The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (208 page)

The geography of states, federations, and substate units. The term was first taken beyond the purely descriptive by Montesquieu's suggestion that there was a link between types of climate and types of political regime. The father of modern political geography was André
Siegfried
, whose demonstrations of
ecological associations
between soil types and voting behaviour in France have been more admired than copied (but see
V. O. Key
). Ecological association fell under a cloud because of the risk of fallacious inference, but has recently revived.

 
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See
participation, political
.

 
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The systematic elaboration of the consequences for politics of suggested resolutions of philosophical dilemmas (or of the intractability of those dilemmas). The greatest works of political philosophy try to present those consequences in relation to fundamental cosmological, ontological, and epistemological issues. They articulate a view of human nature which links the cosmological with the political. On a less grand scale, political philosophy explores the political implications of particular disputes, for example about the nature of the self ( see
communitarianism
,
freedom
;
liberalism
; and
autonomy
), or about the notion of moral responsibility ( see
punishment
). There is obviously a close connection between political philosophy and moral philosophy, because both involve exploring the nature of judgements we make about our values; consequently, when it was thought on epistemological grounds that it was not the place of philosophy to explore these normative matters, political philosophy was declared to be dead. Contemporary political philosophy flourishes because the epistemological argument once thought fatal to it has been rejected.
Political philosophy tries both to make sense of what we do, and to prescribe what we ought to do. Hence different conceptions of the nature of philosophy lead to different views of its status in relation to political activity. Many have contrasted the contemplative nature of philosophy with the active, practical character of politics, suggesting that the former provides a ‘higher’ form of activity which is in danger of corruption by the latter. Others have sought to ensure that their political practice is built upon a coherent philosophical foundation. When
Marx
complained that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but that the point was to change it, he was proposing not the abandonment of philosophy, but a more adequate conception of it.
Both philosophy and political analysis raise issues which are timeless, but both have a history and both will, at a particular time, be engaged by contemporary circumstances or intellectual preoccupations. Perhaps the most abiding question in political philosophy is whether mankind has a nature, and, if so, what follows for political organization. Some answers to that question put human nature in a historical context. Perhaps the most abiding political issue is the legitimacy of government. But although these problems have constantly to be addressed, the situation and experience of those struggling to respond to them necessarily differ. For example, how is the experience of
totalitarianism
to be described, understood, or explained? Political philosophy may thus be approached historically, and with an emphasis on the
context
of an author's work, and analytically, with a critical approach to its internal coherence or inexplicit assumptions. Contemporary political philosophy also has its context, of course, while earlier writers struggled to find eternal truths, so these approaches are properly complementary in the exploration of the political consequences of the human condition.
AR 

 
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The study of the state, government and politics. The idea that the study of politics should be ‘scientific’ has excited controversy for centuries. What is at stake is the nature of our political knowledge, but the content of the argument has varied enormously. For example, in 1741 when
Hume
published his essay, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’, his concerns were very different from those of people who have sought to reduce politics to a science in the twentieth century. Although concerned to some degree to imitate the paradigm of Newtonian physics, Hume's main objective was to show that some constitutions necessarily worked better than others and that politics was not just a question of personalities. Thus one of his main targets was the famous couplet in Alexander Pope's
Essay on Man
: ‘For forms of government-let fools contest, | Whate'er is best administer'd is best.’
The twentieth-century debate about political science has been part of a broad dispute about methodology in social studies. Those who have sought to make the study of politics scientific have been concerned to establish a discipline which can meet two conditions: it must be objective or value-free (
wertfrei
), and it must seek comprehensive and systematic explanations of events. The principal candidate for the role of core methodology of political science has been behaviourism, drawing its stimulus-response model from behavioural psychology and thus being much concerned to establish ‘correlations’ between input phenomena, whether ‘political’ or not, and political outcomes. The chief rival, growing in stature as behaviourism waned after 1970, has been rational choice theory, following economics in assuming as axioms universal human properties of rationality and self-interest.
Critics of the idea of political science have normally rested their case on the uniqueness of natural science. In the philosophical terminology of
Kant
, real science is the product of the
synthetic a priori
proposition that ‘every event has a cause’. The idea that the universe is regular, systematic, and law-governed follows from neither logic nor observation; it is what Sir Peter Strawson has called, more recently, a ‘precondition of discourse’. In order for people to study physics rationally, they must assume that the universe is governed by laws.
It follows from this Kantian conception of the basis of science that there can only be one science, which is physics. This science applies just as much to people, who are physical beings, as it does to asteroids: like the theistic God, Kantian physics is unique or it is not itself. Biology, chemistry, engineering
et al
. are forms of physics, related and reducible to the fundamental constituents of the universe. The social studies are not, according to critics of political science, and become merely narrow and sterile if they attempt to ape the methods and assumptions of the natural sciences. The understanding we seek of human beings must appreciate their individual uniqueness and freedom of will; understanding people is based on our ability to see events from their point of view, the kind of insight that
Weber
called
verstehen
. In short, the distinction between science and nonscience, in its most significant sense, is a distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities; the two are fundamentally different and politics is a human discipline.
However, there are a number of objections to this harsh dichotomy between politics and science. Semantically, it might be said, this account reads too much into the concept of science which, etymologically, indicates only a concern with knowledge in virtually any sense.
Wissenschaft
in German,
scienza
in Italian and
science
in French do not raise the profound philosophical questions which have been attached to the English word science. There are also many contemporary philosophers who seek to undermine the scientific nature of natural science. Inspired, particularly, by Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962) they argue that science itself is not determined by the absolute requirements of its discourse, but is structured by the societies in which it operates. Thus real physics is more like politics than it is like the Kantian ideal of physics, and it has no more claim to be a science than has politics.
LA