Political culture and communist studies.

The work is cogent, well organized, well written. The argument over the inclusion of "subjective" factors in political analysis, while familiar in certain respects, is given at freshness and originality by the communist context. The lively controversy adds greatly to the attractiveness of the work. In short, Political Culture and Communist Studies is a first-rate book and should be well and widely appreciated.-Professor Robert E. Lane (Yale University)

This book contains both fresh insight and vigorous debate on the concept of political culture and, in particular, on the importance of the political cultural dimension to an understanding of continuity and change within Communist countries. Conflicting arguments on how the concept of political culture should be defined and employed are put forward by the contributors, all of whom are prominent political scientists in the area of Communist studies. In raising fundamental issues about the status of the concept of political culture, about continuities and discontinuities in history and concerning the transmission of values and political beliefs, the book addresses questions of broad interest to social scientists and historians.

For students of politics especially, there is much that is new in terms equally of how Communist studies should be approached and of interpretation of actual change and continuity within Communist countries. Particular attention is paid to the cases of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, though several of the chapters draw also on the experience of other Communist states. The Soviet Union's unique importance in the Communist world makes it an obvious candidate for the extended analysis which it here receives. Czechoslovakia is included because its pre-Communist (especially interwar) political experience represents a particularly sharp contrast with pre revolutionary Russia and thus raises the question of the relevance of such widely differing political inheritances to these states and their citizens within the Communist era.