A Tribute to Samuel Beer: Samuel H. Beer and the Possibilities of Politics

The death on 7 April 2009 of Samuel Beer, still vigorous at the age of 97, marks the passing of an era in the study of British politics, not least in the United States where he towered over the field for more than 50 years. This is an appropriate moment to reflect on the distinctive perspectives Beer brought to the study of politics. Although he was a scholar of American federalism and European political development, as well as British politics, Beer’s work had an underlying unity and, as we create our own frameworks of understanding, it is worth recalling the vision of politics articulated by one of the twentieth-century scholars who thought most deeply about it. I first became aware of Beer several years before I met him when, upon arriving at Oxford, I realized I should learn something about British politics. I asked a politics tutor to recommend some reading, expecting to emerge with a long list of books by Oxford dons. To my surprise, he declared that the best book ever written about British politics was the work of an American and he sent me to find Modern British Politics by Samuel H. Beer. I must confess that an initial reading of the book left me confused. Astute enough to recognize it as a work of extraordinary scholarship, I was not yet familiar enough with British politics, or maybe even politics as a whole, to appreciate what was on offer. It seemed a book and a half, dense with observations about the character of British politics and much deeper than the text I had been expecting. Only later did I realize that this is a book, not only about party politics in Britain, but also about the character of politics itself and in many ways a timeless work. Why does Beer’s work have a depth and timeless character rarely attained in political science? In some measure, those qualities derive from the significance of the questions he asks and the levels of insight he brings to bear on them, born of a lifetime of study. How is the traditional combined with the new in contemporary British politics? Why did a country that governed itself so well for so long do so poorly in the 1970s? What role do the states really play in American federalism, and why does power shift back and forth between