Erik Allardt: fruitful contradictions

Typical of Erik Allardt's quality as a scholar and an intellectual is a willingness and a capacity to take into consideration opposite positions in the same analysis and to act at the interface of the national and international levels. This quality appears most clearly in his theory of the preconditions of solidarity, in which both 'rational' and 'irrational' reactions to the adversities of modernization are explained by the same set of variables. His best scholarly and other intellectual contributions make a fruitful connection between domestic Finnish concerns and elements of the non-Finnish sociological discussion. This Janus-faced position differentiates Allardt from Stein Rokkan, who in many other respects is comparable to him.