Ending the war in Vietnam, preventing similar conflicts elsewhere, solving the problems associated with the pollution of our environment, and securing a just domestic social order are among the most important political issues of our time. These issues have one characteristic in common: the securing (or non-securing) of these objectives will be shared by all citizens of the United States. Consequently, these and similar phenomena can be analyzed in terms of collective goods: goods that, if consumed by one member of a specified group, cannot be withheld from the other members. Indeed, much of politics can be seen to be concerned with the securing (or non-securing) of collective goods. The reason for this is well expressed by Mancur Olson:

American academic literature on foreign policy witnessed, in the 1960's, a continuing flow of studies of the Soviet case, as indeed of other cases. It also witnessed a flow of studies of another, newer, and broader type—studies of theoretical bent concerned with the construction of general analytical models of foreign policy behavior.

Ethnicity is one of the less precise terms in the vocabulary of social science. Most frequently used in reference to language, its meaning is sometimes extended to cover common social, cultural, and physical characteristics transmitted as a matter of inheritance and capable of producing social solidarities based on affect. So defined, ethnicity has both subjective and objective dimensions, for it refers both to perceptible traits and to perception whereby the former assume social relevance.

“Future revolutions will doubtless be directed against the admin- JL istration and not against the political system.” Thus states one writer in the opening sentence of his book on l'Administration au pouvoir. There is little doubt that the institution in France that today bears the brunt of attacks coming from the entire range of the political, economic, and social spectrum, is the French administration—the state bureaucracy that, since the early part of the nineteenth century, has been charged with directing most of the state's affairs. Today, the parties of the Left, Right, and Center; big business, small business, and the propertyless; the privileged and the underprivileged; the in-tellectuals, the students, and the unions—all these groups, that is to say, the French people, are agreed on what they regard to be the excessive and nefarious role that the bureaucracy plays in French life. Few Frenchmen would agree with Francois Gazier, former Director of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, when he writes in his preface to Belorgey's book that “the French administration, thriving under praise and criticism alike, can at least be credited with one success: it has known how to keep in tune with its times” (p. 7). One is tempted to say that were these words not merely the manifestation of hyperbolic tendencies sometimes common in preface-writing, some courage would have been needed to write them. It is hard to conceive in present-day France of an attempt to sustain the thesis that the administration is in tune with its times.

Only in the past decade has the study of political socialization grown into a central concern of political science. Although political philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have been interested in the process by which the child acquires behavior appropriate to the role of a citizen, political scientists had, as of ten years ago, devoted little attention to studying this phenomenon systematically.