It Was An Honour To Be Invited To contribute to this special issue, yet I hesitated to take up the invitation. A learned journal is no place for expressions of wifely tribute, had such ever been my style, and I am not a political scientist. In the end, however, it was precisely the lack of specialist qualification which persuaded me. Sam's influence and appeal, as both scholar and teacher, were after all never confined to the realms of political science per se – any more than were his sources of reference and inspiration.

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.

There Was Something Odd About The Order in which S. E. Finer published on so many unrelated subjects. This must have had something to do with the gifts of penetration, precision, concision and clarity manifested in his way of writing, as well as, from a different point of view, with his innate talents as a conversationalist, let alone a teacher. (Be it recalled in passing that he was the most brilliant English-speaking teacher of politics in his generation.) Hence his facility and success in tackling any subject.

The Dustjacket of S. E. Finer's Adversary Politics and electoral Reform, published in 1975, reminds us that his older brother Herman Finer was one of the staunchest and best-known opponents of proportional representation (PR), and points out that S. E. Finer long shared his brother's point of view: in fact, ‘until twelve months ago Professor Finer was still adhering to this view. In advocating proportional representation as he does in this book, . . . he has abandoned the intellectual convictions of a lifetime’. In his later essay ‘Adversary Politics and the Eighties,’ published in 1982, he again pinpoints 1974 as the year of his conversion to PR.

It Was In 1962 In The Man on horseback, A Book which has long since become a classic, that S. E. Finer drew attention to a class of country in which the government was repeatedly subject to the interference of its armed forces: the military, he noted ‘as an independent political force, constitutes a distinct and peculiar political phenomenon’. Beginning from the political strengths and weaknesses of the military, his analysis addressed the disposition of the military to intervene in politics and its opportunities for doing so, and he brought out the different forms such intervention could take and the different levels to which it could be pressed. In effect, he also turned on its head a prevailing if tacit assumption. Given their ‘vastly superior organization’ and their arms, it seemed to him that ‘Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we Ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise’.

It is a Recurrent Theme of Comments on Sammy Finer's writing that, like his talk, it dazzled. Perhaps, as he himself said of his Compurutiue Government text compared to his own lectures, the written version might be ‘less picturesque and Mediterranean’ but it could still enliven the most apparently dull topics within political science. Thus it may seem curious to draw attention to a work of his which betrays fewer of these qualities. The work is Five constitutions published in 1979.

Sammy Finer Contributed To so Many Areas of political science – comparative government, international relations, sociological theory, electoral studies – that it is often forgotten that his first love was public administration, the subject of his first two books, his Primer of public Administration, published in 1950 and his biography of Sir Edwin Chadwick published in 1952. In addition, Sammy published a seminal article on ‘The Individual Responsibiity of Ministers’ in the journal Public Administration in 1956.

In that article, written in the aftermath of the Crichel Down controversy, Sammy refuted what he called the ‘folklore’ that surrounded the principle of individual responsibility, showing that there was no convention of resignation for administrative fault, and that, in any case, resignation was an ineffective remedy for departmental mismanagement.