As the first of these, the book is a remarkable accomplishment: it compresses into less than two hundred pages of lucid, fast-moving prose all that the general reader and the beginning college student need to know about what the political scientists have written on American political parties. Had the author let it go at that, the book might have performed a much-needed educational function. Book-reading Americans, who certainly need to know more about their political parties, are estopped from learning about them by the dullest and most illiterate shelf of books that American political scientists, with their unlimited capacity for dullness and illiteracy, have yet created. Rossiter brings the findings of that literature to life, makes them intelligible, drives them home. Parties and Politics in America makes a couple of evenings of indispensable reading for anyone sufficiently sophisticated about politics to realize, before reaching the grape-arbor, that he or she is being led down the gardenpath.
That brings us to 2) Rossiter’s assault on the political chastity of his readers, the lust and relevant skills for which seem now to grow within him from book to book. He uses as his seductive lure what I like to call the planted axiom: the proposition of dubious validity put forward, in the context of an impressive array of footnotes, as just plain fact, in the resence of which the learned author stands helpless, resigned, and with nothing left to do except pass it on to the reader (who, he manages to suggest, must, being an intelligent man, already know it). All Liberals of course use the planted axiom; but Rossiter, unlike the others, knows better than to do it, and once upon a time was too good to do it. As he himself would put it, he once scraped the stars, and at least approached glory, in a book called Seedtime of the Republic, the most loving, objective, scholarly account we have of the roots of the American political tradition.
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