Political science studies the tasks of the politician or statesman (politikos), in much the way that medical science

concerns the work of the physician (see Politics IV.1). It is, in fact, the body of knowledge that such practitioners, if
truly expert, will also wield in pursuing their tasks. The most important task for the politician is, in the role of lawgiver
(nomothetês), to frame the appropriate constitution for the city-state. This involves enduring laws, customs, and
institutions (including a system of moral education) for the citizens. Once the constitution is in place, the politician
needs to take the appropriate measures to maintain it, to introduce reforms when he finds them necessary, and to
prevent developments which might subvert the political system. This is the province of legislative science, which
Aristotle regards as more important than politics as exercised in everyday political activity such as the passing of
decrees (see EN VI.8).
The term politics derives from the ancient Greek word polis, meaning "city-state," the main form of political
community in ancient Greece. We continue to use the term even though few city-states remain in existence. A
commonsense understanding of the term is illustrated by this analogy: Politics is to the polis what athletics is to
athletes. Just as the world of athletics is subdivided into different types of sport, politics comes in numerous modes and
orders: democratic, tyrannical, constitutionalist, oligarchic, theocratic, bureaucratic, fascist, authoritarian, and so on.

However, everyday language is not a reliable guide to defining politics, because we regularly apply the term to
practices that are not political. We speak of office politics, locker-room politics, or the politics of high school cliques.
These usages are too broad and fail to distinguish politics as a unique activity, distinct from business, sports, social
interactions, and so on. In order to gain a more comprehensively scientific understanding of the meaning of politics, it
is helpful to consider two basic components: (1) the character of political activity and (2) the scope of political activity.

THE CHARACTER OF POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Politics has been defined in numerous ways. The philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BCE) defined it as the art of caring
for souls, meaning that the duty of political rulers is to cultivate moral virtue or excellence in their citizens. Numerous
thinkers throughout history have reiterated Plato’s view. The medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-
1274), who closely studied the philosophy of Plato’s student Aristotle (384-322 BCE), characterized politics as the
activity of bringing together diverse individuals and groups, including doctors, economists, professors, and priests, each
with their own talents and characteristics, into a unity: "The object for which a community is gathered is to live a
virtuous life. For men to consort together that they may thus attain a fullness of life which would not be possible to
each living singly: and the full life is one which is lived according to virtue" (Fuller 2000, p. 85). Both Plato and
Aquinas were concerned with cultivating virtue and living a good life. Aquinas further emphasizes the synthetic or
"architectonic" dimension of politics as the activity of building coalitions and maintaining harmony among the
constituent parts of political society. Politics for Plato and Aquinas reflects humanity’s sociable nature.

Ancient and medieval thinkers emphasized the moral purpose of politics (the why) and the means of reaching that
purpose (the how), while modern thinkers, including contemporary political scientists, are more likely to emphasize
only means (the how). For example, the Renaissance thinker Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote in The Prince that
it is unrealistic for princes to provide moral guidance to citizens because politics requires rulers to perform unjust deeds
to ensure the security and glory of the state, including such acts as treating one’s friends as subjects and killing family
members if necessary. Machiavelli thus introduced what would later become known as the fact-value distinction into
the study of politics. It states that facts are the only objects that can be analyzed empirically and with certainty, while
values are less certain. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) provided what in the early twenty-first century one would
consider a more scientific understanding of politics. His method was to deduce political principles from general and
abstract theories. In his view humans resembled atoms, and human behavior was "matter in motion," whose principle
mode of behavior was self-preservation. Unlike Plato and Aquinas, Hobbes regarded humans not as social but as
asocial. He sums this up in his famous formulation of human behavior:

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after
power that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than
he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power
and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. (Hobbes 1996, p. 70)

This general principle of human behavior leads Hobbes to characterize the activity of politics as the pursuit of peace
and security, not as the perfection of human social inclinations. While Hobbes was not what in the early twenty-first
century one would call a liberal democrat, his theory laid the foundations for liberal democracy by making consent the
basis of government. He also placed politics on a lower (and in his eyes, more stable) ground than earlier thinkers by
making peace and security its purpose, not the cultivation of virtue and community.

