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Guide to the Heinz Eulau Papers
SC0697  
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  • Overview
  • Administrative Information
  • Biographical/Historical note

  • Overview

    Call Number: SC0697
    Creator: Eulau, Heinz, 1915-2004.
    Title: Heinz Eulau papers
    Dates: undated
    Physical Description: 42 Linear feet
    Language(s): The materials are in English.
    Repository: Department of Special Collections and University Archives
    Green Library
    557 Escondido Mall
    Stanford, CA 94305-6064
    Email: specialcollections@stanford.edu
    Phone: (650) 725-1022
    URL: http://library.stanford.edu/spc

    Administrative Information

    Information about Access

    The materials are open for research use. Audio-visual materials are not available in original format, and must be reformatted to a digital use copy.

    Ownership & Copyright

    All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California 94305-6064. Consent is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission from the copyright owner. Such permission must be obtained from the copyright owner, heir(s) or assigns. See: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/spc/pubserv/permissions.html.
    Restrictions also apply to digital representations of the original materials. Use of digital files is restricted to research and educational purposes.

    Cite As

    [identification of item], Heinz Eulau Papers (SC0697). Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.

    Biographical/Historical note

    Heinz Eulau (1915-2004), the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, was a major figure in American political science and a leading scholar in the fields of legislative research, political representation and electoral behavior.
    He was born in Offenbach, Germany, on October 14, 1915 into a German Jewish family whose wide-ranging lineage he and his brother Frank (“in cooperation with cousins of all sorts”) documented in a book on “The Mishpokhe from Eulau-Jilové: Discovering a Remarkably Unremarkable Jewish Family from Germany” (2001). After immigrating to the United States in 1935, he earned his degrees in political science at the University of California in Berkeley: A.B. 1937, M.A. 1938, PhD 1941. Following engagements at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice, and The New Republic, he started his academic career at Antioch College in 1947 and joined in 1957 the Stanford Department of Political Science which he chaired twice, 1969-74 and 1981-84, and from which he retired as the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, in 1986. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, and Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
    Eulau was president of the American Political Science Association 1971-72; he founded the Legislative Studies Quarterly in 1976, was active in the behavioral sciences division of the National Research Council (1969-73), chairman of the board of overseers of the National Election Studies (1977-84), and associate director of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (1975-78). Awards in his name and honor were created by the American Political Science Association (1986) and the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society (2002).
    Heinz Eulau is considered one of the founding scholars of what came to be known as the behavioral movement in political science which brought the analytical tools of sociology and psychology to bear on the empirical study of the linkages between individual behavior and political processes. The focus of Eulau’s work was on the patterns and determinants of electoral and legislative behavior and on the politics of political representation. His extensive published work in this area (including Legislative Behavior, 1959; The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics, 1963; Political behavior in America: New Directions, 1966; State Officials and Higher Education [with Harold Quinley and David D. Henry], 1970; Labyrinths of Democracy [with Kenneth Prewitt], 1973; Politics, Self, and Society, 1986) is considered part of the classics of modern political science and has shaped research as well as teaching in the discipline over the past fifty years. He was one of the founders of the influential journal, The American Behavioral Scientist. Many of his students have moved into positions of leadership in the discipline in their own right, including Stanford faculty members Norman Nie and John Ferejohn and Kenneth Prewitt at Columbia, who credit Eulau with directing their early work and with the equally important role of mentoring their entry into the profession.
    His 1972 Presidential Address for the American Political Science Association represents one of the discipline’s early reflections on the impact of modern technology and the resulting “skill revolution” on the nature and functioning of political systems. His search for “political processes better adapted to the requirements of a rapidly changing technological society than are participative, representational, and bureaucratic processes alone” led him to the vision of a “consultative commonwealth” where professionalized consultation becomes “the linkage mechanism between democracy and bureaucracy”.
    In his later years, Heinz Eulau allowed his impish sense of humor free reign in taking on some of the “fads, foibles and fables” of his colleagues in his 1998 book on “The Politics of Academic Culture”, chapters of which are devoted to such topics as “The Faculty’s Fallacious but Felicitous Faculties, or Nemesis and When Not to Love Thy Colleague as Thyself” or “The Rating, Ranking and Baiting Game, or Don’t Believe All You Read about Yourself Even if True”. The book’s epilogue is entitled “De Mortuis Nil nisi Bonum, or Better Write Your Own Obituary before It Is Too Late” – which Heinz Eulau, forever a man of his word, promptly proceeded to do.
    Heinz Eulau’s wife of 58 years, Cleo, passed away shortly after her husband at Stanford Hospital after a long illness. They are survived by their children Peter and Lauren, and three grandchildren. Family, friends, and colleagues gathered for a memorial celebration of the lives of Heinz and Cleo Eulau on March 2, 2004, in Stanford Memorial Church.