Lucian Pye is Ford Professor of Political Science Emeritus, MIT, and a past President of the American Political Science Association, a former chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a one time advisor to the State Department and the National Security Council, and currently a trustee of the Asia Foundation. He is the author/editor and co-author/co-editor of more than 25 books.
Pye, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resuscitates a psycho-cultural version of Oriental despotism, a paradigm that has afflicted Western perceptions of Asia since Aristotle.
Pye follows Hegel, Mill, Marx and even Max Weber in constructing an Asia that is as flawed as it is different.
Pye submits them to simple-minded psychological theories: how parents treat their children, how Mao Zedong's mother abandoned him, how the narcissism of Indian leaders flows from parental overindulgence, become the primal cause of ideas and social action.
As culture decides the course of political development, Pye shows how Asian societies, confronted with the task of setting up modern nation-states, respond by fashioning paternalistic forms of power that satisfy their deep psychological craving for security.
This new paternalism may appear essentially authoritarian to Western eyes, but Pye maintains that it is a valid response to the people's needs and will ensure community solidarity and strong group loyalties.
LucianPye is Ford Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of Mao Tse-Tung: The Man in the Leader.
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