David Easton
| David Easton | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
June 24, 1917 Toronto, Ontario |
| Died | July 19, 2014 |
| Known for | Political systems theory |
David Easton (June 24, 1917 – July 19, 2014) was a Canadian-born American political scientist. Easton, who was born in Toronto, Ontario, came to the United States in 1943. From 1947-1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
At the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline's most widely used definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for the society. He is renowned for his application of systems theory to the study of political science. Policy analysts have utilized his five-fold scheme for studying the policy-making process: input, conversion, output, feedback and environment. Gunnell argues that since the 1950s the concept of "system" was the most important theoretical concept used by American political scientists. The idea appeared in sociology and other social sciences but it was Easton who specified how it could be best applied to behavioral research on politics.
During his career he has served as a key gatekeeper, as consultant to many prominent organizations and funding agencies, and author of numerous influential scholarly publications. He has served on many boards and committees and was president of the American Political Science Association.
Easton earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in 1939, his M.A. in 1943 and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947; an LL.D. at McMaster University in 1970 and he attended Kalamazoo College in 1972. He married Sylvia Isobel Victoria Johnstone and they raised one son. His move to California in 1997 was in part for the sake of his wife's health.
From 1944 to 1947 Easton was a teaching fellow at Harvard University. He was appointed assistant of political science at the University of Chicago in 1947; associate professor in 1953; professor in 1955; and was Andrew McLeish Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought there in 1984. He was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine in 1997. As at Chicago, his teaching was aimed at graduate students, and the supervising of their theses. He assumed responsibility for UCI's fledgling graduate program, and over a number of years turned it into a dynamic and comprehensive program which equipped them to attract first-rate students. Inter alia this involved a compulsory course for new graduate students, which dealt with 19th and 20th century foundations of modern political science.
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