The effort to explain politics and public policy by political culture theory goes back to the very origins of political science. The Greek and Roman historians, poets, and dramatists comment on the ways in war and peace of the Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Parthians, Caledonians, Judeans, and the like. The concepts and categories we use in the analysis of political culture--subculture, elite political culture, political socialization, and culture change--are also implied in ancient and classic writings....

The notion of political culture change is one of the most powerful themes of classical literature....Plato, in The Republic, argues that "governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other. For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock' and not out of the human natures which are in them'....Aristotle is a more modern and scientific political culturalist than Plato, since he not only imputes importance to political culture variables, but explicitly treats their relationship to social stratification variables on the one hand and to political structural and performance variables on the other. He argues that the best attainable form of government is the mixed aristocratic-democratic form in a society in which the middle classes predominate....Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rosseau, among others of the later political theorists, contribute to the political culture tradition. Machiavelli and Montesquieu draw lessons from Roman history on the importance of moral and religious values and upbringing for the formation of the Roman character....The terms that Rosseau used to identify political culture are morality, custom and opinion....Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy and of the origins of the French Revolution are among the most sophisticated treatments of these themes. In Democracy in America he points out: 'The manners of the people may be considered as one of the great general causes to whcih the maintennance of a democratic republic in the United States is attributable. I here use the word customs with the meaning which the ancients attached to the word mores; for I apply it not only to manners properly so called--that is, to what might be terms habits of the heart--but to the various notions and opinions current among men and the masses of those ideas which constitute their character of mind. I comprise under this term, therefore, the whole moral and intellectual condition of the people....His (Toqueville's) analysis of the political attitudes of the French peasantry, burgeoisie, and aristocracy on the eve of the (French) revolution is a similar masterpiece of political culture analysis....

By the second half of the nineteenth century these beliefs in intellectual, material and moral progress, stimuated by the Industrial Revolution, strengthened by the success of political and social reforms in Britain and by the American example, and fortified by the development of evolutionary ideas in biology, took on some sense of inevitability....The enormity and irrationality of World War I, the rise of fascism, more particularly the rise of Nazism, and the climatic destructiveness of World War II thoroughly shattered these complacent expectations.