Before the 1950s， comparative politics was mostly normative--arguing how insti-
tutions should be--and descriptive， focusing on how other countries institutions
actually worked. In fact， a typical title for what we would now call the introduc-
tory comparative politics course was \"Governments of Foreign Powers.\" There was
almost no explicit comparison of countries institutions， and little interest in what
we would now call the comparative method.
When in 1955 Roy Macridis， then already a leading scholar in the field， pub-
lished the highly polemical essay \"A Survey of the Field of Comparative Govern-
ment，\" he created a sensation that rapidly revolutionized comparative politics.
Macridis s very pointed critique set off an enormous， and mostly constructive， de-
bate throughout the field. It attacked what virtually every present-day scholar
would see as the enormous deficiencies of\"comparative\" politics at the time: that it
was not really comparative at all， that its main texts were really \"travelogues\" of
individual-country description， that it focused almost exclusively on the West， that
it did not formulate (let alone test) hypotheses， and that it was totally devoid of
theory. Perhaps even more interestingly， Macridis went on to attack what was then
seen as the most promising solution to these maladies， namely a focus on \"area
studies\" and the debate over this approach remains lively to the present day. As
you proceed through the course and the other readings in this collection， you will
find it useful to ask again and again: How much of Macridis s critique continues to
apply to comparative politics today?
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