political science

Academic discipline concerned with the empirical study of government and politics. Political
scientists have investigated the nature of states, the functions performed by governments, voter
behaviour, political parties, political culture, political economy, and public opinion, among other
topics. Though it has roots in the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, political science in
the modern sense did not begin until the 19th century, when many of the social sciences were
established. Its empirical and generally scientific orientation is traceable to the work of Henri de
Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. The first institution dedicated to its study, the Free School of
Political Science, was founded in Paris in 1871.

he study of the state, government, and politics. The idea that the study of politics
should be ‘scientific’ has excited controversy for centuries. What is at stake is the
nature of our political knowledge, but the content of the argument has varied
enormously. For example, 1741 when Hume published his essay, ‘That Politics May
Be Reduced to a Science’, his concerns were very different from those of people
who have sought to reduce politics to a science in the twentieth century. Although
concerned to some degree to imitate the paradigm of Newtonian physics, Hume's
main objective was to show that some constitutions necessarily worked better than
others and that politics was not just a question of personalities. Thus one of his
main targets was the famous couplet in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man: ‘For forms
of government let fools contest, | Whate'er is best administer'd is best.’

The twentieth-century debate about political science has been part of a broad
dispute about methodology in social studies. Those who have sought to make the
study of politics scientific have been concerned to establish a discipline which can
meet two conditions: it must be objective or value-free (wertfrei), and it must seek
comprehensive and systematic explanations of events. The principal candidate for
the role of core methodology of political science has been behaviourism, drawing its
stimulus-response model from behavioural psychology and thus being much
concerned to establish ‘correlations’ between input phenomena, whether ‘political’
or not, and political outcomes. The chief rival, growing in stature as behaviourism
waned after 1970, has been rational choice theory, following economics in assuming
as axioms universal human properties of rationality and self-interest.

Critics of the idea of political science have normally rested their case on the
uniqueness of natural science. In the philosophical terminology of Kant, real science
is the product of the synthetic a priori proposition that ‘every event has a cause’.
The idea that the universe is regular, systematic, and law-governed follows from
neither logic nor observation; it is what Sir Peter Strawson has called, more
recently, a ‘precondition of discourse’. In order for people to study physics
rationally, they must assume that the universe is governed by laws.

It follows from this Kantian conception of the basis of science that there can only be
one science, which is physics. This science applies just as much to people, who are
physical beings, as it does to asteroids: like the theistic God, Kantian physics is
unique or it is not itself. Biology, chemistry, engineering et al. are forms of physics,
related and reducible to the fundamental constituents of the universe. The social
studies are not, according to critics of political science, and become merely narrow
and sterile if they attempt to ape the methods and assumptions of the natural
sciences. The understanding we seek of human beings must appreciate their
individual uniqueness and freedom of will; understanding people is based on our
ability to see events from their point of view, the kind of insight that Weber called
verstehen. In short, the distinction between science and non-science, in its most
significant sense, is a distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities;
the two are fundamentally different and politics is a human discipline.

However, there are a number of objections to this harsh dichotomy between politics
and science. Semantically, it might be said, this account reads too much into the
concept of science which, etymologically, indicates only a concern with knowledge
in virtually any sense. Wissenschaft in German, scienza in Italian, and science in
French do not raise the profound philosophical questions which have been attached
to the English word science. There are also many contemporary philosophers who
seek to undermine the scientific nature of natural science. Inspired, particularly, by
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) they argue that
science itself is not determined by the absolute requirements of its discourse, but is
structured by the societies in which it operates. Thus real physics is more like
politics than it is like the Kantian ideal of physics, and it has no more claim to be a
science than has politics.