Politics and Administration

Lecture Mid-Terms
 “Man is by nature a political animal.”
Aristotle, Politics
Politics is exciting because people disagree.

For Aristotle, this made politics the ‘master science’:

that is, nothing less than the activity through which
human beings attempt to improve their lives and
create the Good Society.

Politics is a Social Activity.

It is always a dialogue, and never a monologue.

 Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through
which people make, preserve and amend the general rules
under which they live.

Politics is thus inextricably linked to the phenomenon

of Conflict and Cooperation.

Conflict is Competition between opposing forces,

reflecting a diversity of opinions, preferences, needs or
interests.

Cooperation is working together; achieving goals

through collective action.
 Politics as an Arena Politics as a Process

Definitions of The Art of Government Compromise & Consensus

Politics

Public Affairs Power & Distribution of

Resources
 Politics as the art of government.

Chancellor Bismarck: Politics is the exercise of control within

society through the making and enforcement of collective decisions.

Classical definition of politics developed from the original

meaning of the term in Ancient Greece.

‘Politics’ is derived from ‘polis’, meaning ‘city-state’.

Ancient Greek Society was divided into a collection of

independent ’city-states’, each of which possessed its own system of
Government (e.g. Athens).
 Politics can be understood to refer to the
affairs of the polis - in effect , ‘what concerns
the polis?’

Modern form of definition –

‘what concerns the state?’

Everyday use of the term : People are said

to be in politics when they hold office, or to be
‘entering politics’ when they seek to do so.
 Politics as Public Affairs.
Distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the non-political’
coincides with the division between an essentially public sphere of
life and what can be thought of as a private sphere.

Politics is restricted to the activities of the state itself and the

responsibilities that are properly exercised by public bodies.

Areas of life that individuals can and do manage for

themselves (the economic, social, domestic, personal, cultural,
and artistic spheres, and so on) are therefore clearly ‘non-political’.
 Politics as Compromise and Consensus.

Relates to the way in which decisions are

made.

Politics seen as a particular means of

resolving conflict: By compromise, conciliation
and negotiation, rather than through force and
naked power.
 Politics as Power.

Rather than confining politics to a

particular sphere (the government, the
state, or the ‘public’ realm), this view sees
politics at work in all social activities and in
every corner of human existence.
 Power, in its broadest sense, is the ability to achieve a desired
outcome, sometimes seen as the ‘power to’ do something.

Science – is a field of study that aims to develop reliable

explanations of phenomena through repeatable experiments,
observation and deduction.

The ‘scientific method’, by which hypotheses are verified (prove

true) by testing them against the available evidence, is therefore seen
as a means of disclosing value-free and objective truth.

Karl Popper (1902-94), however, suggested that science can only

falsify hypotheses, since ‘facts’ may always be disproved by later
experiments.
Approaches to the Study of Politics
APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF POLITICS

The philosophical tradition

This involved a preoccupation with essentially ethical, prescriptive or

normative questions, reflecting a concern with what ‘should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’
be brought about, rather than with what ‘is’.

Normative: The prescription of values and standards of conduct; what ‘should

be’ rather that what ‘is’.

Objective: External to the observer, demonstrable; untainted by feelings, values

or bias.
The empirical tradition
The doctrine of empiricism advanced the belief that experience is the
only basis of knowledge and that, therefore, all hypotheses and theories should
be tested by a process of observation.

Empirical: Based on observation and experiment; empirical knowledge is

derived from sense data and experience.

Positivism: The theory that social, and indeed all forms of, enquiry should
adhere strictly to the methods of the natural sciences.

Behaviouralism
Behaviouralism: The belief that social theories should be constructed only
on the basis of observable behavior, providing quantifiable data for research.
Rational – choice theory

This approach to analysis draws heavily on the example of economic

theory in building up models based on procedural rules, usually about the
rationally self-interested behavior of the individuals involved.

Institution: A well-established body with a formal role and status; more

broadly, a set of rules that ensure regular and predictable behavior, the ‘rules of
the game’.
Politics as a social science deals with the
systematic study of the state and government.
Political Science and Anthropology
Anthropology is a science that deals with the origin, physical and cultural developments,
racial characteristics and social customs and beliefs of mankind.

Political Science and History

Both political science and history look on event involving people from different viewpoints.

Political Science and Sociology

Both sciences concern themselves with human societies as well as with the wide gamut
of man’s relationships. Sociology, as a science, is a body of organized knowledge, a systematic
method, and an enlightened view about the nature of man and society.

Political Science and Psychology

Human behavior is naturally caused by a phenomenon acceptable to both the political
scientists and the psychologists. However, they think differently about the nature of human
behavior. While the psychologist claims it to originate from the inner self of man that includes
intelligence, motivation, hopes and fears, the political scientist sees it as an effect of the political
institutions that play a significant role on the lives of the people.
Political Science and Philosophy

Celestine N. Bittle defined philosophy as the “science of beings in their ultimate reasons,
causes and principles acquired by the aid of human reason alone.”

