POLİTİKA BİLİMİ - Deneme Sınavı - 2

Socialism has had most success in the form of critique.

As many have observed, resistance to change is the abstract concept or negative moment of conservatism.

Michael Oakeshott said that conservatism, understood as a ‘disposition’, is ‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the convenient to the perfect’ (Oakeshott, 1991: 408).

Emancipation: The act of freeing a human being or class of human beings from the control of another, usually when this control is enshrined in some legal privilege or right (Scruton, 2007: 206).

Liberalism separates ‘church’ and ‘state’, by locating all matters of religion in privacy, so leaving the secular state dominant in public. Socialism alleges that the separation is an error, which leaves the self in thrall to religion.

It explains why liberals are concerned with law, why socialists are concerned with economy, society and power, and why conservatives are concerned with tradition and the religion manifest in tradition.

A century and a half ago J.H. Newman declared that the fundamental theoretical principle of liberalism is that ‘no one should believe what he does not understand’ (Newman, 1890: 294.)

In liberalism the relation between one self and another is contingent, not constitutive; and it is law which enables the freedom of separate selves to co-exist. As expressed in Rawls’s first principle of justice, this means that ‘each person has an equal right to the most extensive equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’. So that, as he puts it, ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself’ (Rawls, 1972: 244).

A Marxist is someone who attempts to understand why the shift from an unenlightened order to an enlightened order was not as successful as many had anticipated, and then attempts to understand how socialism can be the historical completion of this shift.

The seminal work of Karl Marx is Grundrisse.

Conservatism extends the criterion even further. While liberalism offers the self—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, and while socialism offers an extension of this criterion so it includes the social—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, conservatism supposes that both of these are too abstract.

The conservative seeks no liberation from tradition. He has a criterion which is an extension of the original criterion, but which is extended so far that it appears to require the restoration of a traditional order, even religious order, which, according to the criterion, cannot be restored. To put it another way, the conservative has to accept the existence of an order which emerged from a revolution he could never have sanctioned at the time

Emancipation: The act of freeing a human being or class of human beings from the control of another, usually when this control is enshrined in some legal privilege or right (Scruton, 2007: 206).

John Rawls is among the supporters of liberalism

The great Greek political thinker Aristotle said centuries ago that man is by nature and necessity a social and political animal. According to Aristotle, he who is unable to live in society or who has no need for it, because he should be sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

According to Robert A. Dahl, politics is a universal activity. Whether an individual likes it or not everyone in a society is tossed into the arena of politics. To him, “a citizen encounters politics in the government of a country, town, school, church, business firm, trade union, club, political party, and a host of organizations. Politics is one of the unavoidable facts of human existence. Everyone is involved in some fashion at sometime in some kind of political system.

In its classical form Political Science had its origin in the ancient Greek city-states. The oriental people had speculated on the state and its problems even before the Greeks. But they did not develop Political Science in a pure and systematic form. Thus, historically the term ‘Politics’ itself was derived from the Greek words ‘Polis’ (city-state), ‘Polity’ (government), and ‘Politeia’ (constitution).

To the Greeks, Politics is everything that touches the life of the state. Thus Aristotle called Politics as the ‘master science’. For the Greek, ‘Political’ then pertains to whatever is done within or by the State.

The central focus of interest of Political Science or Political scientists in all over the world is that of the political aspects of human relations in society. In this sense, Political Science is the scientific designation of the subject of our study. This name, “Political Science,” was accepted by some Political Scientists at a conference held on 16 September 1948 under the auspices of the UNESCO.

Aristotle, the father of Political Science, regarded it as the master science. Scholars such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes and Henry Sidgwick also held the same view. But writers such as Frederic W. Maitland and Auguste Comte maintain that there can be no such thing as a scientific study of state and government. They agree with Edmund Burke that there is no science in Politics.