Lucian Pye

Lucian W. Pye was born on October 21, 1921, in Fenzhou, in Shanxi Province in northwest China. His father, Watts O. Pye, a graduate of Carleton College, and his mother, Gertrude Chaney Pye, were Congregational missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. When his father died in 1926, he and his mother stayed in Fenzhou until he moved to Oberlin, Ohio, for high school. Pye lost much of his grasp of the Chinese language upon moving to Ohio, only to take it up again later. Pye graduated in 1943 from Carleton College, where he met Mary Toombs Waddill, of Greenville, South Carolina; they married in 1945, and she would co-write and help edit many of his books and writings over the years. Pye returned to China at the end of World War II to become an intelligence officer with the U.S. Marines Corps, achieving the rank of second lieutenant. He returned to the United States to attend graduate school through the G.I. Bill at Yale University, where he was introduced to comparative politics by his mentor, political scientist Gabriel Almond. Almond later said Pye "generally (left) me a little breathless; he had so much energy and enthusiasm." During his time at Yale, Pye worked with other notable political scientists like Almond, Harold Lasswell and Nathan Leites in exploring the psychological, sociological, and anthropological elements of international affairs, rather than applying the orthodox "realism" approach. Pye wrote his dissertation on the attitudes underlying the warlord system of politics in China during the 1920s and earned his Ph.D. in 1951. ==Career==

Early in his career, Pye worked with other political scientists to free the field from academic constraints placed upon them by the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Pye's approach was so novel that it often drew opposite reactions and criticism, but he nevertheless came to be considered a peer of the Chinese experts of his generation, like John K. Fairbank of Harvard. He emphasised the "need to create more effective, more adaptive, more complex, and more rationalised organisations" and saw the "heart" of the nation-building "problem" centered on the "interrelationships among personality, culture, and the polity". ARPA counterinsurgency research programs, such as the one done by Simulmatics Corporation, part of Project Agile, relied heavily on Pye's work. In 1985, Pye and his wife wrote Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority, which discussed commonalities in Asia' disparate political cultures. Critics of the book accused Pye of using flagrant stereotypes; Howard Wriggins, writing in Political Science Quarterly, asked, "Who but Lucian Pye would be bold enough" to undertake such a publication. Pye went on to serve as president of the American Political Science Association from 1988 to 1989. ==Death==

Pye died on September 5, 2008, in Boston, Massachusetts, at age 86. His health had gradually deteriorated after a fall the previous July, but the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia. He was survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Mary Waddill; his daughters Lyndy Pye of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Virginia Pye of Richmond, Virginia; his son, Chris, of Northampton; and three grandchildren, and Eva and Daniel Ravenal. Separate memorial services were in Belmont, Massachusetts, and at M.I.T. Charles Stewart, head of the M.I.T. political science department, said of Pye upon his death, "Lucian was a giant in the intellectual world that went well beyond our field of political science. For anyone ever called 'hero' or 'scholar' by Lucian, we must now live up to those titles he so cheerfully bestowed upon us." ==Major publications==

• 1956. Guerrilla Communism In Malaya, Its Social And Political Meaning. Princeton University Press. • 1958. "The Non-Western Political Process".Journal of Politics 20.3: 468–486. • 1962. ''Politics, Personality, And Nation-Building: Burma'S Search For Identity''. Yale University Press. • 1965. Political Culture And Political Development (Co-Editor And Co-Author). Studies In Political Development, Vol. 5. Princeton University Press. • 1968. The Spirit Of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study Of The Authority Crisis In Political Development. MIT Press. • 1971. Warlord Politics: Conflict And Coalition In The Modernization Of Republican China. New York: Praeger. • 1972. With Mary W. Pye. China: An Introduction. Boston: Little & Brown. • 1976. Mao Tse-Tung: The Man In The Leader. New York: Basic Books. • 1981. The Dynamics Of Chinese Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain. • 1982. Chinese Commercial Negotiating Style. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain. • 1985. With Mary W. Pye. Asian Power And Politics: The Cultural Dimensions Of Authority. Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press. • 1988. ''The Mandarin And The Cadre: China's Political Cultures''. Ann Arbor: Center For Chinese Studies, University Of Michigan. • ==Notes==