The Handbook of Political Behavior

Book excerpt: On Revolutions That Never Were "If you want to understand what a science is," the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 5) has written, "you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do. " If it is not always possible to follow this instruction, it is because the rate of change in scientific work is rapid and the growth of publications reporting on this work is great. It is therefore the task of a handbook, like this Hand book of Political Behavior, to summarize and evaluate what the practi tioners report. But it is always prudent to keep in mind that a handbook is only a shortcut and that there is no substitute for looking directly at what the practitioners of a science do. For when scientists are "at work" (Walter, 1971), the image of what they are doing is often quite different from that conveyed in the "briefs" that, in their own way, make a hand book so valuable that we cannot do without it. These reflections set the stage.