Foundation Of Political Science

This textbook introduces the scientific study of politics, supplying students with the basic tools to be critical consumers and producers of scholarly research.

First published in 1958, The Foundations of Political Theory strives to answer essential questions of politics by studying its foundations. In this book, Mr. Greaves treats the state as only one among several associations whose function is to promote entirely human ends. He tries to reinterpret such ideas as ‘self-realization’ and the ‘good life’ in ways acceptable to students of contemporary philosophy, who reject the theological and metaphysical doctrines these ideas have been tied to in the past. He insists that men get their moral standards and their ideas about what makes life worth living by reflecting on their experience; that there are no ultimate and self-evident moral principles. While admitting that moral standards are subjective in the sense that we cannot explain how men come to have them except by showing how they serve their needs, he refuses to allow that rational argument about them is therefore impossible. Since men are rational, since they have purposes and ideals and not merely desires, and since they know that to realize these purposes they must live with others, there are moral standards acceptable to all men when their function is understood.

When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.