What is Political Science??

by Mark Rupert

Syracuse University

Submitted to the “Define Political Science” Project

editors:

Ronald F. King,
Department of Political Science, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA.
ronking@rohan.sdsu.edu

Cosmin Gabriel Marian,
Department of Political Sciences, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
cmarian@polito.ubbcluj.ro, marian@msu.edu

Respondents were asked to "define" political science as they understand it, and to comment on the future of the discipline, as briefly as possible. My response follows:

In contrast to dominant positivist approaches, which seek to discover causal laws with which to explain and predict political behavior, I take a critical approach to political inquiry. Whereas politics has been traditionally understood in terms of authoritative processes of rule (based upon an official monopoly of the means of coercion), or the authoritative allocation of values (who gets what, etc), these understandings of politics seem to me remarkably limited, and limiting. In the context of a critical, dialectical view of history, politics appears as struggle over processes of social self-production, the ability to steer those processes in one direction or another, and thus to shape the kind of world in which we will live and the kinds of persons we will become in that world. Politics, in short, concerns the contested processes of producing future possible worlds. On this view, politics and political struggle are essential aspects of the processes by which all social structures are (re)produced, and hence the analytical separation of political from economic and cultural life (as well as domestic and international aspects of these) represents for me a false dichotomy which obscures much of political significance. As I practice it, then, political inquiry is the study of these contested processes of social self-production (entailing political, economic, and cultural aspects) under specific historical circumstances, with a critical eye toward relations of power and domination and a normative orientation toward uncovering possibilities for producing social relations which enable greater freedom and collective self-determination.

I expect that the sociology of knowledge within our discipline (i.e., networks of academic influence and disciplinary power) will continue to perpetuate positivistic forms of political inquiry within the mainstream of the discipline. However, I also expect that accelerating and intensifying processes of change ( e.g., globalization, climate change, the twilight of the hydrocarbon era, post-Fordist political economy) will generate stresses, tensions and struggles not readily captured in mainstream models or covering laws. On the margins of the discipline, therefore, there will continue to grow more process-oriented and critical approaches which will seek to understand the ways in which political struggles respond to, and drive, these processes of historical-structural change.