POLITICAL SCIENCE
In the 1986 film, Legal Eagles,
Robert Redford's character, attorney Tom Logan, defines politics for his teenage daughter saying, "...it is, should be, the wise exercise, distribution, and maintenance of power." His daughter replies, "Politics is just getting what you want, right?"
Political science has indeed been rather inelegantly but succinctly defined as the study of who gets what, when, and how. Knowingly or not, Logan is borrowing the words of the late Hans J. Morgenthau, the renowned political scientist who wrote:
"Political science deals with the nature, the accumulation, the distribution, the exercise, and the control of power on all levels of social interaction, with special emphasis upon the power of the state."
The practice of politics is as old as civilization, and political theory can be dated to Plato and Aristotle; but the intellectual discipline of modern political science is actually relatively new, formed mainly in the United States in the last fifty years. Inquiry regarding political and organizational behavior can be highly quantitative like scientific investigation in other social sciences such as sociology and psychology. But political science can also be viewed as belonging to the humanities, especially in the sense of striving for the ideal—aspiring to moral conduct in the interactions of nations, believing in the ethic of the primacy of the public welfare, seeking the leadership of those in whom the public trust should be invested.
A major in political science is suitable only for those students interested in how the public life of the world functions, who and what makes it work, and why—in other words, every student who wants to be an engaged, educated person and involved, informed citizen.
Political science is the theoretical underpinning of social movements as well. The anti-war movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement—all had a profound impact on the second half of the twentieth-century. New movements are emerging or strengthening in the twenty-first century, such as gay rights and global ethnic and religious movements, in concert with the ongoing sweep of the democracy movement in countries around the world.
Political science is the stuff of newspaper headlines, espionage thrillers, royal scandal. Indeed that which happens to all of us every day as we cope with issues of work, school, money, relationships, and even leisure can be termed "political" in that issues involving power—that is, issues of freedom and equality and the tension between them; conflict and its just resolution; and the equitable distribution of goods and services—form the fundamental framework of our lives as citizens.
