Peter Bachrach had a remarkable impact on those who encountered him in person and on generations of readers. Judith Baer vividly captures, among other things, his inspiring, emboldening influence on his students and the sheer fun it was to be with him. My recollections are of exciting, forward moving, intense, and probing arguments, in private and public settings, with an infectiously warm, buoyant, generous friend.

I first met him in Oxford, where I was teaching. I liked his forceful formulation of participatory democratic ideas, but I had a bone or two to pick with his “Two Faces of Power” and so seized the chance to meet him at dinner in Nuffield College, where he was spending some months. Our dinner conversation was electrifying and led to a series of debates, between ourselves and with students, all hugely enjoyable. They inspired one participant, John Gaventa, whom I was supervising, and for whom Peter developed a huge respect, to embark on his study of power and acquiescence among Appalachian miners, eventually published as Power and Powerlessness. In that book Gaventa sought, with remarkable success, to render empirically researchable the less visible operations of power (the concern Peter and I shared) and to explore the issue of whether power can shield people from awareness of their own interests (on which our disagreements largely focused).

In defending his side in our arguments, Peter was a wonderfully resilient and engaged discussant, sometimes issuing sharp, occasionally unanswerable challenges, sometimes making surprising concessions. We both enjoyed these exchanges so much that, after my Power: A Radical View appeared, he helped to secure an invitation for me to Temple University to co-teach with him. I readily accepted (in the process turning down an invitation to the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies; Albert Hirschmann expressed his astonishment to me at such a choice). The experience was unforgettable. We became good friends and spent time together with his family and with various sympathetic colleagues. We pursued our argument with his students, who entered the fray with gusto and sometimes striking insights. I saw, in his interaction with students, some of the virtues that Judith Baer so well describes. He was patient and encouraging but, where appropriate, formidably severe. “So what's your argument?” he would demand, kindly but always supportively, cutting short the long-winded, the prolix, or the befuddled.

He made teaching and, I am sure, learning terrific fun while always focused on serious matters. One crucial part of the mix was his irreverence, more particularly towards prevailing academic orthodoxies. Another was his centredness: he reasoned from and lived by a set of basic principles. He really believed in the beneficent effects of active participation (as, for instance, in the classroom), which had to be full and real. He was ever watchful for its phoney surrogates—for ways, in C. Wright Mills's phrase, of “managing discontent.” And his radicalism was, as Aryeh Botwinick rightly observes in this symposium, always inflected by a firmly held liberalism that made him suspicious, not only of Marxism, whether orthodox or sectarian, but also of my own tendency to allow room for real or objective interests. He liked some Marxists, notably Gramsci, and was critical of others, such as Nicos Poulantzas, but was always interested in them for what their thought might contribute to the understanding of his central preoccupation, which was, as Jane Mansbridge acutely notes, the key issue of control.

But Peter's impact also reached innumerable readers, above all of his famous brief essay with Morton Baratz. (I used to joke with him that Baratz, whom I never met, actually never existed and that he had invented him in order to attribute to him any faults in the argument. He always fiercely denied this charge.) That article in effect inaugurated the so-called power debate. In his “Critique of the Ruling Elite Model” and his classic study of New Haven politics, Who Governs?, Robert Dahl had sought to convert loose talk of “power elites” and “ruling classes” into empirically refutable (and, he and his fellow pluralists went on to claim, refuted) hypotheses. The resulting behaviorist focus on decision making in settings of conflicting preferences, which was to inspire an entire research program pursued by Dahl, his colleagues and followers, seriously narrowed, as Peter clearly perceived, the understanding of what power is, and the first step into the new debate was the simple, incisive question: Who decides what gets decided? The next step, of course, was to invent the awkwardly-named notion of “nondecisions”—which began as observable decisions but became, under the pressure of the debate, less and less recognizable as deliberate and observable interventions by identifiable agents. Schatschneider's “mobilization of bias,” cited by Bachrach and Baratz, began to look more and more impersonal and less episodic, more and more like Gramscian hegemony. From there the debate could range freely into questions about structure and agency, degrees of hegemony and the postulation of false consciousness, subjective and objective interests, positive and negative actions, the relations between power and freedom, and the still puzzling methodological dilemma of how, through empirical research, one is to reach the least observable aspects of power relations, given the assumption (which Peter and I shared) that power is at its most effective when least perceptible to actors and observers alike.

I always valued and, indeed, admired Peter's reluctance to relinquish what remained of behaviorist assumptions in his approach and his insistence on the need for robust evidence when making assertions about where power lies. Here lay his important challenge to attempts to carry his critique of the prevailing orthodoxy further. He remained, in this sense, a practicing political scientist who could, with unmistakable irony, write that “if there appears to be universal acquiescence in the status quo,” then it will not be possible “to determine empirically whether the consensus is genuine or instead has been enforced through nondecision-making” and that then “analysis of the problem is beyond the reach of a political analyst and perhaps can only be fruitfully analyzed by a philosopher” (Bachrach and Baratz Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 49). Of course, he realized that the very idea of such “universal acquiescence” is indeed a fantasy, at best a philosopher's imaginary case aimed at raising the question of how to identify unacknowledged interests. His answer was: more subtle and probing empirical research.

I continue to miss Peter Bachrach. He was a vibrant and lovable person who was capable of transforming the lives of his students and whose insights into how power operates were sharp, clear, and deep.