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Samuel Finer's The History of Government from the Earliest Times is not only a major contribution to the history of governance in the ancient world; it is, in certain crucial respects, the only one. This essay surveys the uses of history within the discipline of political science to establish that surprising conclusion. In certain other social sciences -- most notably in economics & above all in sociology -- numerous leading scholars have applied the theories of their disciplines to illuminate the study of past civilizations while using data from those periods as a check on contemporary theories. Political scientists have, however, rarely ventured into world history before the 18th century. This essay considers some possible explanations for that discrepancy, then delineates & assesses Finer's massive & penetrating exploration of some 5,000 years of institutional governmental history. 112 References. Adapted from the source document.

Political systems of every description continuously confront a problem crucial to their survival: how to prepare the younger members of the system for the political responsibilities they must one day assume. This problem is quite general; it exists in all societies in every historical epoch, and it embodies a learning process that stretches back to a child's first perceptions of the larger social world. How children learn the values that will guide their future behaviour in politics, and what it is they learn, are questions with answers that vary from society to society.

On January 23, 1976, UC Santa Cruz's second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned from office. He had served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. This second of two oral history volumes devoted to the Christensen era, is comprised of two interviews with Professor George Von der Muhll. The first was conducted by former Regional History Project director Randall Jarrell in 1976; the second by current Project director Irene Reti in 2014. Both set Christensen's resignation within the broader context of a tumultuous and transitional moment in the campus's history and Von der Muhll's incisive reflections on UC Santa Cruz as a "noble experiment" in public higher education. George Von der Muhll is now an emeritus professor of politics at UCSC. He arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1969, affiliated with College Five (Porter College), where he was acting provost at the time of the interview conducted by Randall Jarrell in 1976. Von der Muhll earned a BA from Oberlin College; MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Harvard University. He retired in 1994. Von der Muhll shares his thoughts, not only on the Christensen administration, but also on the reaggregation and reorganization programs of the late 1970s, in which he played a central role. He also contemplates UC Santa Cruz as an experiment in public higher education, from the perspective of fifty years after the campus was founded.