Co-founder and President of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research (ASSR), of which he was Scientific Director from 1987 to 1997, Abram De Swaan has held the Chair of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam since 1973.
Born in Amsterdam in 1942, he was awarded a doctorate in political science in 1973, after completing post-graduate studies as a Harkness Foundation Fellow from 1966 to 1968 at the Universities of Yale and California (Berkeley). His thesis, Theory of Political Coalitions and Government Formation, won him the biennial prize of the Dutch Science Society in 1976.
From 1973 to 1984, Abram De Swaan, who attended the Dutch Institute of Psychoanalysis, practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. During this period, he published a series of articles combining sociology and psychoanalysis on psychotherapeutic consultation, the profession of therapist, anguish in cancer wards and "agoraphobia as a psychic substitute for the19th-century social ban on girls going out alone".
In those years, he also published De mens is de mens een zorg, a book dealing with the shift from relational management by order to management by negotiation. Translated into English in 1989, this book has been reprinted regularly since its first publication in 1982; its French title could be "L'homme est un souci pour l'homme".
From 1969 until 1991, Abram De Swaan was a contributor to the cultural magazine De Guids ("The Guide", founded in 1837), as well as writing a weekly column for the daily NRC/Handelsblad.
In 1988, he wrote directly in English In Care Of The State, an essay devoted to the sociogenesis of the welfare state, in which he discusses the process of collectivization of health, education and assistance, from the dawn of modernity to the present day, in Europe and the United States of America. Translated into Dutch, German, Spanish and French(Sous l'aile protectrice de l'État, 1995), In Care Of The State was awarded the Cercle des Politologues néerlandais prize in 1989.