political science
political science, the systematic study of governance by the application of empirical and generally scientific methods of analysis. As traditionally defined and studied, political science examines the state and its organs and institutions. The contemporary discipline, however, is considerably broader than this, encompassing studies of all the societal, cultural, and psychological factors that mutually influence the operation of government and the body politic.
Although political science borrows heavily from the other social sciences, it is distinguished from them by its focus on power—defined as the ability of one political actor to get another actor to do what it wants—at the international, national, and local levels. Political science is generally used in the singular, but in French and Spanish the plural (sciences politiques and ciencias políticas, respectively) is used, perhaps a reflection of the discipline’s eclectic nature. Although political science overlaps considerably with political philosophy, the two fields are distinct. Political philosophy is concerned primarily with political ideas and values, such as rights, justice, freedom, and political obligation (whether people should or should not obey political authority); it is normative in its approach (i.e., it is concerned with what ought to be rather than with what is) and rationalistic in its method. In contrast, political science studies institutions and behaviour, favours the descriptive over the normative, and develops theories or draws conclusions based on empirical observations, which are expressed in quantitative terms where possible.
Although political science, like all modern sciences, involves empirical investigation, it generally does not produce precise measurements and predictions. This has led some scholars to question whether the discipline can be accurately described as a science. However, if the term science applies to any body of systematically organized knowledge based on facts ascertained by empirical methods and described by as much measurement as the material allows, then political science is a science, like the other social disciplines. In the 1960s the American historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn argued that political science was “pre-paradigmatic,” not yet having developed basic research paradigms, such as the periodic table that defines chemistry. It is likely that political science never will develop a single, universal paradigm or theory, and attempts to do so have seldom lasted more than a generation, making political science a discipline of many trends but few classics.
Fields and subfields
Modern university departments of political science (alternatively called government or politics at some institutions) are often divided into several fields, each of which contains various subfields.
- Domestic politics is generally the most common field of study; its subfields include public opinion, elections, national government, and state, local, or regional government.
- Comparative politics focuses on politics within countries (often grouped into world regions) and analyzes similarities and differences between countries.
- International relations considers the political relationships and interactions between countries, including the causes of war, the formation of foreign policy, international political economy, and the structures that increase or decrease the policy options available to governments. International relations is organized as a separate department in some universities.
- Political theory includes classical political philosophy and contemporary theoretical perspectives (e.g., constructivism, critical theory, and postmodernism).
- Public administration studies the role of the bureaucracy. It is the field most oriented toward practical applications within political science and is often organized as a separate department that prepares students for careers in the civil service.
- Public law studies constitutions, legal systems, civil rights, and criminal justice (now increasingly its own discipline).
- Public policy examines the passage and implementation of all types of government policies, particularly those related to civil rights, defense, health, education, economic growth, urban renewal, regional development, and environmental protection.
Historical development
Ancient influences
Analyses of politics appeared in ancient cultures in works by various thinkers, including Confucius (551–479 bce) in China and Kautilya (flourished 300 bce) in India. Writings by the historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) in North Africa have greatly influenced the study of politics in the Arabic-speaking world. But the fullest explication of politics has been in the West. Some have identified Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), whose ideal of a stable republic still yields insights and metaphors, as the first political scientist, though most consider Aristotle (384–322 bce), who introduced empirical observation into the study of politics, to be the discipline’s true founder.
Aristotle’s students gathered descriptions of 158 Greek city-states, which Aristotle used to formulate his famous sixfold typology of political systems. He distinguished political systems by the number of persons ruling (one, few, or many) and by whether the form was legitimate (rulers governing in the interests of all) or corrupt (rulers governing in their own interests). Legitimate systems included monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and polity (rule by the many), while corresponding corrupt forms were tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristotle considered democracy to be the worst form of government, though in his classification it meant mob rule. The best form of government, a polity, was, in contemporary terms, akin to an efficient, stable democracy. Aristotle presciently noted that a polity functions best if the middle class is large, a point confirmed by modern empirical findings. Aristotle’s classification endured for centuries and is still helpful in understanding political systems.
Plato and Aristotle focused on perfecting the polis (city-state), a tiny political entity, which for the Greeks meant both society and political system. The conquest of the Mediterranean world and beyond by Aristotle’s pupil Alexander the Great (336–323 bce) and, after his death, the division of his empire among his generals brought large new political forms, in which society and political system came to be seen as separate entities. This shift required a new understanding of politics. Hellenistic thinkers, especially the Stoics, asserted the existence of a natural law that applied to all human beings equally; this idea became the foundation of Roman legalism and Christian notions of equality (see Stoicism). Thus, the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce), who was strongly influenced by the Stoics, was noteworthy for his belief that all human beings, regardless of their wealth or citizenship, possessed an equal moral worth.