Political Science and Economics

Economics as a science which deals with the production, distribution and consumption of
goods and services was formerly referred to as political economy; while political science refers to
the knowledge and understanding of the state and if the principles and ideals which underlie its
organization and activities.

Political Science and Geography

The geographical conditions which include soil, climate, vegetation, population, land use,
mountains and rivers affect the political development of a nation, notwithstanding its culture.
Geopolitics which deals with the study of the influences of physical factors.
Political Science and Ethics
Political science and ethics share common interests interconnecting what a good
government is all about.

Political Science and Jurisprudence

Jurisprudence which deals with the science of law is concerned primarily with the
analysis of existing legal systems as well as with the ethical, historical, sociological and
psychological foundations of law.

Political Science and Statistics

Statistics as a science which deals with the collection, classification, analysis and
interpretation of numerical facts or data by using mathematical theories of probability is very
valuable to the political scientists.

Political Science and Religion

Political scientists have continuously analyzed the role of religion in the mainstream of
the political life of the people.
The Fields of Political Science

1. Political theory or philosophy

2. Public Law

3. International relations, international law and international organizations

4. Government (National and local government)

5. Comparative government

6. Public Administration

7. Political dynamics (political parties, public opinion and propaganda, pressure and interest groups)

8. Legislation and legislatures

9. Government and business

Nature, Meaning and Kinds of Political
Ideology

Communism, Conservatism, Facism,

Liberalism and Socialism.
COMMUNISM
 According to the political doctrine of communism, an ideal society would be one
where social and economic classes cease to exist and where property and all means of
production are collectively owned and controlled.

Communism would thus serve as a replacement for the class-divided, market

economy of capitalism (page 44), in which property is privately held.

For some, communism should resemble the arrangements instituted by the former
Soviet Union, under which property was controlled by a single-party state. In this
model, decision-making about the production and distribution of material good is highly
centralized, and accompanied by the use of authoritarian practices to quash those
perceived to be a odds with the regime’s ideological objectives.
 The term communism-which derives from communis, the Latin word for “shared”
or “common”-first entered the political lexicon in the I84OS.

However, visions of a society modeled along communist lines date back to

antiquity. In The republic, for instance, Plato imagined a social order governed by an
elite group of “guardians”, who would be responsible for upholding the interests of the
community at large.

Believing that they would be corrupted by the private ownership of property, Plato
maintained that they should share material goods and live together in large families
where spouses and children would be likewise held in common.
 Other notions of communism emerged from what Karl Marx would later call the
“misty realms of religion”.

A simple type of communism was practiced by the first Christians, whose disdain
for private property was inspired by a passage from the New Testament, “The Believers
Share Their Possessions” (Acts 4:32-37). Stirred by similar impulses within Christianity
(page 46), later monastic orders espoused that their brethren should take vows of
poverty and share their materials possessions with one another and with the poor.

Monastic communism would in turn influence the author Thomas More who, in his
I5I6 Utopia, imagined a world where money had been eradicated and all material goods
were held in common.
 Other fictional models of communism would follow, including Italian Dominican
philosopher Tommaso Campanella’s City of the sun, published in I623.

Around this time, there were also a number of efforts to put the ideal of
communism into practice. In the Munster Rebellion of I534 to I535, for example, radical
Anabaptists established a short-lived communist government in the Westphalian city
Munster.

Later, during the English Civil Wars of I642 to I65I, a group of Protestant radicals
known as the Diggers attempted to create an agrarian form of communism under which
the earth would be shared by all “a common treasury”.
 The German thinker Karl Marx is undoubtedly the most renowned modern theorist
of communism.

Although he sometimes used the terms “communism” and “socialism”

interchangeably, the ultimately believed the former to be higher and more advanced
form of the latter.

In his I875 “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx spoke of an initial “lower”
phase of communism, to be established in the immediate aftermath of the working class’
victory over the capitalist order.

In this transitional stage, the workers would assume control of the state and the
economy, while continuing to pay people according to the length and intensity of their
work.
 In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels
referred to this first phase of the communist revolution as the “dictatorship of the
communist revolution as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, during which workers utilize
the state as an instrument for defending and sustaining the revolution.

However, communism will be fully realized only upon the transition to the next
and final phase, in which all class divisions are abolished, the state (in Engels’s phrase)
“withers away”, and production is organized in such a way that humanity regains control
over its own laboring activity.
 In his I9I7 book State and Revolution, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin
emphasized the distinction between a lower socialist stage of communist society and a
later phase that would establish true communism.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks gained control of the Russian state in the October

Revolution of I9I7, adopting the name All-Russian Communist Party a year later.

