A while ago we lost Peter Bachrach, one of the pre-eminent academic figures of the twentieth century. After he died on December 14, 2007, a group of his former students and colleagues gathered at the APSA annual meeting in Boston to celebrate his life and career. The audience included family members, “academic grandchildren,” and admirers of his work. The speakers' themes included power, poverty, activism, legal theory, and equality, and this symposium grew out of the panel. This range and variety of topics indicate the scope and depth of his impact. His 1962 APSR article, “Two Faces of Power,” co-authored with Morton Baratz, is the most frequently cited article in the history of the political science profession. Although I suspect this distinction would have amused Peter, terms like faces of power, nondecision, and deciding not to decide are familiar even to those who don't know Bachrach and Baratz's work on power (Bachrach and Baratz Reference Bachrach and Baratz1962, Reference Bachrach and Baratz1963). These writings taught scholars to listen for what is not said and look for what is not shown. That was a crucial lesson for feminist legal scholars like my classmate and fellow panelist, Elizabeth Schneider, and me.

Figure 1.

Photograph of Peter Bachrach courtesy of Temple University.

I was one of Peter's last students at Bryn Mawr College. We kept in touch, writing back and forth and talking at professional meetings, as I went through graduate school and began my own academic career. We conducted permanent floating colloquies about democracy-versus-rights and bourgeois-versus-proletarian academic venues. In later years our scholarly interests diverged, and distance separated us, but his influence on me not only survived, but grew.

My task for this symposium is to recapitulate Peter's life and work. He was born June 19, 1918, and grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb on Chicago's North Shore. In his youth, he got polio, and thereafter walked with two canes. His disability affected him, but never controlled him. His example showed other people with disabilities how not to let them control us. That was the greatest gift anyone could have given me in those years. He graduated from Reed College in 1942, and received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1951. The year 1946 brought two milestones in Peter's life. He married the former Florence Rice and began teaching at Bryn Mawr College. He rose through the academic ranks at Bryn Mawr and stayed there for over 20 years, moonlighting at places like Penn and Swarthmore, before joining the political science department at Temple University in 1968. Within three years, Peter had won a teaching award, helped found a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and joined with the student senate to demand that the administration open its financial records to justify raising tuition.

Peter was an activist within the political science profession, too. His career, spanning more than four decades, coincided with a time of transformation in academia. The democratization of the professoriate had begun by the time Peter started his career; what had once been an enclave for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants admitted, if it did not always welcome, Jews and Catholics. To give you an idea—or to refresh your memory—of how little progress had been made as late as a generation ago, the packed room at the first APSA panel I ever attended contained two women and several dozen men: white men, in suits and ties. The GI bill, Title IX, and the activism of new voices in political science accelerated a process of professional democratization that has now entered its second century. Far from longing for the old days, Peter delighted in these changes. He was a member of the first APSA Committee on the Status of Women. He was a co-founder of the Caucus for a New Political Science, which twice nominated him for APSA president. Some of us gleefully remember that in 1972 he came within 60 votes of defeating the nominating committee's choice. The establishment made sure that this never happened again—by including caucus members in the leadership, in a way that students of elite theory could appreciate, and doing the same, eventually, for other insurgent groups as they came on the scene.

The Bachrachs raised six children in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. After Florence Bachrach's death in 1975, Peter married the former Adrienne Adam Sharpless and acquired four stepchildren. The couple established a second home in Southwest Harbor, Maine, after he retired in 1988, and eventually relocated there. In Maine, Peter enjoyed kayaking, chess, and stamp collecting, and volunteered as an “honorary grandfather” at an elementary school. He spent his leisure as he had spent his career, in activities “suited for such men as come/proud, open-eyed, and laughing to the tomb” (Yeats Reference Yeats1957, 499–503). Peter died at home, in his sleep, after a normal day. He was 89.

