ABSTRACT
Political science is one of the more difficult of the 'sciences' because political science is so severely hampered not only by the inherent difficulty of its subject matter but also by the hazards attached to the very tools with which it must work. The hazards of studying politics have taken their toll on the political science discipline and its members, who have been prone not only to revolutions but occasionally to something resembling civil war. The model is political in a higher sense also, for it is founded not on human subservience to social, economic, or governmental institutions, but instead emphasizes the power of strategically situated individuals to understand, confront, and change circumstances. A model in political science is approximately what it is in everyday discourse: a simplified, usually reduced version of the real world. The essential elements of the 'polities' model are similar in some ways to other social science models, but are in other ways markedly different.
