Why “Political”? — the meanings inside the word

From the Greek polis (city-state, community). Politics is the activity of reaching binding collective decisions by reconciling differences — over ends, means, resources, values and authority. Hence the “art of the possible”: workable solutions under disagreement.

Working definition “Politics is the activity by which groups reach binding collective decisions through attempting to reconcile differences among their members.”

Five meanings of “the political”

• As government — the art of governing; office, authority, the machinery of the state.
• As public affairs — citizenship, public life, the common good. Aristotle: “Man is by nature a political animal”; Hannah Arendt: politics as action and speech among free citizens.
• As compromise & consensus — conciliation rather than force; the peaceful settling of conflict.
• As power & domination — Adrian Leftwich: politics lies in all collective activity, “formal and informal, public and private”; Carl Schmitt: the friend–enemy distinction; Antonio Gramsci: hegemony; Karl Marx: class power and political economy.
• As authoritative allocation — David Easton: politics is the authoritative allocation of values for a society.

Politics, Power & the State

Politics is power-laden — the acquisition, retention and exercise of power. J.W. Garner’s state-centric maxim, “Political science starts and ends with the state,” once ruled the discipline; it now competes with society-wide readings that locate power across all social relations, not the state alone.

Political Theory: Meaning & Nature

George H. Sabine defines political theory broadly as “anything about politics or relevant to politics.” It runs along three connected dimensions:

• Historical — political ideas read in their context.
• Philosophical — questions of justice, liberty, obligation and the good society.
• Scientific — behaviour, institutions and processes studied through observation.

Political theory is therefore both explanation and evaluation: it describes political life, criticises it, and helps reconstruct it. It clarifies concepts and supplies the ideas that political science then tests.

Theory · Science · Philosophy · Thought · Ideology — know the splits

Norman Jacobson: “Every political scientist plays a double role — part scientist and part philosopher; no theorist can make a lasting contribution unless he works in the realms of both.” — without science, theory is a “worthless ethical residue”

Bridge line: theory supplies the ideas, science tests them. Philosophy seeks justification; science seeks explanation. Exam-worthy: “Every political philosopher is a theorist, but not every theorist a philosopher.”

Five-Stage Evolution of Political Science

From ethics to relevance — the journey of the discipline. 1 · Greek (Ethical: Aristotle — the “master science”; Barker calls it architectonic) → 2 · Medieval (Theological: Augustine, Aquinas fuse politics with salvation) → 3 · Renaissance / Enlightenment (Machiavelli splits power from morality; contract, rights, separation of powers) → 4 · Behavioural (Stats & surveys; Easton — politics “as it is, not as it ought”) → 5 · Post-Behavioural (Credo of Relevance — values rejoin data).

The Map of Approaches — Traditional vs Contemporary

Normative Approach

Prescribes the best possible order — concerned with values, ends and “what ought to be.”

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

John Rawls

• Gerald Allan Cohen: a normative principle is “a general directive that tells agents what they ought, or ought not, to do.”
• Charles Taylor (“Neutrality in Political Science”): political science cannot be value-free.
• Significance: values are unavoidable — “not deciding is simply deciding to allow others to decide for you.”
• Criticism: subjectivity; resists testing and prediction.

Empirical Approach & the Normative–Empirical Debate

Empirical: describe, explain, predict; facts over values. Locke on property and consent; Easton on systems analysis.

The fault line that runs through all of political theory

Resolution is balance, not choice. Jacobson warns against both scientism and moralism.

The Other Approaches — one-liners & their critics

C.B. Macpherson* reads Locke through an emergent bourgeois lens; James Tully* situates Locke’s property theory amid dissenters’ rights.

Behavioural Approach — the scientific turn

Background: positivism (Auguste Comte) demands value-free science. Seeds after World War I; full bloom after World War II. Aim: place the “actual human being” at the centre — the systematic, empirical study of political behaviour.

Major thinkers: Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, V.O. Key, Herbert Tingsten.

David Easton’s eight intellectual foundations: Regularities · Verification · Techniques · Quantification · Value-neutrality · Systematisation · Pure science · Integration

Achievements: precision, survey tools, comparative data — the discipline finally “looked scientific.”

Decline: over-complication (jargon over clarity), reductionism (numbers flatten meaning), an ethical vacuum and a status-quo bias. Easton faulted scholars for sitting in “ivory towers,” perfecting techniques while ignoring real problems; Robert Dahl called it “more revolutionary in technique than in validated theory.”

Behaviouralism is “rather like the Loch Ness monster: one can say with considerable confidence what it is not, but it is difficult to say what it is.”

Critical School: Germino — “quantification without reflection” killed theory; Adorno & Horkheimer — instrumental rationality props up capitalism; Habermas — technique colonises the lifeworld; Marcuse — one-dimensional man.

Behavioural vs Institutional — a comparison

Systems Approach — Easton’s input-output model

The political system as a converter of demands into decisions. ENVIRONMENT — society, economy, culture. INPUTS (Demands + Supports) → POLITICAL SYSTEM (conversion / the “black box” of decision-making) → OUTPUTS (Authoritative decisions + policies). FEEDBACK: outputs reshape future demands & supports.

Extension: Gabriel Almond’s structural-functionalism — system capabilities and conversion functions. Criticism: status-quo bias; neglects power and conflict.

Post-Behavioural Approach — the Credo of Relevance

Trigger: the crises of the 1960s — war, poverty, civil rights. Sparks: Thomas Kuhn (paradigms) and Karl Popper (falsification).

David Easton: a “genuine revolution, not a reaction; a becoming, not a preservation; a reform, not a counter-reformation.” — substance before technique

Credo watch-words: Action · Relevance · Social change · Values · Reality. Values are “an integral part of our personality… so long as we are human beings”; the intellectual must “protect the human values of civilisation.”

Critique: Dwight Waldo — a “raving, rumbling structure without any ultimate destiny”; and it still leans on the systems theory it once denounced.

Decline & Resurgence of Political Theory

Declared dead, then reborn. “Perennial concern” (Sabine, What is Political Theory?) → DECLINE declared (Easton · Cobban · Germino) → RESURGENCE (Rawls · Berlin · Arendt · Oakeshott) → Post-colonial turn (Said · Fanon · Spivak).

Why it declined (per Easton): historicism · moral relativism · hyper-factualism · science-fetish. Hyper-factualism piled facts without theory — Easton’s “theoretical malnutrition and surfeit of facts.” James Bryce had demanded “facts, facts, and facts”; Alfred Cobban judged that theory “played no role.”

Why it returned: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice) restores normative reasoning; Isaiah Berlin — “so long as rational curiosity exists… political theory will not wholly perish from the earth”; Hannah Arendt recovers the public realm — theory is “an arduous calling, not an escape mechanism”; with Michael Oakeshott and C.B. Macpherson.

Post-Colonial Theory & Eurocentrism

Recovers the political experience of the “other” and challenges the universal claims of Western theory. Edward Said (Orientalism), Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak.

The hinge of the 2023 question Eurocentrism is both the target (what post-colonial theory sets out to dismantle) and the motive force (the very engine that drives its agenda).

Scope at Work — three classic themes

• Political obligation: Filmer (divine right) → Hobbes (escape from a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”) → Locke (“the end of government is the good of mankind”); grounded in the moral worth of social cooperation.
• Right to property: Locke — the “chief end… the preservation of their property”; Marx — communism as the “abolition of private property”; UDHR Art. 17 — the right to own property.
• Politics as master science: Aristotle — the good is the end of all action, and “the science which studies this good is politics.”