ABSTRACT
Although its ancestry in social philosophy can be traced back to ancient times, modern political psychology as an academic discipline was born in the decades between the First and Second World Wars. It is a child of political science and psychology, having been conceived in the ambivalent mood of optimism and despair that has characterized the scientiWc age. Rapidly expanding knowledge, the increasing conWdence in scientiWc methods, and the ever quickening technological developments stimulated the awareness that scientiWc methods might be applied to the understanding of political behavior. The increasing political turmoil, the irrationality and destructiveness of the First World War, the development of modern totalitarian regimes with their barbarities, the emergence of the mass media and their systematic use by propagandists, suggested an urgent need for more systematic knowledge about the relationship between political and psychological processes.
