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Ghiţa Ionescu 1913–96: Freedom and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

John Pinder
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Ghiţa Ionescu's Formal Academic Career Began When He reached the London School of Economics in 1963, at the age of fifty. Within three years he had published three books and become the founder-editor of Government and Opposition. He went on to edit the journal for the next thirty-one years and to bring the total number of his books to fourteen, five of them comprising a brilliant series on the East European communist states and the rest mainly on the challenges, both internal and external, facing the liberal democracies in advanced industrial society. He became Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and chairman, for over two decades, of the Research Committee on European Unification of the International Political Science Association. He inspired and energized countless students and colleagues. The main purpose of this article is to explore the significance of these achievements. But first, a word about the motive forces behind them.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 400 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1996

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References

1 Ionescu, Ghita, Communism in Rumania 1944–1962, London, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 46–47.Google Scholar The spelling ‘Rumania’ was normal in the 1960s, but ‘Romania’ has since become standard and is used in the text of this article.

2 ibid., pp. 61–2, 143.

3 Campbell, John C., The Independent, 6 07 1996.Google Scholar

4 Ionescu, Ghita and de Madariaga, Isabel, Opposition: Past and Present of a Political Institution, London, C. A. Watts, 1968;Google Scholar paperback, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972, p. 16.

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7 See Mayne, Richard, ‘Europe’s éminence grise’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 07 1996, p. 31.Google Scholar

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9 Campbell, op. cit.

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11 ibid., p. 139.

12 Ionescu, Ghita, The Politics of the East European Communist States, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967, p. 286.Google Scholar

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14 Ionescu used this term in his Leadership in an Interdependent World: The Statesmanship of Adenauer, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev, Harlow, Longman, 1991, p. 289.

15 Ionescu, Ghita, The Break‐up of the Soviet Empire, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965;Google Scholar hardback Westport Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1984 (from which page references are given), p. 150.

16 ibid., p. 84.

17 op. cit. (n. 12, above); citation from Finer, S. E., ‘Foreword’, in Parry, Geraint (ed.), Politics in an Interdependent World: Essays presented to Ghila lonescu, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1994,Google Scholar p. x.

18 Ionescu, Ghita, Comparative Communist Politics, London, Macmillan, 1972,CrossRefGoogle Scholar published in association with Government and Opposition in the series of Studies in Comparative Politics, edited by S. E. Finer and Ghita Ionescu. In addition to Ionescu and Finer themselves, the authors of the series included Apter, David E. and Joll, James, Brown, A. H., Crick, Bernard, Dodd, C. H., Mackenzie, W. J. M., Wallace, William and Williams, Roger.Google Scholar

19 Cited in The Politics of the European Communist States, p. 87.

20 loc. cit.

21 ibid., pp. 55–64.

22 Opposition, p. 17.

23 The Politics of the European Communist States, p. 165.

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27 op. cit. (n. 17, above), p. xi.

28 op. cit. (n. 4, above).

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30 Bernard Crick’s formulation, which the authors cited on p. 127 of Opposition.

31 op. cit. (n. 29, above).

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33 Centripetal Politics, p. 8.

34 ibid., p. 128.

35 ibid., p. 206.

36 ibid., p. 160.

37 Ionescu, Ghita (ed.), The New Politics of European Integration, London, Macmillan, 1972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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48 ibid., pp. 4, 180–1.

49 ibid., pp. 8, 231.

50 London, Macmillan, 1921 (originally in Spanish, Madrid, 1912).

51 Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness, op. cit., p. 11.

52 ibid., p. 111.

53 op. cit. (n. 17, above). The contributors were Benjamin R. Barber, Klaus von Beyme, Michael Biddiss, Ronald Dore, S. E. Finer, Ernest Geliner, Karlheinz Neunreither, Emile Noël, Geraint Parry, John Pinder, Susan Strange and Roger Williams.