Political Science

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Political science is an academic discipline, devoted to the systematic description, explanation, analysis and evaluation of politics and power. Political science might be more accurately labelled ‘politology’, as indeed it is in some European countries, both because some of its practitioners reject the idea that their discipline is like that of the natural sciences and because the subject does not have one unified body of theory or paradigm (unlike some of the natural sciences).

The historical antecedents of the discipline are most apparent in the works of western political philosophers in a canonical tradition stretching from Plato’s Republic through to Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’s Leviathan. However, political science has also evolved from numerous other forms of ancient and medieval enquiry, especially history, political economy and jurisprudence.

The ambition to create a science of politics is an old one, at least as old as Aristotle’s Politics, but agreement on its scope, methods and results remains elusive.

The scope of the contemporary discipline of political science is extensive. The major subfields of inquiry include political thought, political theory, political history, political institutions, comparative political analysis, public administration, public policy, rational choice, political sociology, international relations, and theories of the state.

The classics of western political thought, the accumulated body of texts and writings of great philosophers, still frame the intellectual education of.........

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