ABSTRACT
Political science has a strange lineage. Its intellectual antecedents are bifurcated between the utopian inheritance involving the image of the perfect polity, and the pragmatic inheritance involving the image of the perfect scoundrel. Sociology tends to be more reformist because it makes assumptions that political science does not. However, the very concern with political primacy tends to polarize political scientists most sharply on questions of everyday life. Sociology tends to assume that spontaneous or collective dynamics is very important, that the behavior of 200,000 may not be vital, but only because they are not 400,000 or more. Within political science the notion of being popular or of appealing to a wider public counts for much less than it does in sociology. The fact is that political sociology has come to define the twentieth century with the same fundamental importance as political economy defined the nineteenth century.
