Lucian Pye, political scientist was an expert on Asia; at 86

LUCIAN PYE (Graham Ramsay via The New York Times)

NEW YORK - Dr. Lucian Pye, an influential political scientist who marshaled a piercing intellect, psychoanalytic insights, and plain intuition to take startling new perspectives on area studies, particularly concerning China and other Asian nations, died Sept. 5 in Boston. He was 86.

The immediate cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Virginia, who added that his health had deteriorated after a fall in July.

As a sinologist, Dr. Pye advised the State Department and the National Security Council and was considered a peer of the great China experts of his generation such as John K. Fairbank of Harvard. Dr. Pye was a leader of the National Committee on United States-China Relations when it laid the groundwork for the American table tennis team to visit China in 1971, and he later served as acting chairman.

He advised Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Henry M. Jackson of Washington, urging a muscular foreign policy.

But Dr. Pye was first and foremost an intellectual who wrote or edited 25 books and led his profession as president of the American Political Science Association in 1988-89. He was among the pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s in theorizing about how poor nations develop politically. In contrast to political scientists who seek universal, overarching explanations, he delved into the vagaries of cultures, countries, and people in search of more individualized interpretations.

"He redirected political science away from rational models of political behavior and toward things that are harder to measure and understand," said Richard J. Samuels, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Pye taught for 35 years.

"It was the beginning of what would be a very important moment in postwar social science," Samuels continued.

So novel were Dr. Pye's intellectual forays that opposite reactions to them were not unusual. This was particularly true of "Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority," which he wrote with his wife, Mary, and published in 1985. The book found commonalities - or, critics railed, flagrant stereotypes - in Asia's disparate political cultures.

Lucian W. Pye was born in Fenzhou, in northwest China's Shanxi Province, to Congregational missionaries. He became bilingual, although he lost much of his skills in Chinese after he moved to Oberlin, Ohio, for his primary education, only to relearn it later. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., in 1943, and then was a Marine intelligence officer in Asia.

He earned his doctorate from Yale in 1951, writing his dissertation on the attitudes underlying the warlord system of politics in China in the 1920s. His mentor, Gabriel A. Almond, who introduced him to the study of comparative politics, once recalled Dr. Pye as "generally leaving me a little breathless; he had so much energy and enthusiasm."

In 1956, Dr. Pye joined the MIT Center for International Studies to teach in a new program that would soon develop into a full-fledged political science department.

Along with other social scientists trying to find better explanations for change than those offered by Marxism, he helped found the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council. He used his research in Malaysia to suggest that communism's appeal there came from insecurity over the pace of change.

In a 1988 article about Dr. Pye's work in the journal Political Science and Politics, Donald L. M. Blackmer suggested such leaps of imagination were typical of him, writing, "Interpretation and generalization abound, often unsupported by the sorts of evidence most of us have been taught to look for."

The upside, Blackmer said, was that Dr. Pye could "explain the otherwise inexplicable."

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Pye leaves his wife of 63 years, the former Mary Waddill; another daughter, Lyndy of Northampton; a son, Chris, also of Northampton; and three grandchildren.