Guillermo O'Donnell (1936-2011)

Journal of Democracy, Volume 23, Number 2, April 2012, pp. 185-188

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0028

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/472537

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 Guillermo O’Donnell (1936–2011)

On October 29, Guillermo O’Donnell, professor emeritus of political

science at the University of Notre Dame and senior fellow at the Kel-
logg Institute for International Studies there, passed away in his native
Argentina. A longtime member of the Editorial Board and later the In-
ternational Advisory Committee of the Journal of Democracy and a reg-
ular contributor to its pages, he is widely regarded as the leading Latin
American political scientist of the past half-century. A major conference
in his honor is scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires on March 26–27
with the cosponsorship of the Universidad San Andrés, the Universi-
dad Nacional San Martín, the Latin American Program of the Wood-
row Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Kellogg Institute
for International Studies. We present below two tributes to O’Donnell:
The first, written by Scott Mainwaring, comes from the website of the
Kellogg Institute (http://kellogg.nd.edu/faculty/news/godonnell.shtml),
which also contains more information about the conference and links
to other tributes; the second was written especially for the Journal by
O’Donnell’s former coauthor Philippe Schmitter:

Scott Mainwaring, Director, Kellogg Institute for International

Studies, University of Notre Dame: Our dear friend and colleague
Guillermo O’Donnell died yesterday afternoon in his native Buenos Ai-
res at the age of 75, following a four-month battle against cancer.
O’Donnell was a giant in contemporary social science, known around
the world for his unique intellectual creativity, his pathbreaking origi-
nality, and his passion for democracies that function decently. His
scholarly work on authoritarianism and democracy established his inter-
national reputation as a brilliant and seminal thinker.
Closer to home, he played a pivotal role in creating and developing
the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. As Kellogg’s first aca-
demic director, he defined an exciting research agenda for the Institute
and built an outstanding program of visiting fellows. . . .
O’Donnell’s scholarly contributions can be grouped into three phases.
Early in his career, he worked primarily on the origins of authoritarianism
in South America, especially in the region’s more developed countries.
First published in 1973, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarian-
ism was a seminal work in understanding the origins of modern authori-
tarianism in Latin America.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Guillermo recognized that
186 Journal of Democracy

this was a new kind of authoritarian rule. Again unlike his contempo-
raries, he also understood that this new pattern of authoritarian rule
had profound theoretical implications for understanding the relation-
ship between modernization and democracy. He subsequently wrote
many important papers about the nature of authoritarianism in Latin
America.
In a second phase, O’Donnell was the pioneer in anticipating the
wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in 1978.
With remarkable prescience, when Latin America was at the zenith of
authoritarian rule, he correctly and almost uniquely understood that
many of the awful dictatorships then in power were likely to be tran-
sient. He studied internal contradictions within authoritarian regimes
and then analyzed the wave of transitions to democracy that resulted
in part from the tensions within authoritarianism that he had analyzed
earlier. Once again, he opened a new research question, hugely impor-
tant both theoretically and in the “real” world. His 1986 coedited vol-
ume, Transitions From Authoritarian Rule (Johns Hopkins University
Press), remains a classic. It is one of the most widely cited works in
political science.
Beginning in the late 1980s, O’Donnell’s attention turned to the severe
deficiencies of most democratic regimes, again with a primary focus on
Latin America. While countless other individuals observed these same
deficiencies, nobody matched his acuity in the theoretical analysis of new
issues that revolve around these shortcomings. He coined many important
concepts that remain at the core of analyses of contemporary democracy.
For example, his concept “delegative democracy” refers to democratic re-
gimes in which the president and congress are democratically elected, but
in which mechanisms of accountability are fragile. He contributed semi-
nal articles on accountability, the rule of law, and the relationship between
the state and democracy. His article, “Democracy, Law, and Compara-
tive Politics” (Studies in Comparative International Development, Spring
2001), won the Luebbert Prize for the best article in comparative politics,
awarded annually by the Comparative Politics section of the American
Political Science Association.
As a scholar, O’Donnell always focused on great normative is-
sues that confront contemporary humanity—how to build better de-
mocracies, how to ensure more effective rule of law and more even
citizenship. In the last two decades, he achieved a judicious balance
between criticizing the deficiencies of Latin American democracies
while at the same time not indulging in facile criticisms that could
fuel antidemocratic sentiment.
His scholarship won him wide recognition. A member of the Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Sciences, O’Donnell won the 2003 Kalman
Silvert Award for Lifetime Achievement, given every 18 months by the
Latin American Studies Association. He was president of the Interna-
Guillermo O’Donnell 187

