000			03139nam a2200205Ia 4500
999			_c8772 _d8772
005			20220302170137.0
008			200202s9999 xx 000 0 und d
082			_a320 Pol
100			_aPolsby, Nelson W.
245		0	_aPolitics and social life : an introduction to political behavior
260			_aBouston
260			_bHoughton Mifflin
260			_c1963
300			_a879p.
520			_aFor 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 In several cases, we were fortunate in attracting previously unpublished works which we thought said some things that needed saying better than anything we had seen in print.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
650			_aPolitical Science
700			_aDentler, Robert A.
700			_aSmith, Paul A.
942			_cB _2ddc