Samuel Hutchison Beer Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Samuel Hutchison Beer (1911–2009) was an Eaton professor of the science of government at Harvard University and one of America’s most distinguished political scientists, especially renowned for his writings on British politics and American federalism.

Beer received his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, graduating with a bachelor of arts in 1932, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1932 to 1935.After working as an occasional speech writer for Franklin Roosevelt from 1935 to 1936, Beer became a reporter for the New York Post in 1936 and worked as a writer at Fortune magazine from 1937 to 1938.

Beer’s long career at Harvard University, begun as a graduate student in 1938, was interrupted by his service as a captain in the American military during World War II (1939–1945). After finally receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1943, he returned to the university after the war, teaching there until his retirement in 1981. For more than thirty years his lecture course, Western Thought and Institutions, the longest-running of Harvard’s famous postwar general education courses, was an inspiration to thousands of students, among them such notables as Henry Kissinger and William Rehnquist.

Beer published his Harvard dissertation as The City of Reason (1949), a work of political theory drawing on the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead and defending liberalism against the totalitarian threat. His Treasury Control: The Co-ordination of Financial and Economic Policy in Great Britain (1956) was a penetrating look into what had previously been the secretive workings of a key institution of the British cabinet. In 1965 his masterful study of British political parties and reigning ideologies, Modern British Politics: A Study of Parties and Pressure Groups (the first American edition was titled British Politics in the Collectivist Age) appeared. Arguing, among other things, that great moral ideas continue to shape political conflict in the age of interest groups, it is considered one of the most influential studies of British politics ever written, winning the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in 1966. Subsequent publications include The British Political System (1974) and Britain against Itself: Political Contradictions of Collectivism (1982). The latter traces the self-defeating pluralism, political overload, and “scramble for benefits” of 1970s British politics to the end of an inherited culture of deference and the erosion of class as a basis for party support. In 1993 Beer published To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism, in which he argued that the historical origins of American federalism do not support the conservative or “states’ rights” view of the system.

While teaching and publishing, Beer continued to be active in American politics, serving as national chair of Americans for Democratic Action from 1959 to 1962. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1977. During congressional deliberations on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998, Beer testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary, arguing against the use of impeachment as a partisan political weapon.

Intellectually vigorous and productive until his death in 2009 at age 97, Beer devoted his later research and writings to the search for an American public philosophy adequate to challenges of governance in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography:

Beer, Samuel. The City of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949.
Treasury Control: The Co-ordination of Financial and Economic Policy in Great Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Modern Political Development. New York: Random House, 1973.
Britain against Itself:The Political Contradictions of Collectivism. Norton, 1982.
Modern British Politics: Parties and Pressure Groups in the Collectivist Age. Norton, 1982.
First published as Modern British Politics: A Study of Parties and Pressure Groups, London: Faber and Faber, 1965, and as British Politics in the Collectivist Age, New York: Knopf, 1965.
To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.