Joseph LaPalombara, a distinguished comparative political scientist and a prominent figure in Yale’s Department of Political Science for more than half a century, died on June 12 at Whitney Center in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 101.
He was the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Management, Emeritus.
Born in Chicago to Italian immigrant parents, LaPalombara grew up in the “Little Italy” neighborhood of Chicago — in an area of poverty and violence, known for its ward heelers, machine politics, and the organized crime operation known as “the Syndicate” — where it was, as he said in his intellectual trajectory for Yale’s Koerner Center, ”universally
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