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Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics

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What can one say about Seymour Lipset, the grand diety of the subfield of comparative politics? Along with Gabe Almond and a few other luminaries, Lipset blazed a trail and managed to put the "science" in political science at a time when most of his colleagues were writing one-dimensional country studies and other subjective hoo-ha. "Political Man" is first and foremost a work of political sociology, in the tradition of Weber, Marx and Parsons, and as such seeks to uncover the social factors underlying political variables like legitimacy and stability. Since Lipset's work is dated in several ways, including an obsolete cold-war division of world comparative categories, as well as a positivistic, naive modernist belief in the objectivity of social sciences, the book's shine has been somewhat dimmed over time. However, the meticulousness and parsimony of Lipset's research, coupled with the stunningly coherent writing style, make the book a mouth-watering treat nonetheless. Political scientists of today should read the book more for form than content, as it is a true masterpiece of rigorous objectivity and of social scientific analysis in general.