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The political scientist is a teacher of public men in the making, and an adviser of public men in activity; "public men," that is, men who are taught, invited or assumed to feel some responsibility for the exercise of political power; "political power," that is, concentrated means of affecting the future.Obviously we can not affect the past, or that present moment which is now passing away, but only what is not yet: the future alone is sensitive to our actions, voluntary if aimed at a pictured outcome, rational if apt to cause it, prudently conceived if we take into account circumstances outside our control (known to decision theorists as "states of nature"), and the conflicting moves of others (known in game theory as opponents' play). A result placed in the future, conditions intervening in the future, need we say more to stress that decisions are taken "with an eye to the future," in other terms, with foresight?

A certain small group of men (hereafter called "the team") shares an intention, the implementation of which requires at least a once-for-all decision of some public authority. The most obvious procedure is to plead in favor of that decision with the holders (or holder) of the competent authority. The next most obvious is to win over people who have easy and habitual access to the decision-maker or makers. These first and second procedures can be practiced under any regime.

Political activity is dangerous. Arising inevitably out of men's ability to influence each other, conferring upon them the benefits of joint endeavour, an indispensable source of social boons, it is also capable of doing great harm. Men can be moved to injure others or to ruin themselves. The very process of moving implies a risk of debasement for the moved and for the mover. Even the fairest vision of a good to be sought offers no moral guarantee, since it may poison hearts with hatred against those who are deemed an obstacle to its achievement.No apology is required for stressing a subjective dread of political activity: the chemist is not disqualified as a scientist because he is aware that explosives are dangerous: indeed that chemist is dangerous who lacks such awareness.This feeling of danger is widespread in human society and has ever haunted all but the more superficial authors. Although, to be sure, few have, like Hobbes, brought it out into the open, it has hovered in the background, exerting an invisible but effective influence upon their treatment of the subject; it may be, to a significant degree, responsible for the strange and unique texture of political science.There are no objects to which our attention is so naturally drawn as to our own fellows. It takes a conscious purpose to watch birds or ants, but we can not fail to watch other men, with whom we are inevitably associated, whose behaviour is so important to us that we need to foresee it, and who are sufficiently like us to facilitate our understanding of their actions. Being a man, which involves living with men, therefore involves observing men. And the knowledge of men could be called the most fairly distributed of all kinds of knowledge since each one of us may acquire it according to his willingness and capacity.

Our mind strives for statements of configuration and statements of consequence. Where different things stand in relation to one another, that is configuration. How successive events arise from one another, that is consequence. We grasp far more easily disposition in space than process in time; further an incomplete "geographic" account can be valid as far as it goes while an incomplete "historic" account can be highly misleading. The difference in difficulty and reliability between "where" and "how" statements is at a maximum in politics. It is therefore not surprising that political science should have dealt mainly with configurations.

One of the major obstacles to the progress of political theory lies in the fact that people speak of rights without paying attention to the feasibility of their exercise. I propose to raise here some elementary problems relating to the right of speech. It is one of the basic tenets of our democratic political philosophy that all people (over a given age) have an equal right of speech. Making this right operational however gives rise to difficulties which have not been faced.I shall start out with a very simple problem, which moreover has the advantage of evoking familiar pictures: this is the chairman's problem. I find myself chairman of an assembly, and regard all participants as formally equal, which commits me to treating them equally. Feeling bound by this principle, I decide as follows: the duration of the meeting is m, the number of participants n: I shall give the floor to each participant for a time m/n; thus the equal right of speech will receive practical application. Assume that the meeting is to be crowned by a vote (the time of actual voting not figuring in m): before the participants cast their equal votes, they will have had equal opportunities to influence the voting, i.e., they shall have had, insofar as depends upon me, equal voices.Now if m the duration of the meeting (in speaking time) is three hours, and if n the number of participants is 12, my procedure is susceptible of being applied: it grants the floor to each participant for a quarter of an hour. This is not a long time but still it may be enough.