Machiavelli and Hobbes’s distinction between the moral purpose of politics and the pragmatic pursuit of power can
be seen in some twentieth-century definitions of politics, which deemphasize moral excellence in favor of the use of
power and the distribution of goods within a community. The French thinker Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987) defined
politics as the activity of gathering and maintaining support for human projects: "We should regard as ‘political’ every
systematic effort, performed at any place in the social field, to move other men in pursuit of some design cherished by
the mover" (Jouvenel 1963, p. 30). Allan Ball emphasizes conflict in his definition: "[Politics] involves disagreements
and the reconciliation of those disagreements, and therefore can occur at any level. Two children in a nursery with one
toy which they both want at the same time present a political situation" (Ball 1971, p. 20). Harold Lasswell emphasizes
distribution in his treatment of politics, as reflected in the title of his 1936 treatise Politics: Who Gets What, When, and
How.

While these definitions have their benefits, they fail to distinguish political activity from other forms of activity. This
is especially true for Ball’s definition, which provides little guidance on the difference between a nursery and a nation-
state like the United States. More promising is Bernard Crick’s definition of politics as "the activity by which different
interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to their importance to
the welfare and the survival of the whole community" (Crick 1972, p. 22). This definition recalls Aquinas’s
characterization of politics as unifying different parts of society. By mentioning survival, Crick also alludes to the fact
that a political society requires a large degree of autonomy, in a way that a smaller unit, such as a family, lacks. By
mentioning welfare, which is broader than survival, he also indicates that a political society is organized around a set of
goals and principles.

THE SCOPE OF POLITICAL ACTIVITY

The activity of politics, then, consists of a continuous attempt to fashion a unity from a diverse set of competing
interests and talents. Beyond this, any analysis of politics needs to move to a more concrete level. Politics, as the
activity of the polis, depends on the form the political community takes. Political actions such as the conciliation of
interests would take different forms in Nazi Germany, for example, and a liberal democracy like the United States. In
the former, power is based on a personality cult surrounding Adolf Hitler for the purpose of furthering the utopian ideal
of a Third Reich. In the latter, coalitions of interests form and compete with one another in a law-based constitutional
system. In the former, politics is seen as something that will in fact cease once the utopia is reached (this is true of any
utopian system). In the latter, politics is assumed to be a never-ending activity of negotiation and bargaining, on the
assumption that a diversity of opinions and interests will always exist.

Political thinkers have devised a variety of methods for evaluating the differences among political systems. Plato
distinguished five regimes, ranked according to the degree to which each is just. In descending order, they are the just
city governed by philosopher kings, timocracy (ruled by warriors), oligarchy (ruled by the wealthy), democracy (ruled
by the many), and tyranny (Plato 1991, pp. 449a-592b). Aristotle distinguished six different regimes according to who
rules and for what purpose. He identified three good and three corrupt systems: (1) monarchy and tyranny, (2)
aristocracy and oligarchy, (3) polity, or constitutional democracy, and mass democracy (Aristotle 1984, pp. 1288b10-
1296b15).

Plato and Aristotle’s typologies are based on the polis. Modern scholars have developed typologies that attempt to
organize the different forms the modern state takes. Three separate axes can be identified: (1) the interpenetra-tion of
state and society, (2) whether the state is presidential or parliamentary, and (3) whether the state is federal or unitary
(Dickerson and Flanagan 1998, pp. 209-310; Finer 1999, pp. 1473-1484).

The first axis considers the extent to which state institutions and civil society are autonomous. For example, liberal
democracies prize pluralism, which requires a multiplicity of political parties competing for power as well as a wide
array of independent schools, newspapers, and other sources of opinion. Totalitarian governments—for example, that
of Hitler—attempt to control all facets of society, including universities, newspapers, unions, and businesses.
Totalitarian states permit only one party, which purportedly speaks for the nation.

The second axis considers the composition of the representative institutions. In a presidential system like the United
States, the central government is divided into three branches: executive (the president), legislative (Congress), and
judicial (the Supreme Court). These three branches balance one another to ensure that no single branch of government
possesses complete power. In a parliamentary system like that of Great Britain, executive power (the prime minister
and cabinet) is more fused with legislative (the House of Commons). According to the doctrine of responsible
government, the prime minister and cabinet must continually maintain the confidence of the House of Commons, which
has the power to dissolve the government. Dissolution can occur at any time, in contrast to the U.S. presidential system,
where members can only be removed by election or, in extreme circumstances, by impeachment.
The third axis reflects the territorial size of a society. In ancient Greece the polis was not divided into states or
provinces because city-states were small enough for government to exert control over its territory and maintain
solidarity among its citizens. Modern nation-states are considerably larger in size, which poses special challenges for
controlling territory and promoting social solidarity. A federal state splits up the nation-state into states or provinces
and hands over to those small units specific powers appropriate to them while maintaining the powers necessary to
address national concerns. Large nations such as the United States and Canada have a federal system, while smaller
nations such as Great Britain are unitary. Federal systems are based on the view that citizens will have greater solidarity
with those who live nearby and who share common ways of life, though this view is less salient when a society has a
highly mobile population.

