The Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Nature In Politics, by Graham Wallas

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Title: Human Nature In Politics
Third Edition

Author: Graham Wallas

Release Date: March 19, 2004 [EBook #11634]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS

BY

GRAHAM WALLAS

PREFACE

I offer my thanks to several friends who have been kind enough to read
the proofs of this book, and to send me corrections and suggestions;
among whom I will mention Professors John Adams and J.H. Muirhead, Dr.
A. Wolf, and Messrs. W.H. Winch, Sidney Webb, L. Pearsall Smith, and
A.E. Zimmern. It is, for their sake, rather more necessary than usual
for me to add that some statements still remain in the text which one or
more of them would have desired to see omitted or differently expressed.

I have attempted in the footnotes to indicate those writers whose books
I have used. But I should like to record here my special obligation to
Professor William James's _Principles of Psychology_, which gave me, a
good many years ago, the conscious desire to think psychologically about
my work as politician and teacher.

I have been sometimes asked to recommend a list of books on the
psychology of politics. I believe that at the present stage of the
science, a politician will gain more from reading, in the light of his
own experience, those treatises on psychology which have been written
without special reference to politics, than by beginning with the
literature of applied political psychology. But readers who are not
politicians will find particular points dealt with in the works of the
late Monsieur G. Tarde, especially _L'Opinion et la Foule_ and _Les Lois
de l'Imitation_ and in the books quoted in the course of an interesting
article on 'Herd Instinct,' by Mr. W. Trotter in the _Sociological
Review_ for July 1908. The political psychology of the poorer
inhabitants of a great city is considered from an individual and
fascinating point of view by Miss Jane Addams (of Chicago) in her
_Democracy and Social Ethics_.

GRAHAM