Basic to an understanding of China is the fact that it is a Third World nation. The country is clearly very poor. Eighty percent of the population is rural and a large number of the urban dwellers are engaged in low-status, unskilled jobs. There are many involved in trade and selling for artisans and small shop-keepers. While there, I was on occasion surrounded by peddlers, including children, imploring me to buy trinkets and other small items.

The most common form of transportation, by far, is the bicycle. It is omnipresent, particularly in the cities. People ride bikes everywhere. During the times when people are going to or coming from work, it is often hard to pass because of the density of bike-riders. On the roads between the cities, every form of transportation known to the human race may be seen with the exception of the rickshaw. Since the rickshaw is symbolically associated with exploitation in pre-Communist days, it is now outlawed. The current range of road transportation varies from Mercedes to women pulling carts with ropes around their necks, as well as wagons pulled by donkeys or water buffalo.

There are few machines in the countryside. Tractors, other than one horse-power ones, are quite rare. The rural areas frequently offer a sight portrayed in many classic Chinese pictures, hundreds of peasants in the fields working by hand transplanting rice and doing other tasks. While there are many large rice fields, tiny plots of land are also common. It seems as if almost every inch of land that can possibly be farmed is, including cleared areas going up steep mountainsides. Among other crops, wheat is grown on these small mountainside plots. The contrast between these tiny hand-tilled fields and the vast, mechanized wheat farms of North Dakota or Saskatchewan is depressing.

Citizenship is not terra incognita for political science, but it is not home ground either. Citizenship is more art than science, more practice than theory, and in the education of citizens, political science is subject to two obvious limitations.

In the first place, the basic character of citizens is formed before they become students of political science and even before they are taught civics by the schools. The first principles by which they perceive the world and relate to others already have been shaped by the family, by the laws and by early education generally. In that sense, political science influences citizens most profoundly when it teaches their teachers, although in a more superficial way political science can and does instruct citizens themselves.

Second, as Aristotle taught us, civic virtue is not identical with human goodness, and citizenship is a questionable excellence. The art of citizenship is specific to and limited by the regime in which the citizen is to practice it. In the ordinary sense of the term, a good citizen accepts the laws and “works within the system,” and even if we argue that citizens should pursue ends which are universal and by nature, citizenship requires them to do so in ways which are adapted to a particular people, place and time.

LaRuth, at forty, was on the knife's edge. Another two years and he'd be a man of influence, and therefore ineligible for any politics outside the House–or not ineligible, but shopworn, no longer new, no longer fresh. He would be ill-suited, and there were other practical considerations as well, because who wanted to be a servant for twelve or fourteen years and then surrender an opportunity to be master? Not LaRuth. So the time for temporizing was nearly past. If he was going to forsake the House and reach for the Senate (a glamorous possibility), he had to do it soon.

Ward Just, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert

Ward Just's fictional congressman LaRuth faces two distinct, but related pressures. First, for members of the House, there are few opportunities for advancement. This truncated “structure of opportunities” forces tough choices upon ambitious politicians. The second pressure is no less profound. Ticking away are the dual clocks of chronological age and congressional seniority. Most members seek higher office early in their congressional career (though this may be changing some), when their ties to the House are least strong and the fires of ambition burn the hottest. Much as the externally imposed structure of opportunities affects career choices, so too do the roughly defined internal mandates of human development.

Of all modern machines, indeed of all the artifacts of modern culture, the bomb is the most frightening. It is the most dangerous of all human inventions. The American, European, and Soviet people have always known how dangerous it is. They have, nevertheless, left nuclear weapons in the hands of the nuclear priesthood. (In the Soviet Union this has not been a matter of choice.) In the 1980s some in the West resolved to take control of the bomb. They began to demand that disarmament replace deterrence as the principal nuclear business of the Atlantic alliance.

Probably from 1945 onward the average American or European would, if asked, have said that he wanted to do away with all nuclear arsenals rather than refine or increase them. But the average Westerner was not asked, and did not say so, at least not in any way that influenced public policy. In the 1980s citizens of the West did begin to say so, publicly, loudly, and in growing numbers. For the first time, a mass movement dedicated to shaping the nuclear future appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this, as in other things, the North American and the European wings of NATO differ. Opposition to the alliance's nuclear weapons policies made itself known earlier in Europe than in the United States. Both European and American anti-nuclear weapons activists aimed ultimately to lift the nuclear siege that the world must endure as long as these weapons exist. But each rallied around a more immediate issue, and the issues were different. The Europeans opposed the stationing of 572 intermediate-range missiles on the continent, which the NATO governments deemed necessary to offset comparable Soviet weapons. In the United States a proposal to freeze the deployment, testing, and manufacture of all weapons by both superpowers attracted wide support.

The teaching of citizenship might seem inappropriate for a political scientist. Such teaching is normative, it might be said, but political science is empirical. And, it might be added, citizenship is a parochial concern for the good of one's own country, whereas political science is based on a universal love of truth. These objections will have to be made more precise, even recast; but insofar as they suggest that good citizen and good political scientist may not be the same thing, they are perfectly reasonable.

The distinction between empirical and normative, or fact and value (which cannot be explored theoretically here), means that a political scientist, as political scientist, cannot tell citizens whether citizenship is a good thing, or say that political science is a good thing and ought to be welcomed or tolerated by citizens. A political scientist might perhaps remark empirically, or half-empirically, that love of one's country animates the citizens as citizen and love of truth inspires the political scientist as political scientist. But instead of leading to conflict between citizens and political scientists and hence to a problem for political scientists, who must be both, this observation is made to yield a queer harmony between the two. It is thought that since political scientists cannot pronounce upon the worth of citizenship, they do not get in the way of citizens. Their work is neutral to that of citizens. Love of truth does not interfere with love of country because all loves, being “values,” are incommensurable. Thus, the methodology of the fact-value distinction provides a lefthanded endorsement of (at least democratic) citizenship.