THE STUDY OF POLITICS

The political analysis of major thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hobbes attempted to combine the
empirical study of politics with normative concerns, though the latter two dissolve that combination somewhat. Politics
is studied in the early twenty-first century at the academic level in departments of political science. While the term
political science is a translation of Aristotle’s politike episteme, modern usage, with the emphasis on "science," reflects
the attempt, begun by Hobbes, to study politics according to the methodologies of the physical sciences.

The division of most departments of political science into four subfields of analysis reflect this methodology. Political
philosophy, which focuses on normative questions of political life, is one subfield. International relations considers the
complexities of the international order, including law, organizations, war, and political economy. Comparative politics
examines the politics of various countries and regions of the world. A fourth subfield examines the politics of the native
country, so, for instance, every political science department in the United States has an American politics subfield, and
their counterparts in Canada have Canadian politics subfields.

Political scientists frequently step outside of their subfields. This is most true of political philosophy and its relation
to other fields, as few political phenomena can be separated from their normative dimensions. For instance, the study of
power requires one to consider why a political actor seeks power, and these reasons usually depend on that actor’s
particular understanding of justice. As a result, political science involves the study of the good society, just as it did for
Plato 2,500 years ago.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques (1712-78).

The famous French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave better advice and followed it less than perhaps any other
great man. Although he wrote glowingly about nature, he spent much time in crowded Paris. He praised married life and
wrote wisely about the education of children, but he lived with his servant, marrying her only after 23 years, and gave up
their babies. He taught hygiene, yet he lived in a stuffy garret. He preached virtue, but he was far from virtuous.
Rousseau himself was unable to guide his behavior to follow his beliefs. Yet his writings on politics, literature, and
education have had a profound influence on modern thought.

Of French Huguenot descent, Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 28, 1712. His father was a
watchmaker. Young Rousseau grew up undisciplined, and at about the age of 16 he became a vagabond. In Chambery,
France, he met and lived with Madame de Warens, a woman who was to influence his intellectual evolution. For a while
he roamed through Switzerland, Italy, and France, earning his way as secretary, tutor, and music teacher. When he went
to Paris in 1741, he was impressed by the fact that society was artificial and unfair in its organization. The society that
Rousseau viewed lived by rules made by the aristocracy and had little interest in the welfare of the common man.

This unknown wanderer upset that whole elaborate society. After years of thought Rousseau wrote a book on the origins
of government, 'The Social Contract', stating that no laws are binding unless agreed upon by the people. This idea
deeply affected French thinking, and it became one of the chief forces that brought on the French Revolution about 30
years later.

Rousseau helped bring about another revolution in education. In his novel 'Emile' he assailed the way parents and
teachers brought up and taught children. Rousseau urged that young people be given freedom to enjoy sunlight,
exercise, and play. He recognized that there are definite periods of development in a child's life, and he argued that
children's learning should be scheduled to coincide with them. A child allowed to grow up in this fashion will achieve the
best possible development. Education should begin in the home. Parents should not preach to their children but should
set a good example. Rousseau believed that children should make their own decisions.

In literature, too, Rousseau inspired a profound change. He stirred writers to realize that the beauties of nature have a
rightful place in literature. The Romantic movement in Germany, France, and England owes much to Rousseau's
influence and example. He dared to write of his most intimate emotions. His autobiographical 'Confessions' is
considered a masterpiece of self-revelation.

Rousseau was persecuted for his innovative ideas and fled France in 1762. For a time he lived in Switzerland and then
with the historian David Hume in England. He later returned to France. He died in Ermenonville, near Paris, on July 2,
1778.

Careful readers of Rousseau find many flaws in his logic, especially in his greatest book, 'The Social Contract'.
Rousseau was broad-minded enough to realize that his was not the final word on government. Rousseau's chief works
are 'The New Heloise', published in 1761; 'The Social Contract' (1762); and 'Emile' (1762). His 'Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality', published in 1755, was nearly as influential as 'The Social Contract'. The 'Confessions', written in his later
years, was published in 1782.

