The Soviet Dictatorship

New York: McGraw-Hill Book COmpany, Inc, 1960. Presumed first edition/first printing. Hardcover. Good. No dust jacket. Signed by previous owner. Cover has some wear and soiling.. xiii, 657, [1] p. 24 cm. Charts. Footnotes. Index. From a university posted obituary: "Herbert McClosky, a University of California, Berkeley, political science professor emeritus who used survey instruments to perform pioneering research into political beliefs, attitudes and ideologies, died Monday. He was 89 years old. McClosky, who joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1960 and taught there for almost three decades, was a major force in the work of the campus's Survey Research Center and the establishment of "political behavior" as a graduate teaching field within the campus's Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science. McClosky's research included two major books, "Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe About Civil Liberties" (with Alida Brill, 1983), and "The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy" (with John Zaller, 1984), as well as numerous articles written over the last half-century that are still cited and relied upon by contemporary researchers. One of these articles, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics, " (1964) was recently identified as the 13th most cited American Political Science Review article in the last 100 years. McClosky also wrote a major text on the Soviet Union, "The Soviet Dictatorship" (with J. Turner, 1960). According to Dennis Chong, a Northwestern University political science professor and one of McClosky's former doctoral students, "Herb McClosky's survey research on the social psychological foundations of democratic institutions helped transform the theory and methodology of modern political science. He illuminated the big imponderables of society, such as intolerance, political alienation, conformity, and ideological conflict, by showing how these phenomena could be explained-at least partly-by systematic social processes." McClosky worked his way through the then-private University of Newark (now Rutgers-Newark), studying economic history, political philosophy and comparative government. He received his bachelor's degree from the university in 1940, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He then repeated his academic success in graduate work at the University of Minnesota, earning a doctorate degree in 1946. As a very junior member of the University of Minnesota faculty, his teaching in the humanities program and in political science was widely admired for its vitality and range, according to colleagues....he also joined the brain trust that the young Mayor Hubert Humphrey gathered about him in the course of consolidating the Minnesota Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and while seeking to rid the municipal government of Minneapolis of corruption, anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. While at Minnesota, McClosky gravitated toward the world-famous cluster of social psychologists that then taught on the Minneapolis campus-especially Paul Meehl, then-chair of the university's psychology department, ...And, with the help of a multi-year grant, McClosky supplemented his doctoral education with post-doctoral training in social psychology, psychometrics and survey research. From the mid-1950s onward, a hallmark of McClosky's work was the design and application of elaborate survey instruments to the study of political attitudes and their foundations in core ideological beliefs...After an immensely productive two decades at the University of Minnesota, McClosky moved to UC Berkeley where he set up his influential program of teaching and research in behavioral political science. During his academic career McClosky was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served as vice president of the American Political Science Association and worked with or led numerous research foundations and councils. Upon his retirement from UC Berkeley in 1987, campus officials awarded him the Berkeley Citation for notable professional achievement and service to the university."