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This interesting volume, from the pen of the assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, represents another attempt to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to social phenomena. This time the author is concerned with the psychological factors which lie back of various types of political activity. He studies political agitators, administrators, and theorists by the case-history method, using actual case
material, some of it from mental hospitals, some from volunteers who had never considered themselves in any way abnormal. This case material occupies a good third of the book. It is led up to by chapters which are designed to orient the reader in the psychopathological approach, and one which reviews the current criteria of political types. It is followed by chapters which discuss the bearing of personality studies on general political theory and criticise existing methods of study.
This statement, however, by no means covers the scope or significance of the book. The author is concerned not only with the developmental history of individual politicians but with the whole social and political order. What is the meaning in human experience of the culture patterns to which the child is exposed? If we can understand a man's deeds only in the light of his personality, and his personality only in the light of his developmental experiences, can we account for the differences in culture and in Weltanschauung by the child's early experiences, which are so largely conditioned by the particular culture—or within a culture by the social and economic strata—into which he happens to be born? The older works upon the theory of the state and of politics have not glimpsed these questions at all. They have been concerned with abstractions and with logical constructions and leave us cold as to human meanings; even political biographers have not set us far on the road to an answer. Sociology has only recently taken up the study of personality, while psychology