David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist.
22 Facts About David Easton
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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.
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David Easton was renowned for his application of systems theory to the study of political science.
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The idea appeared in sociology and other social sciences but it was David Easton who specified how it could be best applied to behavioral research on politics.
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David Easton was president of the American Political Science Association.
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David Easton married Sylvia Isobel Victoria Johnstone and they raised one son.
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David Easton's move to California in 1997 was in part for the sake of his wife's health.
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From 1944 to 1947 David Easton was a teaching fellow at Harvard University.
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David Easton 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.
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David Easton was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine in 1997.
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David Easton 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.
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David Easton was a member of the executive committee of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research ; chairman of the Committee on Information and Behavioral Sciences Division, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council ; and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
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David Easton has served as a consultant to The Brookings Institution ; the Mental Health Research Institute of the University of Michigan ; the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism ; and as a Ford Professor, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
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David Easton served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Political Methodology, Youth and Society, and International Political Science Abstracts, and was editor of Varieties of Political Theory.
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David Easton was a former president of the American Political Science Association, past president of the International Committee on Social Science Documentation, and vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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David Easton was a trustee and chairman of the Academy of Independent Scholars ; a member of the Committee on Higher Education of the Royal Society of Canada ; and served as chairman of the Committee on Scientific Information Exchange of the American Political science Association.
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David Easton has been described as one of the "first generation of behavioral revolutionaries" in the discipline of political science.
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David Easton argued for development of a proper science of political studies that would produce reliable, universal knowledge about social phenomena, and that the purpose of scientific rules of procedure was to make possible the discovery of a highly generalized theory of politics.
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David Easton's vision was one of a "general theory" of political science that would consist of a deductive system of thought so that a limited number of postulates, as assumptions and axioms, a whole body of empirically valid generalizations might be deduced in descending order of specificity and provide predictive causal explanations of political behavior.
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Some years later, after David Easton became President of the American Political Science Association, he led the charge of a new post-behavioralist revolution, arguing that political science research should be both relevant and action-oriented, so it might better serve the needs of society by solving social and political problems revealed during the 1960s.
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David Easton was renowned for his application of systems theory to political science, and for his definition of politics as the "authoritative allocation of value" in A Framework for Political Analysis and A Systems Analysis of Political Life, both published in 1965.
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David Easton has written about the influence of political structure on various aspects of political life, on the state and development of political science, and on the political socialization of children.