Preface

Summary

Philosophers of the late Middle Ages felt that they understood certain things better than the Greeks, who had dealt with the same questions in earlier centuries. Yet their reverence for the ancient philosophers was such that they never considered themselves to be as talented or insightful as those who had come before. Rather, they said, they were pygmies on the shoulders of giants, and only because of this could they see just a bit farther.

In much the same way, I am so immodest as to believe that this book does advance certain important questions, but, like the medieval philosophers, I understand that my work is advancing questions that were framed by my predecessors, and that, with only minor deviations, I am plodding down the center of a path that was clearly marked out by them. Which is to say that my intellectual debt to my predecessors in the political behavior field is very great. Three of these debts stand out. One is to William McGuire, a social psychologist whose masterly synthesis of research on attitude change has provided the starting point for all of my work in this area. The greater part of the second half of the book is simply an elaboration of the model he originally proposed in the late 1960s.

The second debt is to Philip Converse, whose work has dominated the political behavior field for more than two decades and dominates my own as well.