tional Political Science Association from 1988 to 1991, and also served
as vice-president of the American Political Science Association from
1999 to 2000. In 2006, he won the inaugural Lifetime Achievement
Award of the International Political Science Association. He was the
recipient of countless other fellowships and awards, including the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Indicative of the nearly global reach of O’Donnell’s work, it has been
translated into Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and, of course,
English. In recent years, several leading Latin American universities
awarded him honorary Ph.D.s and other distinctions.
Throughout his career, O’Donnell posed great new theoretical ques-
tions about tremendously important developments in the contemporary
world. He was a deeply learned person who always drew upon the an-
tecedent scholarship, yet one of his extraordinary gifts was recognizing
new questions and new problems that had not hitherto been addressed.
He stands as one of the most important thinkers about democracy and
dictatorships in the history of political science.

Philippe C. Schmitter, European University Institute, Florence:

If I learned one thing from my association with Guillermo, it was that
a political scientist should be responsible.
For him, this implied at least three things.
First and foremost, it meant the capacity to think like a politician:
to understand (but not necessarily to admire) the dilemmas that poli-
ticians have to face when making important decisions with limited
knowledge, under contingent circumstances, and despite uncertain ca-
pacities both to act and, then, to deal with the often-unintended con-
sequences of their decisions. For exercising power—whether publicly
or privately, legitimately or illegitimately—demands a special set of
skills. Machiavelli bundled them together and labeled them virt` u .
Granted, not all politicians have these skills, but postulating
that they could act “rationally” by knowing all the alternatives and
their consequences and choosing the one that optimized their great-
est marginal return; or “behaviorally” by consulting public opinion
and choosing the option that best ensured their reelection or reap-
pointment; or “systemically” by responding passively to a fixed set
of functionally determined requisites—all these points of departure
violated this basic imperative of basing one’s analysis on the capacity
to think in a politically distinct manner. Needless to say, this banned
Guillermo from membership in any of the fashionable paradigms that
have swept through the academic discipline of political science in
recent decades.
Second, Guillermo wrote as a citizen, not as an academic. Every
one of his works was addressed to an imagined audience of intelli-
gent and critical persons of indeterminate nationality. Of course, he
188 Journal of Democracy

had specific polities in mind—not least his native Argentina—but his

message (like his vocabulary) was infallibly generic, which explains
why both practitioners and scholars in such a wide range of cultures
and contexts could understand what he was saying.
He had a notable flare for coming up with novel and apposite con-
cepts. “Bureaucratic authoritarianism” and “delegative democracy”
may have been difficult for positivist-minded academics to measure
precisely, but they accurately captured critical emergent properties of
regimes. My personal favorite was his distinction between “blandos”
and “duros” which I faithfully translated into the more prosaic Eng-
lish of “soft-liners” and “hard-liners.” I sometimes wonder whether
a scholar such as Guillermo (or myself) could make it through the
overprofessionalized and overspecialized discipline of political sci-
ence under today’s conditions without paying stricter attention to
“peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals” or without anchoring
oneself safely in the company of fellow travelers following the same
“dominant paradigm.”
Third, Guillermo focused his attention—especially in his latest
works—on a particularly critical aspect of politics, namely, agency.
Without the capacity—collective or individual—to make a differ-
ence, to exercise power in order to rise above the determinants of
what Machiavelli called necessit` a and fortuna, politics would be an
irrelevant activity. We tried to capture this in our Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democ-
racies. But that book dealt specifically with the highly uncertain pe-
riod of regime transformation when the behavior of actors or agents
is manifestly underdetermined by the absence of agreed-upon rules
and the ambiguous presence of new and untested organizations. In
his subsequent work, Guillermo carried this notion further—into the
functioning of the democracies that emerged from such a transforma-
tion—however dubious he often regarded their democratic credentials
as being.
It was a responsibility of both citizens and rulers, he believed, to act
as agents in both defending and changing existing rules and distribu-
tions of power. Guillermo clearly had a preference for the latter—but
it did not blind him from acknowledging the dominant influence of
entrenched interests and routinized behaviors. Nevertheless, he felt, a
responsible political scientist should not only look for opportunities
to exercise agency, but should also encourage citizen agents to take
advantage of the “political spaces” (another of Guillermo’s favorite
concepts) they opened up.
Guillermo and I were brought together by momentary political cir-
cumstance. From it, we forged an enduring personal friendship. I like
to think that this combination resulted in an opus that was better—and
more responsible—than either of us could have produced alone.