Rolf Stumpf (1945–2020) : tough, decisive and compassionate technocratic-intellectual
Date
2021-05-28
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ASSAf
Abstract
Reflecting on the career of Rolf Stumpf, who passed during late October 2020 from cancer, reminded me of a
meeting I had around 1992 with the famous Hungarian sociologist Ivan Szelenyi, who had started working on
his very interesting book Making Capitalism without Capitalists (Verso, 1998). With the South African transition
looming, he was interested, from a Hungarian perspective, in what made certain communists successful in the new
capitalist Hungary and he wanted to know if I was interested in doing a similar study in South Africa. The transition
became far too busy for me to consider another study, but the central theme of Szelenyi’s work was that one of
the characteristics of a successful transition was their distinctive technocratic-intellectual elites who were both
successful communists and successful capitalists.
Description
CITATION: Cloete, N. 2021. Rolf Stumpf (1945–2020) : tough, decisive and compassionate technocratic-intellectual. South African Journal of Science, 117(5/6):10684, doi:10.17159/sajs.2021/10684.
The original publication is available at https://sajs.co.za
The original publication is available at https://sajs.co.za
Keywords
Stumpf, Rolf (1945-2020) -- Biography
Citation
Cloete, N. 2021. Rolf Stumpf (1945–2020) : tough, decisive and compassionate technocratic-intellectual. South African Journal of Science, 117(5/6):10684, doi:10.17159/sajs.2021/10684.