TWO POLITICAL SCIENCE BOOKS: A COMPARISON
Political science is a large field of study, embracing the whole range of experience and behavior relating to the human capacity for living in communities whose cohesion is supported by power or authority, with institutions that supply that power or authority. Within this large field is therefore room for a wide variety of works, exploring, analysing, and interpreting various aspects of human political activity and experience. These works may range from the broad in scope, seeking to touch on the field in all its variety, to the narrowly specific, treating some particular aspect of political science in depth.
As in most academic fields, a large proportion of modern original work appears in the form of scholarly journal articles, a few pages to a few dozen pages in length. The audience for journal articles is confined almost entirely to academic professionals, who have readier access to the journals in which they appear, and who can be presumed to be conversant with the ongoing scholarly dialogue, of which individual journal articles are components.
Journal articles are supplemented by longer works, published as books. While less numerous than articles, books dealing with political science have an even wider variety, ranging from monographs, specialized works resembling enlarged journal articles, to books aimed at the interested layperson, dealing with some aspect or aspects of political life and thought, to broad introductions to the field intended for students. The following discussion compares two relatively recent books in the field, as exemplars of two different approaches to the field, intended for different audiences and having different purposes. They are Political Science: An Introduction (2000), by Michael Roskin, Robert Cord, James Madieros, and Walter Jones; and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997), by Rogers Smith.
The ...