Presumably you are reading this book to gain insight into politics. Politics means different things to different people. For some it is an electoral fight for city hall. For others it is the legislative struggle to change a law. In non-democratic countries it may be the struggle of an autocrat to maintain power, or of citizens to organize a rebellion. Still others may view it as the bureaucratic hassle of getting a business license. For our purposes these are all politics. Politics consists of behavior undertaken either to make centralized decisions for a group, or to secure interests shared by members of a group.

This book makes claims – big claims – about enduring patterns to be found in politics. Hopefully, these patterns will help you understand why certain things happen, and even how you can make some things happen. The book cannot give us a complete understanding of politics: nothing holistic. But we can explain why certain problems, certain patterns, occur over and over again. Barring a few insights, these are not things I have discovered. Rather, a substantial group of scholars has expanded the theories of rational choice to explain many aspects of politics. They, along with a skilled, and often skeptical, bunch of others have tested these conjectures. In this volume, I present generalizations about politics that are justified by a chain of reasoning. Most have also survived some serious testing. These generalizations amount to claims of knowledge regarding both empirical and normative political questions. Knowledge claims have been made by other political theorists over the millennia, never without contention. Contention continues. So before we begin our exploration of these knowledge claims, let us consider the ground rules.