M. Crawford Young
Merwin Crawford Young (November 7, 1931 – January 22, 2020) was an American political scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[1][2]
Education
He received his
Academic career
Young became an assistant professor at Wisconsin in 1963, and published his first major work, Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence. He became prominent as the author in 1976 of the highly influential The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, which was awarded the
He held chairmanship of the UW–Madison political science department twice (1969–72; 1984–87), and was between 1973-75
His work's emphasis
Young's primary contributions to political science have come from his work on the Zairian (and later, African) state and on the politics of cultural identity in the third world, which was theoretically innovative and presaged the contemporary "instrumentalist" and "constructivist" approaches to political identity.
Select publications
- Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence, 1965
- Issues of Political Development (with Charles Anderson and Fred von der Mehden), 1967
- The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, 1976, University of Wisconsin Press
- Cooperatives and Development: Agricultural Politics in Ghana and Uganda (with Neal Sherman and Tim Rose), 1981
- Ideology and Development in Africa, 1982, Yale University Press
- The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (with Thomas Turner), 1985, University of Wisconsin Press
- The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay?, 1993, University of Wisconsin Press
- The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, 1994, Yale University Press
- The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010, 2012, University of Wisconsin Press
See also
- Lewis H. Gann, American political scientist focused on Africa and active in the 1960s and 1970s