Guillermo O'Donnell
| Guillermo O'Donnell | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 24, 1936 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Died | November 29, 2011 (aged 75) Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Occupation | Professor, Political Science |
Guillermo A. O'Donnell (1936–2011) was a prominent Argentine political scientist, who spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America. His brother, Pacho O'Donnell, is a well-known politician and writer.
O'Donnell was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and became a lawyer in 1958, aged 22. He was involved in student politics, and was Secretary and Acting President of the Buenos Aires University Federation (FUBA), part of the Argentine University Federation, in 1954–1955. Later he served as national Vice-Minister of Interior (Political Affairs), in Argentina, in 1963. But he focused mainly on making a living by working as a lawyer and teaching. During these years he taught in the School of Law at the University of Buenos Aires (1958–66) and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (1966–68)
In 1968 O'Donnell left Argentina to pursue graduate studies in political science at Yale University. He earned his master's degree in political science in 1971, but rather than complete his dissertation and take a job offer from Harvard University, he returned to Buenos Aires. The text he started to work on at Yale was published as Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1973), a book that immediately drew a lot of attention and led to a seminal debate about Latin American politics in David Collier's edited volume, The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (1979). But since this text was published, it could not be presented as a dissertation. And thus O'Donnell would not receive his Ph.D in political science from Yale University until he presented a new dissertation and thus was awarded his Ph.D. belatedly, once he was an established scholar and professor, in 1987.
...
Wikipedia