Lucian W. Pye (; October 21, 1921 – September 5, 2008) was an American political scientist, sinologist and comparative politics expert considered one of the leading China scholars in the United States. Educated at Carleton College and Yale University, Pye chose to focus on the characteristics of specific cultures in forming theories of political development of modernization of Third World nations, rather than seeking universal and overarching theories like most political scientists. As a result, he became regarded as one of the foremost contemporary practitioners and proponents of the concept of political culture and political psychology. Pye was a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 35 years and served on several Asia-related research and policy organizations. He wrote or edited books and served as advisor to Democratic presidential candidates, including John F. Kennedy. Pye died of pneumonia at age 86.
Early life
Lucian W. Pye was born on October 21, 1921, in Fenzhou, in Shanxi Province in northwest China. His father, Watts O. Pye, a graduate of Carleton College, and his mother, Gertrude Chaney Pye, were Congregational missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. When his father died in 1926, he and his mother stayed in Fenzhou until he moved to Oberlin, Ohio, for high school. Pye lost much of his grasp of the Chinese language upon moving to Ohio, only to take it up again later. Pye graduated in 1943 from Carleton College, where he met Mary Toombs Waddill, of Greenville, South Carolina; they married in 1945, and she would co-write and help edit many of his books and writings over the years.
Pye returned to China at the end of World War II to become an intelligence officer with the U.S. Marines Corps, achieving the rank of second lieutenant. He returned to the United States to attend graduate school through the G.I. Bill at Yale University, where he was introduced to comparative politics by his mentor, political scientist Gabriel Almond. Almond later said Pye "generally (left) me a little breathless; he had so much energy and enthusiasm." During his time at Yale, Pye worked with other notable political scientists like Almond, Harold Lasswell and Nathan Leites in exploring the psychological, sociological, and anthropological elements of international affairs, rather than applying the orthodox "realism" approach. Pye wrote his dissertation on the attitudes underlying the warlord system of politics in China during the 1920s and earned his Ph.D. in 1951.
Career
Early in his career, Pye worked with other political scientists to free the field from academic constraints placed upon them by the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1956, Pye joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies as a teacher in a new program, which eventually developed into a political science department, partially due to Pye's assistance. He taught political science at the M.I.T. for 35 years, particularly focusing on China and other Asian nations. M.I.T. officials said he was one of only a few scholars who studied Asian politics from a comparative standpoint, and he served as a mentor to several generations of students who went on to prominent positions in academia and government. Among his Ph.D. graduate students were Richard H. Solomon and Susan Shirk, both of whom were political scientists who served in the United States government, and Richard Samuels. Pye helped found the Committee on Comparatives Politics for the Social Science Research Council, along with other social scientists seeking alternative explanations for change than those offered by Marxism.