Download or read book The Study of Politics written by M. Duverger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the study of politics is to be rewarding both intellectually and practically it must. by definition. concern itself with the great issues which arise in the real world and with the fundamental arguments which occur about their nature and the possible solutions to them. Abstract political philosophy which is not informed by the experi ence of practice will become sterile. A study of constitutions and the machinery of government can become dry-as-dust and hence boring unless the underlying principles are analysed and grasped. But theo ries of political change divorced from an understanding of consti tutions and institutions will degenerate into mere phrase-mongering. Attempts to apply the techniques of the natural sciences to politics will lead to model building for its own sake and thence to arid and barren intellectualism unless it is understood that it is impossible to quantify the intangible. Indeed. anyone-sided approach to politics and consequent failure to grasp the essential wholeness of the sub ject is bound to end in disaster. The study of politics is a study of changing human relationships in dynamic societies. Thus it involves. since the present and hence the future are shaped in part by the past. an appreciation of history.
Download or read book Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics written by Ian Shapiro and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of politics seems endlessly beset by debates about method. At the core of these debates is a single unifying concern: should political scientists view themselves primarily as scientists, developing ever more sophisticated tools and studying only those phenomena to which such tools may fruitfully be applied? Or should they instead try to illuminate the large, complicated, untidy problems thrown up in the world, even if the chance to offer definitive explanations is low? Is there necessarily a tension between these two endeavours? Are some domains of political inquiry more amenable to the building up of reliable, scientific knowledge than others, and if so, how should we deploy our efforts? In this book, some of the world's most prominent students of politics offer original discussions of these pressing questions, eschewing narrow methodological diatribes to explore what political science is and how political scientists should aspire to do their work.
Download or read book Approaches to the Study of Politics written by Bernard Susser and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1992 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Leo Strauss Max Weber and the Scientific Study of Politics written by Nasser Behnegar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values—the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science—are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics.
Download or read book Decolonizing Politics written by Robbie Shilliam and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political science emerged as a response to the challenges of imperial administration and the demands of colonial rule. While not all political scientists were colonial cheerleaders, their thinking was nevertheless framed by colonial assumptions that influence the study of politics to this day. This book offers students a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Not content with revealing the colonial legacies that still inform the discipline, the book also introduces students to a wide range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world that will help them think through the same themes and issues more expansively. Decolonizing Politics is a much-needed critical guide for students of political science. It shifts the study of political science from the centers of power to its margins, where the majority of humanity lives. Ultimately, the book argues that those who occupy the margins are not powerless. Rather, marginal positions might afford a deeper understanding of politics than can be provided by mainstream approaches.
Download or read book Politics as a Science written by Philippe C. Schmitter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Politics as a Science, two of the world's leading authorities on Comparative Politics, Philippe C. Schmitter and Marc Blecher, provide a lively introduction to the concepts and framework to study and analyze politics. Written with dexterity, concision and clarity, this short text makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of evidence and no search for patterns of association. Instead, Schmitter and Blecher keep the text broadly conceptual and theoretical to convey their vision of the sprawling subject of politics. They map the process in which researchers try to specify the goal of the trip, some of the landmarks likely to be encountered en route and the boundaries that will circumscribe the effort. Examples, implications and elaborations are included in footnotes throughout the book. Politics as a Science is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in, or studying, comparative politics. “The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781003032144, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.”
Download or read book Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics written by Peter J. Katzenstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New insights into the interplay between conflict and cooperation, the impact of domestic political structures on foreign policy, the role of institutions, and the influence of worldviews and causal beliefs on decision-making.
Download or read book That Noble Science of Politics written by Stefan Collini and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1983-11-24 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, three historians of ideas examine the forms taken in nineteenth-century Britain to develop a 'science of politics'.
Download or read book Reason and Politics written by Mark Blitz and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reason and Politics explores the central phenomena of political life and, therefore, of human affairs in general. Amidst the seemingly endless books on more and more narrowly specialized topics within politics, Mark Blitz offers something very different. Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena examines the central phenomena of political life in order to clarify their meaning, source, and range. Blitz gives particular attention to the notions of freedom, rights, justice, virtue, power, property, nationalism, and the common good. At the same time, Blitz shows how, in order to understand political matters correctly, we must also understand how they affect us directly. We do not merely theorize over political questions; we experience them. Blitz also considers matters such as the powers and motions of the soul, the nature of experience, and the varieties of pleasure and attachment. Living at a time when technological change makes it difficult even to claim convincingly that there are defining human characteristics and natural limits that we simply cannot change, Reason and Politics proposes that there are in fact basic phenomena not only in politics, but that make up human affairs as such. In examining these central phenomena in a lucid and articulate manner, this book makes a unique contribution not only to the study of politics but also to the study of philosophy more broadly. It will interest undergraduate and graduate students, political scientists and philosophers, those interested in politics, and general readers.