Much to the chagrin of defenders of the original Marxian ideal, the word
“communism” has since been widely associated with single-party, authoritarian models
of governance that were later instituted in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of
China, and other nations.
CONSERVATISM
 Conservatism is a political doctrine that advocates for the maintenance of a
society’s traditional social practices and institutions.

It distinguishes itself from competing perspectives such as Marxism and classical

liberalism, which seek to better society and redress abuses of state power through
modernization and change.

Conservatives contend that rather than transform prevailing norms and political
arrangements, the proper objective of government is to preserve the time-honored
traditions, policies, and lifestyles behind society’s organic unity and stability.

They are thus highly suspicious of governmental activism, and of liberal and
radical movements that adopt anti-traditionalist stands.
 While he did not use the term himself, late eighteenth-century thicker Edmund
Burke helped galvanize the conservative cause.

He rejected the anti-traditionalism and violence that accompanied the French

Revolution, and advocated for the restoration of pre-Revolutionary forms of social
organization.

Contemporary conservatives do not subscribe to Burke’s reactionary desire to

revert to a previous political order.

They do, however, share his interest in maintaining the patriarchal family, the
church, and other traditional institutions; these are necessary, they believe, in order to
instill the value of self-discipline and curb the irresponsible exercise of individual liberty.
FASCISM
 Between I9I9 and I945, several mass political movements emerged throughout
Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe-movements whose legacy of death and
destruction the world still grapples with.

These movements and their associated ideologies are encompassed under the
term fascism.

Not only was the fascist cause wildly popular in countries where its leaders
managed to attain state power; it also attracted large following in Western Europe and in
many nations outside the continent, including the United States and South Africa.
 The first fascist head of state in Europe was Benito Mussolini, who became Prime
Minister of Italy in I992-some eleven years prior to Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to the
German Chancellorship.

Mussolini’s National Fascist Party derived its name from fasces, a Latin term
referring to a bundle of elm or birch rods (often with an axe inside it), which the ancient
Roman used to symbolize the formidable powers of their penal system.

Fascist ideologies and movements differ in important ways, but there are several
broad points of agreement: they roundly reject parliamentary democracy, Marxism,
and liberalism; they aim for a hierarchal society in which elites rule; they support
extreme militaristic nationalism; and they subordinate the interests of particular
individuals to those of an authentic “people’s community”, in whose name the fascist
state is organized.
 Some regard it is a genuinely radical movement in the Jacobin tradition of the French
Revolution, promising sweeping cultural “renewal” and the birth of a “new man”; for others, it
is little more than a fearful, reactionary assault on the liberal ideas of the European
Enlightenment and the emancipatory objectives of international communism.

Some are struck by the incomprehensibility and irrationality of the fascist worldview;
others view it as the pinnacle of capitalist rationality and bureaucratic efficiency, as
evidenced by the systematic mass exterminations carried out in the Nazi concentration camps.

Although the fascist parties of Germany, Italy, and Japan were dissolved upon the
conclusion of World War II, fascism was not so easily swept under the rug.

By the late I940’s, fascist-oriented parties and movements were already on the rebound
in Europe, Latin America, and South Africa.

Today, various neofascist organizations continue to attract significant followings

throughout the world.
LIBERALISM
 Like all political philosophies, liberalism addresses the question of how to found
and structure the political order.

It merged in seventeenth-century Europe, fueling an allied political movement

that ultimately toppled prior religious and absolutist forms of government in the
continent.

Although liberalism has developed in a variety of directions over the ensuing

centuries, several basic claims are common to all its strains.

Most critically, it is invested in the individual’s fundamental rights and liberties.

 The seventeenth-century social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes is generally
recognized as being the founder of modern liberalism (though he himself did not employ
the term).

According to his philosophical anthropology, individuals in the “natural state” are

constitutively free and equal; they may apply their own wills to shaping the direction of
their lives.

This view of human nature stands in stark contrast to the Catholic Church’s
doctrine of predestination, which views the fate of the individual as pre-obtained by God.
 For Hobbes, however, allowing people to exercise free will without any constraints
would leave them in a state of perpetual insecurity-a “war of each against all” in which
every individual would pursue his or her self-interests at the expense of everyone else’s.

The state exists for no other reason than to prevent such a war. In exchange for
peace and security, Hobbes argued, people will rationally agree to surrender some of
their natural rights and freedoms to an all-powerful sovereign, whose tasks is to
implement the natural law on their behalf.

In maintaining that this sovereign’s authority derives not from God but from the
people, Hobbes breaks with the divine right doctrine.

Although the powers of the Hobbesian ruler are absolute, he is justified in

constraining the private will only when its free exercise threatens the aims of the social
contract-where the sovereign law is silent the individual remains free.
 John Locke, the next great thinker within the social contract tradition, endorsed
both Hobbes’s view of humans as naturally free and equal, and his critique of rule by
divine right.