Major works of political philosophy

As part of what Rousseau called his "reform," or improvement of his own character, he began to look back at some of
the austere principles that he had learned as a child in the Calvinist republic of Geneva. Indeed he decided to return to
that city, repudiate his Catholicism, and seek readmission to the Protestant church. He had in the meantime acquired a
mistress, an illiterate laundry maid named Thérèse Levasseur. To the surprise of his friends, he took her with him to
Geneva, presenting her as a nurse. Although her presence caused some murmurings, Rousseau was readmitted easily
to the Calvinist communion, his literary fame having made him very welcome to a city that prided itself as much on its
culture as on its morals.

Rousseau had by this time completed a second Discourse in response to a question set by the Academy of Dijon: "What
is the origin of the inequality among men and is it justified by natural law?" In response to this challenge he produced a
masterpiece of speculative anthropology. The argument follows on that of his first Discourse by developing the
proposition that natural man is good and then tracing the successive stages by which man has descended from
primitive innocence to corrupt sophistication.

Rousseau begins his Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalité (1755; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) by distinguishing
two kinds of inequality, natural and artificial, the first arising from differences in strength, intelligence, and so forth, the
second from the conventions that govern societies. It is the inequalities of the latter sort that he sets out to explain.
Adopting what he thought the properly "scientific" method of investigating origins, he attempts to reconstruct the
earliest phases of man's experience of life on earth. He suggests that original man was not a social being but entirely
solitary, and to this extent he agrees with Hobbes's account of the state of nature. But in contrast to the English
pessimist's view that the life of man in such a condition must have been "poor, nasty, brutish and short," Rousseau
claims that original man, while admittedly solitary, was healthy, happy, good, and free. The vices of men, he argues, date
from the time when men formed societies.

Rousseau thus exonerates nature and blames society for the emergence of vices. He says that passions that generate
vices hardly exist in the state of nature but begin to develop as soon as men form societies. Rousseau goes on to
suggest that societies started when men built their first huts, a development that facilitated cohabitation of males and
females; this in turn produced the habit of living as a family and associating with neighbors. This "nascent society," as
Rousseau calls it, was good while it lasted; it was indeed the "golden age" of human history. Only it did not endure. With
the tender passion of love there was also born the destructive passion of jealousy. Neighbors started to compare their
abilities and achievements with one another, and this "marked the first step towards inequality and at the same time
towards vice." Men started to demand consideration and respect; their innocent self-love turned into culpable pride, as
each man wanted to be better than everyone else.

The introduction of property marked a further step toward inequality since it made it necessary for men to institute law
and government in order to protect property. Rousseau laments the "fatal" concept of property in one of his more
eloquent passages, describing the "horrors" that have resulted from men's departure from a condition in which the earth
belonged to no one. These passages in his second Discourse excited later revolutionaries such as Marx and Lenin, but
Rousseau himself did not think that the past could be undone in any way; there was no point in men dreaming of a
return to the golden age.

Civil society, as Rousseau describes it, comes into being to serve two purposes: to provide peace for everyone and to
ensure the right to property for anyone lucky enough to have possessions. It is thus of some advantage to everyone, but
mostly to the advantage of the rich, since it transforms their de facto ownership into rightful ownership and keeps the
poor dispossessed. It is a somewhat fraudulent social contract that introduces government since the poor get so much
less out of it than do the rich. Even so, the rich are no happier in civil society than are the poor because social man is
never satisfied. Society leads men to hate one another to the extent that their interests conflict, and the best they are
able to do is to hide their hostility behind a mask of courtesy. Thus Rousseau regards the inequality between men not as
a separate problem but as one of the features of the long process by which men become alienated from nature and from
innocence.

In the dedication Rousseau wrote for the Discourse, in order to present it to the republic of Geneva, he nevertheless
praises that city-state for having achieved the ideal balance between "the equality which nature established among men
and the inequality, which they have instituted among themselves." The arrangement he discerned in Geneva was one in
which the best men were chosen by the citizens and put in the highest positions of authority. Like Plato, Rousseau
always believed that a just society was one in which everyone was in his right place. And having written the Discourse to
explain how men had lost their liberty in the past, he went on to write another book, Du Contrat social (1762; The Social
Contract), to suggest how they might recover their liberty in the future. Again Geneva was the model; not Geneva as it
had become in 1754 when Rousseau returned there to recover his rights as a citizen, but Geneva as it had once been;
i.e., Geneva as Calvin had designed it.