Early Christian thinkers, such as St. Augustine (354–430), emphasized the dual loyalty of Christians to both God and temporal rulers, with the clear implication that the “heavenly city” is more important and durable than the earthly one. With this came an otherworldly disdain for politics. For eight centuries knowledge of Aristotle was lost to Europe but preserved by Arab philosophers such as al-Fārābī (c. 878–c. 950) and Averroës (1126–1198). Translations of Aristotle in Spain under the Moors revitalized European thought after about 1200. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) Christianized Aristotle’s Politics to lend it moral purpose. Aquinas took from Aristotle the idea that humans are both rational and social, that states occur naturally, and that government can improve humans spiritually. Thus, Aquinas favoured monarchy but despised tyranny, arguing that kingly authority should be limited by law and used for the common good. The Italian poet and philosopher Dante (1265–1321) argued in De monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy) for a single world government. At the same time, the philosopher Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280–c. 1343), in Defensor Pacis (1324; “Defender of the Peace”), introduced secularization by elevating the state over the church as the originator of laws. For this, as well as for proposing that legislators be elected, Marsilius ranks as an important modernizer.
Early modern developments
The first modern political scientist was the Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). His infamous work The Prince (1531), a treatise originally dedicated to Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, presented amoral advice to actual and would-be princes on the best means of acquiring and holding on to political power. Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which completed the secularization of politics begun by Marsilius, was based on reason rather than religion. An early Italian patriot, Machiavelli believed that Italy could be unified and its foreign occupiers expelled only by ruthless and single-minded princes who rejected any moral constraints on their power. Machiavelli introduced the modern idea of power—how to get it and how to use it—as the crux of politics, a viewpoint shared by today’s international relations “realists,” rational choice theorists, and others. Machiavelli thus ranks alongside Aristotle as a founder of political science.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also placed power at the centre of his political analysis. In Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), completed near the end of the English Civil Wars (1642–51), Hobbes outlined, without reference to an all-powerful God, how humans, endowed with a natural right to self-preservation but living in an anarchic state of nature, would be driven by fear of violent death to form a civil society and submit to a single sovereign authority (a monarch) to ensure their peace and security through a social contract—an actual or hypothetical agreement between citizens and their rulers that defines the rights and duties of each. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who also witnessed the turmoil of an English civil war—the Glorious Revolution (1688–89)—argued in his influential Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) that people form governments through a social contract to preserve their inalienable natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.” He further maintained that any government that fails to secure the natural rights of its citizens may properly be overthrown. Locke’s views were a powerful force in the intellectual life of 18th-century colonial America and constituted the philosophical basis of the American Declaration of Independence (1776), many of whose drafters, particularly Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), were well acquainted with Locke’s writings.
If Hobbes was the conservative of the “contractualists” and Locke the liberal, then the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the radical. Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) constructs a civil society in which the separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as the “general will” (volonté générale) of the collective that overrides individual wills, “forcing a man to be free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by French revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who distorted many of his philosophical lessons.
Montesquieu (1689–1755), a more pragmatic French philosopher, contributed to modern comparative politics with his The Spirit of Laws (1748). Montesquieu’s sojourn in England convinced him that English liberties were based on the separation and balance of power between Parliament and the monarchy, a principle later embraced by the framers of the Constitution of the United States (see separation of powers; checks and balances). Montesquieu also produced an innovative analysis of governance that assigned to each form of government an animating principle—for example, republics are based on virtue, monarchies on honour, and despotisms on fear. Montesquieu’s analysis concluded that a country’s form of government is determined not by the locus of political power but by how the government enacts public policy.
The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90) is considered the founder of classical economic liberalism. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he argued that the role of the state should be restricted primarily to enforcing contracts in a free market. In contrast, the classical conservatism of the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729–97) maintained that established values and institutions were essential elements of all societies and that revolutions that sought to destroy such values (e.g., the French Revolution) delivered people to irrational impulses and to tyranny. Burke thus introduced an important psychological or cultural insight: that political systems are living organisms that grow over centuries and that depend on a sense of legitimacy that is gradually built up among their subjects.
The early development of political science was also influenced by law. The French political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) articulated a theory of sovereignty that viewed the state as the ultimate source of law in a given territory. Bodin’s work, which was undertaken as the modern state was first developing, provided a justification of the legitimacy of national governments, one fiercely defended to this day. Many political scientists, especially in international relations, find Bodin’s notion of sovereignty useful for expressing the legitimacy and equality of states.
