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Sammy Finer – Scholar and Human Being: A Pupil Remembers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
By Any Standards Sammy Finer's Career Was one of the utmost distinction. It was also an outstanding (and outstandingly merited) case of social mobility. He was but seven years-old when he first declared his ambition to be a university teacher, inspired by the example of his brother Herman at the LSE. He was indeed to make his way in a world that was entirely novel and, despite Herman's example, was bound to be in some respects am alien one. Seldom can a childhood ambition have been so fully attained – least of all in a milieu like that of Oxford, whose pathways are only slowly and reluctantly revealed to the newcomer.
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References
1 Oxford Magazine, 25 October 1934.
2 Lewis, David M. Professor in his The Jews of Oxford , Oxford 1992 (pp. 63–4)Google Scholar reports an estimate in May 1935 that put at 77 the number of Jewish undergraduates at Oxford and the later survey (1936–37) that showed a ‘quite astonishing’ increase to 120. Sammy Finer was part of a pioneering Jewish intake. Bright young Jews, native-born of immigrant parents, were coming on stream for Oxbridge scholarships from excellent grammar schools: and a modern meritocratic ethos smoothed their admittance.
3 See Finer, S. E., ‘Political Science: An Idiosyncratic Retrospect’ in A Generation of Political Thought, Government and Opposition, Vol. 15, No. 3/4, 1980, pp. 346–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 ibid., p. 347.
5 See for example his New Society article (22 January 1976) ‘On Terrorism’. He did not hesitate to join Leonard Schapiro, Max Beloff and Hugh Seton-Watson on the Council of the Institute for the Study of Conflict – a body which had little appeal to the conventional liberal imagination.
6 He mocked (and, I hope, offended) a whole set of international bienpensants by adding the following postscript to his New Society article on terrorism: ‘This article has been contributed by that well-known petty-bourgeois reactionary and social-chauvinist, the racial-zionist S. E. Finer.’.
7 Finer, 1980, op. cit, p. 130.
8 ibid., p. 150.
9 Letter by Ann Finer and Kate Finer in Jewish Chronicle, 30 July 1993.
10 Kavanagh, Dennis and Peele, Gillian (eds), Comparative Government and Politics: Essays in Honour of S. E. Finer , London, 1984.Google Scholar
11 Finer must have heard, as I did, Lindsay talk favourably of sociology in the late 1940s. I was never quite sure what Lindsay had in mind: up to a point it was a compound of the ideas of Karl Mannheim (with whom he had many agreeable meetings) and schemes for social improvement. But, allowing for his political and Christian preoccupations, he had a shrewd scepticism for the extremes both of theory and of fact-grubbing. (See the biography by his daughter Drusilla Scott, A. D. Lindsay, 1971).
12 Finer, 1980, p. 349.
13 There is a characteristically mordant, well-informed and fair-minded account of some of Pareto’s complex politics in Finer, S. E., ‘Pareto and Pluto-Democracy; The Retreat to Galapagos’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, 1968, p. 440 CrossRefGoogle Scholar et seq.
14 R. Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, 1992, p. 133.
15 I do not recall his ever mentioning Pareto in his Balliol classes. (The syllabus for PPE in those days did not include sociology.) So, piquantly, his reticence on Pareto meant that he, in turn, might seem to have passed what he called ‘the first duty of a tutor’. But we had many other reasons to be intellectually indebted to him.
16 Vilfredo Panto. Sociological Writings, ed. S. E. Finer, 1966, pp. 86–7.
17 Finer gave a short account of what he himself then understood by sociology at p. 81 of his introduction to the Pareto volume.
18 The Vocabulary of Political Science, Political Studies, Vol. 23, Nos 2–3, 1975, p. 245; see also ibid., p. 254.
19 All three of the papers cited in the text above are relevant here – especially the critique of Almond.
20 Government and Opposition, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1969–70.
21 Political Studies, Vol. 23, nos 2–3, 1975.
22 Government and Opposition, Vol. 15, No. 3/4, 1980.
23 Finer, op. cit., 1980, p. 358.
24 ibid., pp. 357–8.
25 op. cit., p. 363.
26 See the critique of Almond, p. 17. (The original text refers to ‘structure-rule which must be a misprint for structure-role’.