A Comparative Perspective on Democratization: Theory and Experience in the Post-Cold War World

Although Sidney Dell was by training an economist, and by profession an international civil servant, he was also from experience a highly political person. Born into a Jewish family recently arrived in England from Eastern Europe, growing up under the shadow of fascism in the London of the 1930s; studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Queen’s College, Oxford, on the eve of war; and serving as a navigator in the Royal Navy for the bulk of that conflict, he could hardly have been otherwise. Always a man whose sympathies lay on the left, and always very much his own man, his commitment to democracy and pluralist values was always linked to a concern for effective public policies to promote social equality and to overcome poverty and injustice.