A rational strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons is a contradiction in terms. The enormity of the destruction, either executed or threatened, severs the nexus of proportionality between means and ends which used to characterize the threat and use of force. This does not mean, however, that all nuclear strategies are equally irrational. The nuclear policy of the Reagan administration—which is essentially the same as that of the Carter administration and which has its roots in developments initiated by even earlier administrations—is particularly ill-formed. As I will demonstrate, the basic reason for this is that the strategy rests on a profound underestimation of the impact of nuclear weapons on military strategy and attempts to understand the current situation with intellectual tools appropriate only in the pre-nuclear era.

American strategy for the past several years—the “countervailing strategy”—has been based on the assumption that what is crucial is the ability of American and allied military forces to deny the Soviets military advantage from any aggression they might contemplate. The U.S. must be prepared to meet and block any level of Soviet force. The strategy is then one of counterforce—blocking and seeking to destroy Soviet military power. The goal is deterrence. Although it is concerned with how the U.S. would fight many different kinds of wars, both nuclear and non-nuclear, it is not correct to claim that the strategy seeks to engage in wars rather than deter them.

Tocqueville, considering how Americans compare their nation with others, observed that general ideas about politics testify to the weakness of human intelligence. “The Deity does not regard the human race collectively.… Such is, however, not the case with man. … Having superficially considered a certain number of objects, and remarked their resemblance, he assigns to them a common name, sets them apart, and proceeds onwards.”

As it is for human beings, so, too, for political scientists. And of the generalizations which have helped Americans and American political scientists organize the confusing mass of differences and similarities between this country and others, none has been more important and enduring than the notion of the uniqueness of the American political community. This conception is reflected in the split within the discipline between those who study the U.S. political system and those who study comparative politics, a field understood to encompass various foreign countries. The rubric that in the American Political Science Review until the 1950s used to read “Foreign Governments and Politics” has been replaced by a subsection of the book reviews that is entitled “Comparative Politics.” But today as in the past, it is rare to find teaching or research in political science that truly integrates the analysis of American politics within a comparative framework.

Why this should remain the case is difficult to understand, for over the past half-century there have been many shifts in the discipline and in the world that challenged the premises of research based on American exceptionalism. Already in the interwar period, significant work in political science was moving beyond configurative case studies of individual countries. C. J. Friedrich's important Constitutional Government and Democracy (1937), indeed, included the United States in its examination of how well certain general political theories explained the experiences of major political systems. Whatever reservations one might have had about the methodologies of comparative research on which Friedrich relied, the broad influence of his work promised a new integration of American politics into an expanded field of comparative politics.

The objective of liberal education is, surely, to help students develop the skills, capacities, perceptions, and imagination to enable them to enrich and enhance not only their own lives, but the life of the community as well. Educating for citizenship, thus broadly defined, is an endeavor shared by political scientists with colleagues in related fields, in the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Citizenship as subject matter, however, has fallen within our purview. Put differently, as educators all of us consider, in a diffuse sort of way, the relationship between our teaching on the one hand and the polity on the other. Those of us who are political scientists must consciously concern ourselves with matters that fall under the rubric of citizenship. Notwithstanding the high purposes of the Academy as a whole, citizenship has for all practical purposes been defined in terms of the political, and political science has been charged with providing an academic experience that should inform and inspire the citizen experience. A tension, therefore, may be said to exist between political science's competency to teach about and its more general responsibility to educate for citizenship. The writers here address the question of how we can best teach about citizenship, ply our trade as it were, in ways that educate for citizenship.

First, it would be useful to remind ourselves how we typically teach about citizenship. That some subfields of the discipline lend themselves more readily than others to the enterprise is not at issue. Whatever the emphasis in a wide variety of courses, our students should leave our tutelages with an understanding of citizenship as a status, a cluster of activities, a concept, and a value. More tellingly, most of us would like to think that we expose our students to frames of reference and modes of analysis that encourage them to make and act upon informed, critical, and sophisticated judgments about political phenomena and public affairs.

Having had a foot in each camp for over 30 years, I am acutely aware of our discipline's customary division of the study of political parties between American and non-American subjects. The division remains most apparent in teaching programs despite increasing cross-national research efforts during the last few decades. I doubt that merger is entirely feasible. The division is deeply rooted in the general development of political science in the United States, and something like it is characteristic of other subjects as well as of parties. Legislatures, executives, and courts readily come to mind. Significantly, they are governmental institutions so linked to a country's constitutional and historical experience that a national context for their study seems plainly appropriate. Although parties are not governmental institutions in the same sense as are legislatures, executives, and courts, they have become more than merely private political associations. Most notably in the United States, they are plainly quasigovernmental in many respects. Perhaps this helps to explain why American political scientists have treated our parties, along with governing agencies, as American institutions while leaving parties in other nations for treatment under the rubric of comparative government and politics. Much can be said in behalf of that institutional tradition, but one must grant that it ties our work to geographic units and thus keeps many political scientists closer to historians, in at least one methodological sense, than to economists or sociologists. For better or worse, we thus appear less scientific, conceptually, than the ambitious title of our discipline suggests.