The Social Contract begins with the sensational opening sentence: "Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains,"
and proceeds to argue that men need not be in chains. If a civil society, or state, could be based on a genuine social
contract, as opposed to the fraudulent social contract depicted in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, men would
receive in exchange for their independence a better kind of freedom, namely true political, or republican, liberty. Such
liberty is to be found in obedience to a self-imposed law.

Rousseau's definition of political liberty raises an obvious problem. For while it can be readily agreed that an individual
is free if he obeys only rules he prescribes for himself, this is so because an individual is a person with a single will. A
society, by contrast, is a set of persons with a set of individual wills, and conflict between separate wills is a fact of
universal experience. Rousseau's response to the problem is to define his civil society as an artificial person united by a
general will, or volonté générale. The social contract that brings society into being is a pledge, and the society remains
in being as a pledged group. Rousseau's republic is a creation of the general will--of a will that never falters in each and
every member to further the public, common, or national interest--even though it may conflict at times with personal
interest.

Rousseau sounds very much like Hobbes when he says that under the pact by which men enter civil society everyone
totally alienates himself and all his rights to the whole community. Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form of
exchange of rights whereby men give up natural rights in return for civil rights. The bargain is a good one because what
men surrender are rights of dubious value, whose realization depends solely on an individual man's own might, and
what they obtain in return are rights that are both legitimate and enforced by the collective force of the community.

There is no more haunting paragraph in The Social Contract than that in which Rousseau speaks of "forcing a man to be
free." But it would be wrong to interpret these words in the manner of those critics who see Rousseau as a prophet of
modern totalitarianism. He does not claim that a whole society can be forced to be free but only that an occasional
individual, who is enslaved by his passions to the extent of disobeying the law, can be restored by force to obedience to
the voice of the general will that exists inside of him. The man who is coerced by society for a breach of the law is, in
Rousseau's view, being brought back to an awareness of his own true interests.

For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true law and actual law. Actual law, which he describes in the
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, simply protects the status quo. True law, as described in The Social Contract, is
just law, and what ensures its being just is that it is made by the people in its collective capacity as sovereign and
obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could not be
unjust because it is inconceivable that any people would make unjust laws for itself.

Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the majority of a people do not necessarily represent its most intelligent
citizens. Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most people are stupid. Thus the general will, while always morally sound, is
sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau suggests the people need a lawgiver--a great mind like Solon or Lycurgus or
Calvin--to draw up a constitution and system of laws. He even suggests that such lawgivers need to claim divine
inspiration in order to persuade the dim-witted multitude to accept and endorse the laws it is offered.

This suggestion echoes a similar proposal by Machiavelli, a political theorist Rousseau greatly admired and whose love
of republican government he shared. An even more conspicuously Machiavellian influence can be discerned in
Rousseau's chapter on civil religion, where he argues that Christianity, despite its truth, is useless as a republican
religion on the grounds that it is directed to the unseen world and does nothing to teach citizens the virtues that are
needed in the service of the state, namely, courage, virility, and patriotism. Rousseau does not go so far as Machiavelli
in proposing a revival of pagan cults, but he does propose a civil religion with minimal theological content designed to
fortify and not impede (as Christianity impedes) the cultivation of martial virtues. It is understandable that the authorities
of Geneva, profoundly convinced that the national church of their little republic was at the same time a truly Christian
church and a nursery of patriotism, reacted angrily against this chapter in Rousseau's Social Contract.

By the year 1762, however, when The Social Contract was published, Rousseau had given up any thought of settling in
Geneva. After recovering his citizen's rights in 1754, he had returned to Paris and the company of his friends around the
Encyclopédie. But he became increasingly ill at ease in such worldly society and began to quarrel with his fellow
Philosophes. An article for the Encyclopédie on the subject of Geneva, written by d'Alembert at Voltaire's instigation,
upset Rousseau partly by suggesting that the pastors of the city had lapsed from Calvinist severity into unitarian laxity
and partly by proposing that a theatre should be erected there. Rousseau hastened into print with a defense of the
Calvinist orthodoxy of the pastors and with an elaborate attack on the theatre as an institution that could only do harm to
an innocent community such as Geneva._