Download or read book The Politics of the Book written by Filipe Carreira da Silva and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is impossible to separate the content of a book from its form. In this study, Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Brito Vieira expand our understanding of the history of social and political scholarship by examining how the entirety of a book mediates and constitutes meaning in ways that affect its substance, appropriation, and reception over time. Examining the evolving form of classic works of social and political thought, including W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, G. H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society, and Karl Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Carreira da Silva and Brito Vieira show that making these books involved many hands. They explore what publishers, editors, translators, and commentators accomplish by offering the reading public new versions of the works under consideration, examine debates about the intended meaning of the works and discussions over their present relevance, and elucidate the various ways in which content and material form are interwoven. In doing so, Carreira da Silva and Brito Vieira characterize the editorial process as a meaning-producing action involving both collaboration and an ongoing battle for the importance of the book form to a work’s disciplinary belonging, ideological positioning, and political significance. Theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly researched, The Politics of the Book radically changes our understanding of what doing social and political theory—and its history—implies. It will be welcomed by scholars of book history, the history of social and political thought, and social and political theory.
Download or read book The Politics of Political Science written by Paulo Ravecca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking book, Paulo Ravecca presents a series of interlocking studies on the politics of political science in the Americas. Focusing mainly on the cases of Chile and Uruguay, Ravecca employs different strands of critical theory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the development of the discipline in the region, emphasizing its ideological aspects and demonstrating how the discipline itself has been shaped by power relations. Ravecca metaphorically charts the (non-linear) transit from “cold” to “warm” to “hot” intellectual temperatures to illustrate his—alternative—narrative. Beginning with a detailed quantitative study of three regional academic journals, moving to the analysis of the role of subjectivity (and political trauma) in academia and its discourse in relation to the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, and arriving finally at an intimate meditation on the experience of being a queer scholar in the Latin American academy of the 21st century, Ravecca guides his readers through differing explorations, languages, and methods. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences offers an essential reflection on both the relationship between knowledges and politics and the political and ethical role of the scholar today, demonstrating how the study of the politics of knowledge deepens our understanding of the politics of our times.
Download or read book Studying Politics Today written by Nancy S. Love and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines what political scientists are studying - and how they are doing it - in ways that could improve our world. It features scholars in political science and related fields, who are engaged in research that is more politically relevant than the work that continues to dominate the larger discipline. Their shared commitment "to make the study of politics relevant to the struggle for a better world" represents the continuing legacy of the Caucus for a New Political Science, founded in 1967, and the perestroika movement that began in 2000. Both have challenged the defining commitments of political science as a discipline to narrow, parochial, and apolitical approaches to the study of politics. Although the balance of disciplinary critique and alternative approach varies from chapter to chapter, all of the authors included here offer innovative and progressive perspectives on the study of politics today. Topics include: critiques of mainstream political science methods and models; redefinitions of key concepts and major institutions; reconstructions of the borders, subjects, and spaces of politics; and reflections on the ethical commitments of scholars and scholarly journals. This book was published as a special issue of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture.
Download or read book Political Ethnography written by Edward Schatz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, Political Ethnography makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, the contributors amply demonstrate in a wide range of original essays, is uniquely suited for illuminating the study of politics. Situating these pieces within the context of developments in political science, Edward Schatz provides an overarching introduction and substantive prefaces to each of the volume’s four sections. The first of these parts addresses the central ontological and epistemological issues raised by ethnographic work, while the second grapples with the reality that all research is conducted from a first-person perspective. The third section goes on to explore how ethnographic research can provide fresh perspectives on such perennial topics as opinion, causality, and power. Concluding that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field as a whole, the final chapters illuminate the many ways in which ethnographic approaches can enhance, improve, and, in some areas, transform the study of politics.
Download or read book Politics Personality and Social Science in the Twentieth Century written by Harold Dwight Lasswell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1969-08-15 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harold Lasswell is one of America's most distinguished political scientists, a man whose work has had enormous impact both in the United States and abroad upon not only his own field but also those of sociology, psychology and psychiatry, economics, law, anthropology, and communications. This collection of essays is the first full-scale effort to deal with the voluminous writings of Lasswell and explore his at once charming and baffling personality which is perhaps inseparable from the inventiveness, unconventionality, and unusual scope of his work. The authors of these essays, many of whom are former students or collaborators, view their subject from a variety of perspectives. What emerges is a full assessment of Lasswell's many-faceted contribution to the social scholarship of his time.
Download or read book Politics in Time written by Paul Pierson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics, and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them. Politics in Time opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the social world. It explores a range of important features and implications of evolving social processes: the variety of processes that unfold over significant periods of time, the circumstances under which such different processes are likely to occur, and above all, the significance of these temporal dimensions of social life for our understanding of important political and social outcomes. Ranging widely across the social sciences, Pierson's analysis reveals the high price social science pays when it becomes ahistorical. And it provides a wealth of ideas for restoring our sense of historical process. By placing politics back in time, Pierson's book is destined to have a resounding and enduring impact on the work of scholars and students in fields from political science, history, and sociology to economics and policy analysis.
Download or read book Applied Social Psychology written by Linda Steg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to how social psychological theories, methods and interventions can be applied to manage real-world social problems.
Download or read book The Science of Politics written by Josep Maria Colomer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features --