EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE

EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AS A DISCIPLINE

Political science is a classical discipline that deals with the study of political phenomena. Its goal is to deepen human understanding of the forms and nature of political action and to develop theoretical tools for interpreting politically meaningful phenomena.

Analyses of politics appeared in ancient cultures in works by various thinkers, including Confucius in China and Kautilya in India. Writings by the historian Ibn Khaldun in North Africa have greatly influenced the study of politics in the Arabic-speaking world. But the fullest explication of politics has been in the West. Some have identified Plato, whose ideal of a stable republic still yields insights and metaphors, as the first political scientist, though most consider Aristotle, who introduced empirical observation into the study of politics, to be the discipline’s true founder.

Four Stage

● Stage 1st- Ancient Greece- Plato and Aristotle focused on perfecting the polis (city-state), a tiny political entity, which for the Greeks meant both society and political system. Plato is also considered the founder of Western political philosophy.

● Stage 2 Medieval - Political science was being dominated by Religion, Dark Age for it.

● Stage 3 Starts with Machiavelli- The first modern political scientist was the Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which completed the secularization of politics begun by Marsilius, was based on reason rather than religion. Imperial observation and an understanding of history.

● Stage 4 After Second WW- spread out of Europe, Emergence of Behavioralism in the 1930s in the United States. It represented a sharp break from previous approaches in emphasizing an objective, quantified approach to explain and predict political behaviour.

● Stage 5 1960s onwards- Post- Behavioralism, pure science to applied science, Post-behavioralism claimed that behavioralism's bias towards observable and measurable phenomena meant that too much emphasis was being placed on easily studied trivial issues at the expense of more important topics.

● Contemporary political science traces its roots primarily to the 19th century when the rapid growth of the natural sciences stimulated enthusiasm for the creation of new social science.