Countries and Concepts Politics, Geography, Culture 12th Edition by Michael G. Roskin

Countries and Concepts Politics, Geography, Culture 12th Edition by Michael G. RoskinISBN-13: 9780205854653ISBN-10: 0205854656xxviiCountries and Concepts does not attempt to create young scholars out of college students. Rather,it sees comparative politics as an important but usually neglected grounding in citizenship that weshould be making available to our young people. I agree with the late Morris Janowitz (in his 1983The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness) that civic education has declinedin the United States and that this poses dangers for democracy. Our students are often uninformedabout the historical, political, economic, geographical, and moral aspects of democracy, and to exposethem to professional-level abstractions in political science ignores their civic education and offersmaterial that is largely meaningless to them. An undergraduate is not a miniature graduate student.Accordingly, Countries and Concepts includes a good deal of fundamental vocabulary and concepts,buttressed by many examples. It is dedicated to Kant?s injunction that concepts must neverbe separated from percepts. It is readable. Many students neglect assigned readings; with Countriesand Concepts, they cannot make the excuse that the reading is long or boring.Some reviewers note that Countries and Concepts contains values and criticisms. This is partof my purpose. The two go together; if you have no values, then you have no basis from which tocriticize. Value-free instruction is probably impossible. If successful, it would produce value-freestudents, and that, I think, should not be the aim of the educational enterprise. If one knows somethingwith the head but not with the heart, then one really does not know it at all.Is Countries and Concepts too critical? It treats politics as a series of ongoing quarrels for whichno very good solutions can be found. It casts a skeptical eye on all political systems and all solutionsproposed for political problems. As such, the book is not out to ?get? any one country. All politicalsystems are flawed; none approaches perfection. Let us simply say so. Countries and Concepts rejectsabsurd theories of smoothly functioning systems or rational calculators that never break down or makemistakes. Put it this way: If we are critical of the workings of our own country?s politics?and many,perhaps most, of us are?why should we abandon that critical spirit in looking at other lands?