Department of Politics

People commonly become interested in politics, either as an activity or as a discipline, in two rather different ways: some problem or issue in which government is involved—war, poverty, bigotry, degradation of the environment—may arouse their concern or curiosity. Or they may have discovered in themselves a taste for political action—an urge to be at the center of things, to persuade, to bargain, to carry the day for their side. Such people like to be in positions of responsibility; they like power and the exercise of power.

Although the connections are not always obvious, the impulses toward political action and the solving of social problems have done much to shape politics as a discipline. These impulses are often reflected quite directly in the study of political parties, pressure groups, bureaucracy, and public opinion, on the one hand, and on the other, in the study of urban affairs, foreign policy, international organization, governmental regulatory activities, civil liberties, and the politics of racial relations. Students of politics, however, even those specializing in these fields, have not as a group been satisfied with studying issues of policy in an ad hoc fashion or with the mere compiling of the lore of practical politics. The limitations of such knowledge, even for immediate and practical purposes, have compelled political scientists to deeper study.

It has forced them, first of all, to search for systematic and reliable knowledge of what is politically possible—of what can be done and under what circumstances. This leads them to construct tentative explanations of political events, refining and generalizing such explanations, and testing them against experience. Since it is rarely feasible to test theories about political life experimentally, the student of politics must look at the political “experiments” men and women have made on their own behalf throughout history. Potentially, all human history may be relevant to the search for political understanding. The test of a proposition about the size of political communities may conceivably lead from Boise to Babylon, the test of a theory about autocratic regimes from Jersey City to Santiago to Abidjan.

Second, the relationship of social problems to each other and to the political context in which they occur forces the student of politics to proceed from the evaluation and prescription of particular policies to the evaluation and prescription of procedures, institutions, and regimes. The practical-minded often view this enterprise with skepticism, and perhaps it is true that some theorists have been guilty, as Bacon put it, of “spinning cobwebs out of their own substance.” The objective of political philosophy as described by Aristotle, however—to learn not only “that which is best in the abstract, but also . . . that which is best relatively to circumstances”— demands both realism and imagination. The pursuit of that goal over a period of more than two thousand years has produced a literature that is as rich and challenging as that in any field of learning.

Third, students of politics, like other social scientists, have become increasingly self-conscious about the way in which they seek knowledge, whether their purpose in doing so is to test the truth of a theory or the worth and realism of a proposal for action. The application of statistical techniques to data about politics has, for instance, become increasingly widespread because such techniques can compensate in part for the impracticability of experimentation. Similarly, a number of strategies formulated explicitly for the study of politics—analysis of political culture and “systems” theory, for example—clash and contend continually in the professional journals of political science and from time to time in the classroom. Mathematical models also figure significantly in political analysis, brought there in the effort to make political theory more precise and parsimonious.

Developments of this kind, perhaps, led a scholar at another university to write that “political science is not a unified discipline because people think about politics for such diverse purposes and in such disparate ways. They share a common interest but not much else.” Political science is not quite so amorphous a field of study as this statement suggests. Almost all the things students of politics have done contribute directly or indirectly to a body of information relevant to the constituting of political societies. Viewed in that light, seemingly unrelated lines of inquiry support each other; that is one reason the Federalist Papers are such satisfying reading for the student of politics who wants to know how the various strands of the discipline add up. The proper objectives of political organization, the actual workings of political institutions in their many different forms, the impact of mores and habits of a people on their institutions—these issues that are central to politics as a discipline are central also to the constitution- maker and the appraiser of constitutions.

Many students attracted to the study of politics consider (and later actually enter) careers in public life or careers in which familiarity with governmental practices is important. These students should leaven their study of politics with that of other disciplines; a general education in the liberal arts and sciences is particularly important for the public man or woman. Nor should such students expect to acquire in the classroom the politician’s basic skills—tact, for instance, or the ability to put oneself in the place of another and to see things from another’s point of view. Nonetheless, a successful political career is not all experience or native talent; one can learn a great deal from formal studies that is useful to politicians, judges, career public servants, political journalists, and those in other political or quasi-political vocations.

Some students also study politics in order to prepare themselves for careers in the study and teaching of politics. More than other students, they are likely to feel a compulsion to understand things and explain them to others. But while they may differ somewhat in temperament from more activist students, still scholars and prospective scholars have, in their motives, much in common with the political activist. They know that scholarship can modify political practice, that knowledge truly can be power.

Other students study politics with no expectation that politics will be central to their future careers, but while recognizing that politics will matter to their lives. Republican government requires citizens who can understand the political situations that face them, even if the average citizen’s participation in politics extends no further than voting in an election, writing a letter to a representative, or attending a school board meeting. Active citizenship requires lifelong attention to current events, but making sense of the news requires a deeper understanding of the structures and processes of politics. The well-informed citizen is able to place new information in context and possess an understanding of the driving forces behind, and ultimate implications of, the events and issues that appear on the public stage.

Normally, students will be required to take two 200-level courses to enter the department. However, the departmental representatives are prepared to work with you if you cannot meet this requirement but still desire to major in politics.