A survey of how Western scholars study politics: a careful, well-read and sometimes genuinely sharp anatomy of behaviouralism, systems theory, pluralism and elite theory as practised in America, Britain, France, Italy and West Germany.
Its charge is single and relentless - that for all its instruments and its claims to be value-free, Western political science cannot see the class nature of the state it lives inside, and so serves power while believing itself neutral. The charge is often true, and the book is at its best when it takes a particular school on its own terms: the critique of pluralist accounts of power, and the reading of the elite theorists, are substantial pieces of work.
It is a collective product. Eight authors are named at the close of the introduction - N. N. Deyev, S. A. Yegorov, G. V. Gazenko, V. G. Grafsky, P. S. Gratsiansky, B. A. Kurkin, E. N. Ozhiganov and V. V. Smirnov - theorists of the kind the Academy's apparatus in the theory of state and law produced. There is no single editor, and it reads throughout as seamless and institutional.
What makes it worth having is the position it was written from: by scholars of a state that permitted no independent study of its own power, using instruments that would have exposed the society they wrote from.
The freshest event is the eleventh World Congress of the International Political Science Association, held in Moscow in August 1979; the citations thin sharply after 1980.
Translated by James Riordan. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
