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Volume 48 No. 2 (Summer 1981)
Arien Mack, Editor


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Saul Padover 1905-1981

The Graduate Faculty notes with sorrow the passing of our beloved colleague, Saul Padover, on Sunday, Februrary 22. Saul graced our faculty, to which he was passionately devoted, for thirty-two years as Professor of Political Science, Dean, Distinguished Service Professor, and Professor Emeritus. His emeritus status, which began in 1977, made a difference only in the number of classes he taught. He continued to participate fully in faculty and departmental matters, to appear in his office nearly every day, and to devote himself unstintingly to his research and writing in the face of great personal adversity. He completed no fewer than four books during the three and one-half years of his "retirement."

One of the best, and perhaps last, exemplars of the Renaissance man, Saul combined great sweep and awesome erudition in a first-rate mind further graced by the faultless command of several languages. Trained at the University of Chicago in medieval history, the subject of his first books, he became a remarkably prolific and expert scholar in diverse fields, particularly in American political philosophy and the workings of American government, to which he brought the practical experience of his service as Assistant Secretary of the Interior in Roosevelt's New Deal administration. He also had a real capacity for appreciating scholarly approaches for which he himself had no sympathy. His review essay in Social Researh of the behavioralist works of his friend, Harold Lasswell, for example, remains one of the keenest evaluations of that great scholar's contributions to political science.

Saul had an uncanny instinct for filling big gaps in our knowledge of important subjects. The fields of Madisonian and Jeffersonian scholarship, then largely moribund, were energized and revived by his books on those epochal figures in American political history. His biography of Louis XVI, based on archival research, was for many years the only one in the English language; and his masterful "intimate biography" of Marx, likewise the result of much original research, is the most complete in English and perhaps in any language.

Saul was a gentle and compassionate man who was never heard to raise his voice in anger to either colleagues or students. He was genuinely modest with a self-deprecating sense of humor. His personal style was very much like his writing style, understated yet elegant. A truly civilized man, he charmed and enriched all who knew him. We shall always cherish his memory.
 

Jacob Landynski

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