40 What is politics?
to become an object of scientific knowledge as a discipline of its own only after
putting
an end to, or at least attenuating, its original fusion with other realms of
human activity and normativity, such as religion and morality. From the first steps
in this direction taken during the Renaissance even before Machiavelli
9
through
Hobbes and Locke to the Enlightenment, this was the genesis of the scientific study
of politics as a specific creation of modernity brought about with the decisive con-
tribution of political realism (cf. Chapter 10).
On hearing the expression ‘scientific study of politics’, (empirical) political sci-
ence would first come to mind for most people. Political science, with no further
adjective, includes all mental efforts to come to grips with the elusive monster
called politics, provided they respect
basic intellectual standards, such as a clear and
well-argued method including: clarity, consistency (non-contradiction), criteria of
relevance for, and orderly partition of, the subject matter. In this sense, political
philosophy also belongs to the large family of political science. Not so if
empirical
political science is meant, which was born in some conjunction with sociology at
the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and first flourished in
the 1930s and 1940s. Its ambition was to reach, with regards to politics, the same
degree of precision as physics by addressing facts instead of debating theories, mak-
ing its findings verifiable by analysing facts with quantitative methods, primarily
statistics. A further claim was to be able to abstain from value-laden judgements
unlike ethics and political philosophy, thus respecting neutrality against all parties
and all hypotheses involved in a matter of investigation; it is the attitude called
by Max Weber
Wertfreiheit/value freedom. These
were positivistic premises, and in
their pretences to deliver a firmly ‘scientific’ study of politics they must fail, accord-
ing to the post-empiricist turn in the science of philosophy and in science itself
(Newtonian physics relativised by first relativity, then quantum physics and later
quantum mechanics, along with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). Facts turned
out to be themselves theory-dependent, thus losing the aura of being the last truth
on reality; values turned out to be present even in allegedly value-free research.
The related epoch-making changes in the image of science struggled to reshape
the self-image of political science and were received in its epistemology rather than
in the daily practise of numerous scientists, in which an
unreflected confidence in
the truth-bringing virtues of mathematically analysed ‘facts’ persists. This may be
a consequence of the fascination exerted on political research by recent
economics,
itself fairly far from the broad approach of classical political economy. Along with
the monopolistic preference for quantitative methods, which risk to be rough and
distorting if not paired with a qualitative approach, this type of political science
(for example the rational choice and its development, the public choice approach)
imported from economics an image of the actor as being self-interested, rational
and well-informed. This is, in many cases, not even heuristically productive of new
knowledge, for example in the research upon what I have called the subjective
side of politics. Once again, methods cannot be chosen or imposed regardless of
the particular nature of the parcel of reality under inquiry; political identity shifts
in a nation or federation require different tools from those that can help analyse
The
subjective side of politics 41
the voting behaviour of a small community, a beloved object of empirical research.
A further difficulty lies also with the extreme fragmentation of the research objects
in political science; their relevance for the (empirically anchored) conceptualiza-
tion of politics is not always easy to grasp. A case in point is policy analysis, which
is hardly the royal road to the understanding of politics as sphere of complex and
intertwined processes. This posture sounds like an extreme reaction to the holism
of political philosophy – a holism that is on the one hand a necessary piece of its
epistemic status, on the other hand something often at risk of sliding into theories
of everything.
All these drawbacks are not listed here to doubt the scientific validity of empiri-
cal political science, of which several types exist, by far
not entirely prejudiced by
those perplexing aspects. Especially in International Relations
10
and International
Political Economy, sound empirical research is being accompanied by a permanent
interest in the understanding of processes and trends.
What is more generally the actual relationship between political philosophy, in
the broad version illustrated in this Excursus, and political science? Political phi-
losophy is bound by its statute neither to refer to methodically analysed facts, used
as empirical evidence for its statements, not to abstain from discussing and choos-
ing values. Besides, diverging developments as those sketched above have made its
dialogue with political science uneasy. Nonetheless philosophers, since they also
refer
to alleged factual truths, do good whenever they check their assertions about
a certain subject against those analytically researched by their empirical cousins.
‘Facts’ are differently constructed according to the epistemology of the two disci-
plines, and a direct comparison is often naive. Yet contacts and exchanges are – most
of the time and indirectly – stimulating and can prevent both partners from falling
all too easily and as naive victims to empirical-analytical or philosophical blunders.
It must, however, be said that in recent years the attention of the two disciplines for
one another has not been significant; on both sides, the tendency to closure and
self-sufficiency prevails.
Beyond political philosophy and political science, a third party or gender
(tertium
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