Originally published in 1930, this title brings to its conclusion a work first published, in part, in the earlier volume The Science and Method of Politics. The work was undertaken at first with a view to discovering the forces at work which form the anatomy and determine the physiology of States. However, it became apparent that not States but Society must be the object of study if any progress were to made, and if the inquiry were to be radical enough to disclose, and indicate the means of controlling, the causes which conduce to such social disorders as war. The subject might very well have been treated from a very different point of view. However, the author felt that the approach to politics from the angle of political philosophy and the humanities was less important for the needs of the time than an approach from the angle of psychology and of statistics.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was born in Switzerland and became one of France's leading writers, as well as a journalist, philosopher, and politician. His colourful life included a formative stay at the University of Edinburgh; service at the court of Brunswick, Germany; election to the French Tribunate; and initial opposition and subsequent support for Napoleon, even the drafting of a constitution for the Hundred Days. Constant wrote many books, essays, and pamphlets. His deepest conviction was that reform is hugely superior to revolution, both morally and politically. While Constant's fluid, dynamic style and lofty eloquence do not always make for easy reading, his text forms a coherent whole, and in his translation Dennis O'Keeffe has focused on retaining the 'general elegance and subtle rhetoric' of the original. Sir Isaiah Berlin called Constant 'the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' and believed to him we owe the notion of 'negative liberty', that is, what Biancamaria Fontana describes as "the protection of individual experience and choices from external interferences and constraints." To Constant it was relatively unimportant whether liberty was ultimately grounded in religion or metaphysics -- what mattered were the practical guarantees of practical freedom -- "autonomy in all those aspects of life that could cause no harm to others or to society as a whole." This translation is based on Etienne Hofmann's critical edition of Principes de politique (1980), complete with Constant's additions to the original work.

Principles of Comparative Politics offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to comparative inquiry, research, and scholarship. In this thoroughly revised Third Edition, students now have an even better guide to cross-national comparison and why it matters. The new edition retains a focus on the enduring questions with which scholars grapple, the issues about which consensus has started to emerge, and the tools comparativists use to get at the complex problems in the field. Among other things, the updates to this edition include a thoroughly-revised chapter on dictatorships that incorporates a discussion of the two fundamental problems of authoritarian rule: authoritarian power-sharing and authoritarian control; a revised chapter on culture and democracy that includes a more extensive examination of cultural modernization theory and a new overview of survey methods for addressing sensitive topics; a new section on issues related to electoral integrity; an expanded assessment of different forms of representation; and a new intuitive take on statistical analyses that provides a clearer explanation of how to interpret regression results. Examples from the gender and politics literature have been incorporated into various chapters, the Problems sections at the end of each chapter have been expanded, a! nd the empirical examples and data on various types of institutions have been updated. Online videos and tutorials are available to address some of the more methodological components discussed in the book. The authors have thoughtfully streamlined chapters to better focus attention on key topics.

This book presents the rational choice theories of collective action and social choice, applying them to problems of public policy and social justice. Joe Oppenheimer has crafted a basic survey of, and pedagogic guide to, the findings of public choice theory for political scientists. He describes the problems of collective action, institutional structures, regime change, and political leadership.

Remarkable developments have taken place in the domain of political theory in the present age of liberalisation and globalisation. The concept of the nation-state has undergone a major change on account of the irresistible erosion of sovereignty in the internal and external spheres and the emergence of the model of a transnational state. Different models of state may be seen in the countries of the Third World. It has put a question mark on the future of the nation-state. The basic tenets of liberalism have been challenged by Neo-liberalism and Communitarianism with the result that now it is on the retreat. In the post-World War II period, the New Fabians had revised the tenets of Fabianism, but in the post-Cold War era it has been replaced by the Third Way. The pluralists had attacked the classical theory of sovereignty, but the neo-pluralists have given a new shape to it. The theme of political legitimacy has been revisited. The old concept of citizenship requires to be reinterpreted in the contexts of civic republicanism, multi-culturalism and identity politics. It has happened with other themes as well which may be taken note of in the emergence of new topics like Neo-colonialism, Post-colonialism, Post-communism and the like. The task of a political scientist is to comprehend and critically describe the underlying principles of political behaviour in their empirical as well as normative dimensions. Inter-disciplinary focus has become so popular now that the implications of the themes of various social sciences have penetrated into the domain of each other. The discipline of political science has become a study of `power' and of 'struggle' for its sake at any level -- local, regional, national and international. In the light of these salient features, university courses have been modernised, and the author has done well to cover them in this work so as to adequately meet the requirements of students offering this course at the degree and postgraduate levels and of candidates preparing for competitive examinations.

For Graduate and Post Graduate Students of Indian Universities and also useful for competitive examinations.