ABSTRACT
The psychology of politics that traditionalists deem adequate is derived from the logic of the international milieu, which breeds the kind of vocabulary found in the historians and theorists of the state of nature: fear and power, pride and honor, survival and security, self-interest and reputation, distrust and misunderstanding, commitment and credibility. In a issue of Political Psychology, Richard Smoke described two "universes of discourse" for the same topic—survival in the nuclear age and the era of US-Soviet confrontation. He was talking about the antinuclear movement on one side and the "mainstream national security analysts" on the other. Traditionalists believe that the "intrapsychic" approach distorts reality. Decisions about war and peace are usually taken by small groups of people; the temptation of analyzing their behavior either, literally, in terms of their personalities or, metaphorically, in terms borrowed from the study of human development, rather than in terms of group dynamics or principles of international politics, is understandable.
