Suchergebnisse

Reprint of 1972 ed. published by International Business Machines Corp., White Plains, N.Y. ; Bibliography: p. 56-60. ; Mode of access: Internet.

PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped.The same might be said of political science. In the West the first deliberate and reflective studies of political life were made in Greece at the end of the th century BC, and in the succeeding century. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, some of the pamphlets attributed to Xenophon, above all the normative and empirical studies of Plato and Aristotle were among the direct ancestors of contemporary political science. Parallel examples are to be found in the intellectual history of China, India and Islam. It seems that at certain stages in the development of great societies questions of legitimacy, power and leadership assume supreme importance; and intense intellectual effort, using the best analytical tools available, is devoted to the study of man as brought to a focus in the study of politics.

In this unusual and important work, three well-known historians of ideas examine the diverse forms taken in nineteenth-century Britain by the aspiration to develop what was then known as a 'science of politics'. This aspiration encompassed a more extensive and ambitious range of concerns than is implied by the modern term 'political science': in fact, as this book demonstrates, it remained the overarching category under which many nineteenth-century thinkers grouped their attempts to achieve systematic understanding of man's common life. As a result of both the over-concentration on closed abstract systems of thought and the intrusion of concerns which pervade much writing in the history of political theory and of the social sciences, these attempts have since been neglected or misrepresented. By deliberately avoiding such approaches, this book restores the subject to its centrality in the intellectual life and political culture of nineteenth-century Britain

From the Rice Thresher Archive, a collection of newspaper articles published in the student newspaper for Rice University. Genre: News

Like Rachel, Jacob's beloved but still childless bride, who asked herself and the Lord each morning, "Am I?," or "Can I?," so presidents of this Association on these annual occasions intermittently ask, "Are we a science?," or "Can we become one?" My predecessor, David Truman, raised this question last September applying some of the notions of Thomas Kuhn in his recent book on scientific revolutions. I shall be following in Truman's footsteps, repeating much that he said but viewing the development of the profession from a somewhat different perspective and intellectual history. My comments will be organized around three assertions.First, there was a coherent theoretical formulation in the American political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Second, the development of professional political science in the United States from the turn of the century until well into the 1950's was carried on largely in terms of this paradigm, to use Kuhn's term. The most significant and characteristic theoretical speculation and research during these decades produced anomalous findings which cumulatively shook its validity.Third, in the last decade or two the elements of a new, more surely scientific paradigm seem to be manifesting themselves rapidly. The core concept of this new approach is that of the political system.