by getting out of the familiar setting established by family, friends and school to see what else is happening in your native city. If all these resources are drawn upon, by the time one starts the academic study of social science, there is a fund of experiences against which the concepts and insights in books can be tested. To supplement the limited education offered in my school, I went to the library and explored the streets of a big metropolitan area.

Growing Up in a Border City

St. Louis is on the west bank of the Mississippi River at its convergence with the Missouri River. Together, the two rivers have a length more than twice that of the Danube and five times that of the Rhine. They drain the great mass of land between the mountains that separate the American Middle West from the once colonial cities of America's East Coast and what was in my boyhood the lightly populated Pacific Coast. St. Louis was founded by the French in 1763 and briefly under the Spanish flag. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of local difficulties in Europe, that is, the Napoleonic wars, to buy from France the whole of the Louisiana territory, which included the great bulk of the lands west of the Mississippi. St. Louis was never under a British flag nor were there large waves of immigrants from England.

St. Louis boomed in the 1840s, making it a magnet for two groups wanting to leave Europe, Irish fleeing the famine and liberal Germans frustrated by the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament to unify Germans peacefully (Rippley 1984). My father's family were South St. Louis Dutch (that is, Deutsch). His grandparents were born in Alsace, whatever country it was then in. The family had arrived in St. Louis by 1860, for one of my great-great uncles served with Union troops in the American Civil War. When I was growing up, the bakeries, the beer advertisements, the turns of phrase and the surnames of many people were German in origin. Thus, the phone book entries under Sch- were as numerous as those for Mac in Scotland. When I visited Mannheim for the first time in 1965 I was struck by the faces of the older women I saw on the street; they reminded me of people I had seen at my grandmother's funeral. When I shut my eyes listening to an operetta on a hot summer night in a Budapest park in 1989 I was almost back at the summer opera in St. Louis a half century earlier.

America's entry into the First World War in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECPR Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 190730147X
• ISBN 13: 9781907301476
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 212
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Libri GmbH; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; Hessen; Deutschland