| Field of Study: | Political Science and Government, General
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| Description: | When one asks after the subject matter of Botany or Geography or Economics, one may hope for a reasonably straightforward and uncontroversial answer. But to ask after the subject matter of Political Science immediately plunges one into controversies no less deep and intractable than those that grip political life itself. What is politics? Answers range all the way from, at one extreme, Plato's "the art whose business it is to care for souls," to, at the other extreme, Harold Laswell's "who gets what, when, how." For this reason, the study of politics makes uncommon demands on one's critical faculties; in fact, it is the leading aim of political science to cultivate just this capacity for critical reflection. To be sure, the student of politics can expect to be asked to master a great mass of plain facts, with a view to explaining what makes bureaucracies work; how great powers rise and fall; what constitutes the difference between an effective public policy and a misguided one; how one designs an unbiased opinion poll; what factors shape international decision-making; and so on. Indeed, important disciplines within Political Science address questions like these. But not even the greatest exertion of fact-mongering can relieve the student of the need to ponder the more far-reaching questions: Who ought to rule? What is legitimacy? Are liberty and equality compatible? How does one adjudicate between competing ideas about democracy? What are the abiding needs of human beings as such? Are we by nature political animals? In short, one cannot study the doings of citizens, public servants, and governments in abstraction from the attempts, from Plato onwards, to define the very nature of politics itself.
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