Bertrand de Jouvenel: A Remembrance

Abstract

Bertrand de Jouvenel, who died a year ago this March, at the age of 83, is best known to American political scientists for three books—On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1957), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963)—and several essays, among them “The Chairman's Problem” and “The Nature of Political Science.”I almost met Bertrand de Jouvenel in the summer of 1964, when I was 20 years old, a political science major at Oberlin College, and the editor of a student political magazine called The Activist. I was also a student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, a prolific source of article ideas for the magazine, and a reliable guide to the academics and journalists who we often tapped for free copy. Since I was about to spend two months in France, and since Carey had been de Jouvenel's student at Berkeley when de Jouvenel was a Visiting Professor there, why not take a letter of introduction and get an Activist article from one of Europe's most famous political scientists?