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Peter Katzenstein is a prodigiously reductive scholar. As a comparativist, a student of international relations, an historian, and one who has successfully bridged the qualitative and quantitative divide in our discipline, he has made signal contributions to general international relations, political economy, security studies, European and German studies, Asian and Japanese studies, and political science in general. In this brief résumé, seven of his Mends and collaborators highlight his major contributions.
One of the defining characteristics of Katzenstein's work has been his ability to move seamlessly between international and comparative politics. All students of international politics recognize that the state is not just a black box, but few have been able to open that box with confidence. Some international relations scholars have written books about both the international system and variations in national behavior, but these have been different books. What no one has done better than Katzenstein is to integrate different levels of analysis in the same book, something that he accomplished in both his earlier studies of small states and his later ones on Japanese security and world regions.
Katzenstein has been a pioneer in two major international relations literatures: international political economy and international security. At the same time, in the comparative politics field, he has been a path breaker in our understanding of comparative political economy and in comparative regional analysis, both in Europe and, more recently, on a global scale. But more important than his contributions to either subdiscipline has been his capacity to bridge the two, and the growing reach of his work from Europe to Asia, and more recently to the United States. Before discussing the vast amount of substantive work that Katzenstein has published during a career of almost 40 years, we discuss five major themes that motivate and unify his work.
Persistent Themes
Katzenstein's work has reflected four signature themes, from his first article in International Organization in 1971 ("Hare and Tortoise: The Race toward Integration") to his latest books and articles.
First, Katzenstein has always emphasized the distinctiveness of national societies, with their historically conditioned domestic structures and particular cultures. He began his career as a Europeanist and moved determinedly into Asia in the last decade but he is also in the long line of...