Juan José Linz
Juan José Linz ( born December 24, 1926 in Bonn, † October 1, 2013 in New Haven, Connecticut ) was a German - Spanish political scientist. He was emeritus Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University and an honorary member of the Scientific Council at the Juan March Institute.
Life
As a German father and a Spanish mother child Juan J. Linz was born on 24 December 1926 in Bonn. In 1932 the family moved to Spain, where he economics, political science and studied law after graduating from the University of Madrid.
1950 successful and award-winning graduates, another study of sociology at Columbia University, New York followed, where he obtained his doctorate with a study of the German elections.
As a teaching faculty member at Columbia University, he took henceforth noticeable influence on Spanish sociology with a number of important empirical studies that have been produced in collaboration with the Spanish sociologist who followed partly Linz to New York. 1958 Linz returned back to Spain and led the newly founded Autonomous University of Madrid, a study on the Spanish economy. In 1961 he moved back to New York as a lecturer at Columbia University.
In 1968 he accepted an appointment at Yale University in New Haven (USA). In addition, Linz taught, among others at the Universities of Berkeley, Stanford, Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin, and at the European University Institute in Florence.
Research priorities
Juan J. Linz is known in political science for his theories on totalitarian and authoritarian systems, in which one he hurried dictatorships. Linz did also show by extensive research on power structures and the transition autocratic systems in democracies.
Linz deal with a wide range of topics, including studies of social structures and political parties in Germany, the economic life and the balance of power in Spain, the structure and dynamics of social groups in the Iberian Peninsula, and more. His works on the sociology of youth and the sociology of fascism in Spain are particularly well known.
His work was an important point of reference during the Spanish democratization process after the end of the Franco regime in 1975. His studies on Spanish politics involved controversial issues, such as terrorism or regional nationalism, and have there today great impact on the understanding of public life.
His theories on the classification of authoritarian regimes and the process of transition from dictatorship to democracy has been applied by many researchers for case studies in Latin America and Europe. Linz is the author of numerous works on the problems in the transformation of authoritarian regimes to democracies in Southern Europe, South America and post-communist countries.
Writings
- Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Berlin debate science -Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-931703-43-6.
- Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, 2nd revised and enlarged edition, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-931703-88-6.
- Authoritarian regimes, in: Dieter Nohlen (ed.): Dictionary of government and politics, Munich 1996, pp. 40-43.
- Together with Alfred Stepan: Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post- communist Europe, Baltimore 1996 ISBN 0-8018-5158-0.
- Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Edited and translated by Raymond Chandler. 3rd edition. Potsdamer text books 4th World Trends, Potsdam, 2009. ISBN 978-3-941880-00-9
- An authoritarian regime: the case of Spain. Edited and translated by Raimund Krämer and Christoph Sebastian Widdau. Potsdamer text books 13th World Trends, Potsdam, 2011. ISBN 978-3-941880-35-1