Henry Y.K. Tom (1946-2011)

Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond:

The global democratic resurgence of the past three-and-a-half decades has been accompanied by a boom in the publication of scholarly work on democracy. Studies of democratic breakdowns, crises, transitions, and consolidation came to dominate the field of comparative politics. During this extraordinary period, no one in the academic book-publishing industry did more to advance, support, understand, and critically evaluate this scholarly outpouring than Henry Tom, who passed away unexpectedly on 10 January 2011 at the age of 64. Ready for a more varied set of challenges, he had retired from book publishing only the previous summer, after receiving numerous effusive expressions of appreciation from friends, colleagues, and authors at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Fittingly, it was in 1974—the same year that the "third wave" of democratization began—that Henry Tom began his long and fruitful career at Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP), first as social-sciences editor and then as executive editor. In the subsequent 36 years, he was responsible for the publication of more than a thousand books. Having earned a Ph.D. in early-modern European history from the University of Chicago, Henry established JHUP as a leader in that field, especially in Italian Renaissance studies. A Renaissance man himself with diverse intellectual interests, he acquired manuscripts that ranged widely across all fields of history, as well as sociology, economics, and religious studies. But it was perhaps in political science that he had his greatest impact.

Beginning with the publication in 1978 of The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, the four-volume series edited by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Henry published many of the most influential studies of comparative democratic development. He was not afraid to take on big and complex editorial projects or to publish new scholars and unconventional approaches. When the Journal of Democracy began looking for a publisher in 1991, a critical factor drawing us to Johns Hopkins was Henry and the work he had already done to establish JHUP as a leader in the field of democracy studies.

Over the subsequent twenty years, we worked closely with Henry to publish twenty-five Journal of Democracy books. In this process, Henry was more than just our editor. We benefited enormously from his knowledge of the field, and his advice helped us to determine which Journal articles to include in our books, and how to shape them both for scholarly readers and for classroom use. The structure and the titles of many of these books were heavily influenced by his suggestions.

For the past two decades, the Journal of Democracy editorial board has met every year at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association. And every year during the convention the two of us would meet with Henry to discuss our JHUP book projects for the period ahead. In recent years, we invited Henry to attend our editorial-board meeting as well, and given his deep engagement with scholarship on democracy and his love for the Journal, this was an invitation he was happy to accept. On these occasions he always stimulated our thinking and encouraged and guided our efforts to recruit articles and convene conferences with future edited volumes in mind.

The scholarly partnership between JHUP and the Journal of Democracy was in no small measure a personal collaboration between the two of us as editors and Henry Tom. The Journal, its editorial staff (both past and present), and our diverse readers have been graced by his uncommon wisdom, professionalism, and devotion to scholarship on democracy. He will be sorely missed.

Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan:

We mourn the death of Henry Tom, our friend and publisher for 35 years. Henry's creativity and his influence at Johns Hopkins University Press made him, in our minds, one of the cofounders of the democratization field. His work shows how an intelligent publisher can help to shape intellectual life. Henry made possible the publication of ambitious theoretical books, often built upon the basis of pioneering...