This is a book about philosophy by a nonphilosopher addressed to nonphilosophers. Whether it is possible to make such a book work is questionable. In the Prologue, I tried to explain why I was attempting to do so. That explanation is continued here by way of a somewhat less brief autobiographical sketch. Certainly I am not a philosopher and will never be one. For the past sixty years, as “Harry Callahan” admonished, I have been trying to find my limitations, to overcome them as much as may be, and to make the most of what is within them. Shortly before my sixteenth birthday, I quit school and got a job grinding spectacle lenses. I joined the Navy at the age of seventeen in late 1943 and served aboard the aircraft carrier Intrepid in combat in the Pacific until the end of the war. In 1948 I went back on active duty and served in a shore billet for four and a half years. In 1949 I began taking classes in off-duty hours at Los Angeles City College. I soon realized that I had found my calling, but the beginning of the Korean War delayed the pursuit of it.

In three years of part-time study at Los Angeles City College, I took courses in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history, but no courses in political science. I began to question my initial acceptance of the social sciences when, in one of my psychology classes, the professor confidently asserted that philosophy would no longer be necessary because “scientific” psychology had taken its place. Over time those doubts have multiplied. In the meantime, I figured out that I wanted to study political science.