He did, however, dispute Hobbes’s case for monarchial absolutism: he argued for
severely limiting the scope of the state, such that it is no longer positioned to keep the
people in “awe” of the ruler’s authority.

For Locke, the state’s primary purpose is to defend the individual’s right to
property -the right and accumulate goods and the right to liberty are tightly intertwined
in his conception of human selfhood.

Many of Locke’s proposals were incorporated into the founding legal documents of
the representative democracies established in the late eighteenth century, including
the Constitution of the United States.
 At the time, the liberal portrait of an individual who is inherently free and
motivated by self-interest was also assimilated into the theories of free-market
economics advanced by British authors like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas
Malthus. Such a portrait fit nicely into their accounts of the anarchic, nature-like
operations of the capitalist market.

Another especially notable contributor to the philosophy of liberalism was the

nineteenth-century thinker John Stuart Mill.

In his I859 text On Liberty, Mill mounted a robust defense of three fundamental
freedoms: the freedoms of speech, public assembly, and individual taste. He argued
against the tyranny of majority rule and insisted that those with minority and dissenting
opinions should not merely be permitted to air their contrarian views publicly-they in fact
had a moral obligation to do so.
To Mill, the state is justified in restraining the individual’s basic freedoms only in
instances where harm to others result from their expression.
 In the twentieth century, one of the most important contributions to the liberal
tradition was John Rawls’s I971 book A Theory of Justice.

Rawls attempted to defend the propriety of the state’s role in providing for the
social welfare without abrogating the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual.
SOCIALISM
 Socialism is a political program that opposes the private ownership of property,
and advocates for its control by the society at large.

In contrast which classical liberalism –which portrays people as inherently self –

interested and inclined to pursue their affairs in isolation –socialism espouses as
sanguine view human nature: it affirms people’s capacity to live and work cooperatively,
and sees production as fundamentally social process whose outcomes can and should be
shared by everyone involved.
 Socialism is thus at odds with capitalism, which calls for an economy based on
private ownership of the means of production.

Under capitalism, decisions regarding the creation and distribution of goods and
services are not made cooperatively: they are left to the unplanned motions of the free
market.

Socialist view capitalism as an inherently exploitative system that enables an elite

class –the capitalist class –to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth and power by
controlling the production process.

Having failed to triumph in free –market competition, the majority working class
must seek employment in capitalist enterprises, which then appropriate the surplus of
their labor in the form of profits.
 Socialist further argue that, as the dominant economic class, capitalists exert
disproportionate leverage over the political process: they make large contributions to
election campaigns and often hold high positions within the government itself.

Assisted by the latter, capitalists in representative democracies appropriate

liberal principles such as freedom and equality to legitimate the very power structures
over which they preside.

Democratic socialists do not reject these per se, but argue that they cannot be
objectively realized under capitalist conditions.

They maintain that true human emancipation, equality, and prosperity are
dependent upon the establishment of social control of the material means by which
society is reproduced.
 Despite these basic points of agreement, socialists differ in their opinions of how
their social order is to be organized and achieved.

Some among them argue that existing liberal institutions –such as elections and
the legislative process –should be utilized to develop socialism incrementally and lawfully
out of the capitalist order.

This “reformist” course was originally advocated by European social democracy.

Radical socialists, in contrast, contend that true socialism can only be brought about
through revolutionary force.
 Socialists also disagree about which types of property should be socially controlled.

In his I5I6 book Utopia, Thomas More imagined a world in which almost all property, with the
exception of personal effects such as clothing, is publicly owned.

Other socialists depart from this vision and are receptive to the idea of some small or medium –
sized farms and businesses remaining in private hands.

Some argue that property and natural resources should be brought under a single central
authority such as the state. Others agree, but would like to see such ownership backed by the authority
of a political party, in line with the model of socialism established in the former Soviet Union.
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are widely recognized as the most important
modern theorist of socialism.

They argued that it could not be established by building idyllic communities

amidst the existing capitalist order, as writers such as Henri de Saint –Simon, Charles
Fourier, and Robert Owen had imagined –such experiments were “utopian”, they
claimed, and insisted that the true, “scientific”, road to socialism must involve the
resolution of capitalist class antagonisms through revolutionary change.

They saw the working class of advanced industrial society as the historical agent
destined to carry forth socialism’s emancipatory project.
 In the twentieth century, various socialist movements modified Marx and Engel’s
revolutionary prescriptions, adapting them to new social and historical circumstances.

The campaigns of the Bolsheviks in Russia and Mao Zedong in China led to the
advent of ostensibly socialist orders in regions of the world where industrial capitalism
had yet to take hold.

Although these and other contemporary versions of socialism veered significantly

from the ideals upheld by Marx and Engels, they left indelible marks on the world’s
political landscape.
•END OF SLIDES