World-renowned political sociologist Juan José Linz Storch de Gracia was born in Bonn, Germany, on 24 December 1926, in a German–Spanish family. He spent his childhood in the Bavarian Forest, but then went with his Spanish mother to Madrid, where he was raised, becoming a Spanish citizen. After finishing his secondary education (bachillerato) in 1943, he enrolled in the Law School and also in the newly created Faculty of Political Science and Economics of the University of Madrid. He received his undergraduate degree in 1947 from the University of Madrid and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 1959, writing his dissertation under the direction of Seymour Martin Lipset. He served on the faculty at Columbia University (1961–1968) and Yale University (1968–1999), becoming a professor emeritus at Yale in 1999.

Linz was an enthusiastic and influential participant in a host of professional social science associations. Alongside Seymour Martin Lipset, Raymond Aron, Stein Rokkan and Shmuel Eisenstadt among others, he was a founding member of the Committee on Political Sociology (CPS) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the International Political Science Association (IPSA) (1960). He served as CPS chairman (1971–1979), as a member of the ISA Executive Committee (1974–1982), as chairman of the Council for European Studies (1973–1974) and as president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) (1974–1976).

For his research, Juan Linz received numerous tributes and accolades. He held honorary doctorates from the University of Granada (1976), Georgetown University (1992), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1992), Philipps-Universität Marburg (1992), the University of Oslo (2000) and Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (2002). He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. In 1987, he received Spain’s highest honour given to individuals, entities or organizations that make notable achievements in the sciences, humanities and public affairs: the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Ciencias Sociales. In 1993, the WAPOR awarded him its highest distinction, the Helen Dinerman Award. In 1996, Linz received what is popularly known as the Nobel Prize for political science, the University of Uppsala’s Johan Skytte Prize, for his ‘global investigation of the fragility of democracy in the face of authoritarian threat characterized by methodological versatility and historical and sociological breadth’. In 1998 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal British Academy, and in 2003 he received the Karl Deutsch Award, the most prestigious award granted by the IPSA.

Linz conducted research with magisterial talent and an interdisciplinary approach that ventured into the realms of history and sociology, and was directly inspired by many of the classics of social science, including the work of Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, Georg Simmel, Robert Michels and Émile Durkheim. His theoretical and empirical contributions to scholarly research concerned a broad set of questions at the intersection of society and politics, including political parties and electoral attitudes, cultural minorities and regional nationalism in relation to nation building (especially in the Basque region of Spain), federalism, business and local elites in Spain, various religious forms and politics, the relation between the State, ruling elites and society, the sociology of fascist movements between the two world wars and a host of other topics.

Principally, however, Juan Linz was widely recognized as a preeminent political sociologist for his seminal work on non-democratic political regimes, regime change and democratization, and political institutions and democratic politics. Drawing on his first-hand knowledge of Francisco Franco’s Spain, Linz was the scholar who originally developed, in 1964, the authoritarian regime ideal-type and questioned the totalitarianism-democracy dichotomy that prevailed after World War II in the comparative study of political regimes. In ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’ (1975), his 236-page contribution to the Greenstein and Polsby’s Handbook of Political Science, Linz designed a remarkably systematic and broad typology of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which other scholars have utilized intensively since its appearance. In the introductory volume Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration to his four-volume The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978), co-edited with Alfred Stepan, he formulated a new approach to studying the crisis of democracies that challenged Marxist theories (that highlighted economic causes), as well as other approaches (that focused on opposition groups) to explain why democratic regimes collapse. In his paper on presidentialism (1985), eventually published in the two-volume collection he co-edited with Arturo Valenzuela, The Failure of Presidential Democracy (1994), Linz launched a debate in comparative politics about the institutions of presidential democracy, arguing that presidential democracies were more prone to collapse than parliamentary ones. In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996), a co-authored book with Alfred Stepan, Linz contributed to the study of the transition to, and consolidation of, democracies in different areas of the world (Southern Europe, South America and post-Soviet Europe). In the doing, he introduced a novel focus on ‘stateness’ problems emerging from nationalist conflicts and stressed how the type of old non-democratic regimes affected subsequent trajectories of democratization.

Linz published nearly 300 book chapters, articles and short pieces such as encyclopaedia entries and book reviews that have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Turkish. Three exceptional sources on Linz’s thought and writings are his intellectual autobiography in Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession, edited by Hans Daalder (1997), his deeply interesting and extensive interview with Richard Snyder in Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics (2008), and the intellectual biography by José Ramón Montero and Thomas Jeffrey Miley in their recently published seven volume selected works of Linz, adroitly edited in Spanish as Juan J. Linz. Obras Escogidas by the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales in Madrid (2008–2013).

Juan Linz passed away on 1 October 2013, in the Yale Health Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut. Rest in peace, maestro de politólogos.