Politics and social life : an introduction to political behavior

For some time, each of us has felt a need for a book in which the developing
area of intellectual life that is sometimes styled "political behavior" put its best
foot forward to our students. We hope the present book serves to introduce them
to the study of political behavior by suggesting some of the variety and vitality of
the field, by showing how political behavior studies go about advancing knowledge,
and by indicating some of the major findings about political life that have been
expressed in these studies.
The major premise, we suppose, which undergirds the entire study of political
behavior is simply that political life is but one kind - a most interesting kind - of
social life. As men come together and relate to one another in a variety of ways,
they develop practices of all kinds. Human societies are thus characterized by
reasonably stable practices relating to kinship, the production and exchange of
goods, the division of labor and numerous other activities, including activities
which can be regarded as political, such as the settlement of conflicts and the
collective determination of policy for large numbers of people. The quest for laws
describing accurately the political activities of men can, we think, be greatly enriched
by continuous attention to laws which are being developed and tested and which
describe men in other aspects of their lives.
As in any book of readings, we as editors accepted the task of including some
articles and excluding others, perhaps equally good. It may be useful, therefore,
to mention some of the criteria which guided us. Every reading in this book has
been selected to make a pedagogical point of one kind or another. The particular
points involved are mentioned in the essays introducing each chapter. We have
worked hard to keep to a minimum articles whose main virtue was that they stated
succinctly points of view which we would have been inclined to attack. When we
could, we put in hard-to-find articles in preference to readily available ones. In
several cases, we were fortunate in attracting previously unpublished works which
we thought said some things that needed saying better than anything we had seen
in print.
Social science is a collective enterprise, as this book should make clear. This
has been a collaborative effort, not only among three editors of widely differing
backgrounds, tastes and temperaments, but also between us and each of the
authors whose work is reprinted here. We want to thank them, and their publishers,
for allowing us to republish their work in this format. We also want to thank