ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a map for the analysis of personality and politics, an outgrowth of author's attempts to apply the approach developed in Opinions and Personality to the analysis of various problems involving social attitudes and behavior, particularly McCarthyism, civil liberties, and anti-Semitism. A map like this is not a theory that can be confirmed or falsified by testing deductions against evidence; it is rather a heuristic device, a declaration of intellectual strategy, that is to be judged as profitable or sterile rather than as true or false. Many persisting disputes in the social sciences are like the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. A good map helps us to keep the whole Elephant in view. The chapter illustrates the utility of the map by applying it in an attempt to clarify some of the meanings of political rationality—a theme with which Key was preoccupied up to his death.