Peter made as great a contribution as a teacher and mentor as he did as a scholar and activist. Tom Horne, a family friend who became a political scientist, was one of many who described Peter as a “charismatic.” Although that may not be quite what Max Weber meant by the word, it fit. As Steven Lukes said, he “lit up a room” (Downey Reference Downey2007). And other people lit up the room for him. He could make you feel like the one person he'd been waiting to see all day. Even his letters could convey the impressions that you and he were members of an exclusive elect. When I was on the job market, Peter urged me to stay at the Indiana University campus where I was a proletarian among the proletariat. “Hell, any fool can teach at Bryn Mawr and Princeton,” he wrote me, “but it takes real flair and guts to teach at Gary or Temple.”

It was easy to assume that anyone so charming was superficial—my first reaction was, “Is this guy for real?”—but I couldn't have been more wrong. When students confided in him, he listened and responded—and refrained from pointing out how comparatively privileged we were and how self-absorbed we were being. Here, too, as in his teaching, he refrained from lecturing. The summer after graduation, I lived near a coffee shop where a fellow Bachrach student worked. She was having a rough time, and I often dropped in to drink the world's worst coffee outside of a vending machine and chat with her. One day she said, “Oh, Judy, you just missed Mr. Bachrach. He comes in once or twice a week.” He was for real.

At a time when most professors lectured, he held discussions—and students reluctant to speak often found themselves pointed at or even poked to get them to participate. At a time when one professor told a student she had gotten too excited about a paper—well, that was the legend, anyway—Peter encouraged his students' intellectual curiosity and professional ambitions, whether they were teenagers away from home for the first time or graduate students returning to academia after time out. One measure of his influence is that former students who are neither teachers nor political scientists, and hadn't seen him since they graduated, came to the APSA panel and shared their memories on our class listserv. He didn't regard teaching women as wasting time. He took us seriously when many professors didn't, “more seriously,” Tom Horne said after his death, “than our own parents did sometimes” (Downey Reference Downey2007).

Gender equality wasn't the only area where Peter was ahead of his times. He was on a first-name basis with the Bryn Mawr buildings and grounds staff, then quaintly known as the maids and porters. He enjoyed spending time with them at least as much as he enjoyed the company of the college administrators. He was the first person I heard argue that homosexuals were neither evil, as conservatives thought at the time, nor sick, as liberals believed, but okay the way they were.

Peter's popularity was earned, never bought. He was a notoriously tough grader—poli sci majors never won the prize for the highest grade point average!—and was honest in his assessments without identifying the performance with the person. He had sharp opinions about others, but he confined them to private conversation. Usually. Peter was far more than popular. He was admired, respected, and loved. The reminiscences of Bryn Mawr alumnae have shown that he still is. A member of the Class of 1959 asked me to “tell the panel and audience that students from 50 years ago remember his eyes, his smile, his provocative mind, his dedication and humility with his students and much more.”

The novelist Chaim Potok wrote, “A teacher can change a person's life. A good teacher or a bad teacher. Each can change a person's life. But only if the person is ready to be changed” (Potok Reference Potok1969, 116). Peter Bachrach was a splendid teacher whom students encountered at a stage of life when they were changing whether they were ready or not. He knew us during our transition from adolescence to maturity, and treated us like reasonable adults—so we behaved that way, and in time we came to feel that way. He spoke to our strengths, not our weaknesses. We learned from him to be brave, not afraid; active, not passive; confident, not embarrassed. Margaret Levi writes about the effort his mode of teaching cost him. We were oblivious to these costs; he seemed to be having so much fun. His reward was to watch quiet, timid girls become, at least for that class period, articulate, confident young women. Another classmate wrote, “PB taught many of us about personal responsibility for political and social progress of all groups in our society. He also taught me that rights are guaranteed for all only if those with whom I disagreed got to speak.” He showed us how to think, read, write, teach, and question authority. This tough and tender man, committed to social justice, intellectual integrity, and personal benevolence in word and deed, will survive in our collective memory for generations to come.