This Week’s Citation Classic®______Llpaet S M. Political man: the social bases of politics. a [ Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960. 432 p. [Department of Sociology and Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA!

Political Man deals with democracy as a they vary in terms of ranking on the power and characteristic of social systems. The principal status dimensions. topics are: the conditions necessary for democra- I continued to work on the manuscript at Berke- cy in societies and organizations; the factors that affect participation in politics, particularly the ley the following year. I was somewhat dissatisfied behavior of voters; and the sources of support for with what appeared to me to be an overly simplis- values and movements that sustain or threaten tic principle of integration and tried other ap- democratic5 institutions.5 [The Social Sciences Cita- proaches. At the suggestion of another graduate tion Index (55C1 ) indicates that all editions of research student, Amitai Etzioni, I decided to this book have been explicitly cited in over 1.410 break the long manuscript into a series of articles. publications.] This was done during the next few years with the assistance of Etzioni and, later, Robert Alford. Nathan Glazer, then the social science editor at Doubleday, read some of these papers and sug- Seymour Martin Lipset gested that I weave them into a book. Thus, the Departments of Political Science process went full circle from book-length manu- and Sociology script to discrete articles to book. Stanford University I believe the reason the book was so well re- Stanford, CA 94305 ceived when it appeared was that it pointed up the existence of an international research community in political sociology that was producing works May 20, 1986 that cumulated intellectually. Although the pub- lished work focused on political behavior within The genesis of Political Man was a series of proJ- different countries, much of it bore on the same ects commissioned by Bernard Berelson, of the set of theories and hypotheses. And where the Ford Foundation, to inventory knowledge in the results differed from one country to another, the social sciences. I chaired a group at Columbia variations led to an awareness of structural University that included Richard Hofstadter, variables that would not have been noted within a Herbert Hyman, and David Truman, which took on purely national or contemporary framework. the task for the political behavior area. After a The book’s reception was beyond all my expec- number of false starts, we decided that integrated tations. It received the Maclver Prize in 1962, and analyses of the research literature would be more more recently it was one of a small number of useful. Our project ultimately resulted in three books discussed as “social science classics” in arti- books: Political Socialization by Hyman (1959),1 cles in the3 (London) Times Higher Education Sup- The Politics2 of Mass Society by William Morn- plement. I am not sure how many copies have hauser. and Political Man (1960). been sold, but the total is well over 250,000 in the The materials that went into Political Man were US. The work has appeared in two other separate first assembled in an 800-page draft manuscript, English-language editions and has been translated which I wrote, mainly during 1955-1956—a year into 14 other languages. Itis still in print4 in most of spent asa Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study these editions, and a recent edition includes a in the Behavioral Sciences. Juan Linz, then writing new 120-page section that both incorporates the his dissertation with me, and I read through a mass relevant research of the intervening 20 years and of research literature. (Linz is not only a fantastic reacts to critical evaluation. bibliophile, but he knows fluently the maJor Euro- The explanation for the book’s high ranking on pean languages.) the list of the most-cited works rests on its wide The task I took on was an analysis of the social availability in many languages and the fact that it bases of political cleavage, that is, the factors that has proven relevant to work in three disciplines: differentiate electorates in all democratic coun- history, political science, and sociology. In partic- tries. This led to a focus on social class or socioeco- ular, my treatment of the social conditions for de- nomic differences, followed by an effort to mocracy; working-class authoritarianism; fas- analyze the other substantive variables that cism—left, right, and center; and the end of ideol- modify the impact of hierarchically based con- ogy have given rise to considerable follow-up flicts, e.g., education, religion, ethnicity, gender, research andlor controversy. Among my subse- regional variations, center-periphery differences, quent books, two are particularly relevant5 as generation, and age. Many of these could be sub- follow ups, Revolution and6 Counterrevolution and sumed under the concept of stratification, since Consensus and Conflict.

1. Hywan H. Political socialization. Glencoc, IL: Free Press. 1959. 175 p. (Cited 305 tunes.) 2. Kombanse, W. The politics of mass society. Glencoc. IL: Free Press. 1959. 256 p. (Cited 490 times.) 3. Kavanana_b D. Original testament to a liberal democracy. Times High. Educ. Suppl. 5 July 1985. p. 16. U 4. L~eetSM. Political man: the social bases of politics. Bsltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1981. 586 p. 5. — . Revolution and counterreeolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor Books. 1970. 416 p. 6. -.--... consen~sand conflict: essays in political sociology. New Brunswick. NJ: Transaction Books. 1985. 375 p. 14 s&ss ©1986 by SI® CURRENT CONTENTS® .1