The first part of the book proceeds in rather dogmatic fashion, and this no doubt tends to obscure the highly unsatisfactory nature of the materials and methods of contemporary psychopathology. The later chapters are given over to the critical and constructive discussion of these matters, and should fully indicate the highly provisional, though potentially significant, character of the whole. H. D. L. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Life-Histories and Political Science 1 II. The Psychopathological Approach 15 III. A New Technique of Thinking 28 IV. The Criteria of Political Types 38 V. Theories of Personality Development 65 VI. Political Agitators 78 VII. Political Agitators--_Continued_ 106 VIII. Political Administrators 127 IX. Political Convictions 153 X. The Politics of Prevention 173 XI. The Prolonged Interview and Its Objectification 204 XII. The Personality System and Its Substitutive Reactions 221 XIII. The State as a Manifold of Events 240 APPENDIX A. Select Bibliography 268 B. Question List on Political Practices 276 Index 283 CHAPTER I LIFE-HISTORIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE Political biography as a field of political science has long been relied upon to furnish a vivid corrective to the overemphasis laid upon the study of institutional “mechanisms,” “structures,” and “systems.” The legal and customary position of the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the monarch and the electorate, as expounded in the commentaries of Gneist and Dicey, suddenly take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Morley’s Gladstone, Strachey’s Victoria, or Lee’s Edward VII. The German imperial system of Laband is more fleshly and less transcendental when one has studied the lives of Bismarck or William II. An institutional account of the constitutional development of the United States without a life of Marshall and a life of Lincoln would be but the dregs of a rich and ebullient history. Political science without biography is a form of taxidermy.