Page 18 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 2: Historical Development of Economics and Political Science Disciplines

workers of their product, then all good men would join them.’ Accordingly, said Clark: ‘1 wish to test Notes
the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question’ (quoted by Silva and
Slaughter: 111). Marginalism, of course, exactly did this. Schumpeter notes that Clark must be given
credit for ‘subjective originality,’ in that while Thünen, Jevons, Menger and Walras preceded him in
arriving at marginalism, Clark quite independently had arrived at similar conclusions. Schumpeter
offers that American economists took slowly to the marginalist message. Perhaps in America, the rout
of the challengers could have been accomplished even without it? The outcome, in any case, is clear.
Rid of its Germanisms and formally fitted with differential equations, economics was securely in the
hands of descendents of ‘the great masters of the deductive school. ‘As for the others who stayed,
they were, like Veblen, derisively termed ‘sociologists,’ or perhaps more kindly, as with Commons,
Wesley Mitchell and his descendents, ‘institutional economists.’

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. Political economy had been taught as part of the curriculum in …………….in America’s
schools.
2. The American Economic Association came into existence in……………..
3. One of the defining aspects of the Enlightenment in the West was the priority given to
the……………..

2.2 Contribution Made by Prominent Authors in Development of
Political Science

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, political science refers to that branch of knowledge
concerned with political activity and behaviour. Considering the very wide varieties of political
activities and behaviors, and the constant changes that they undergo, this definition is still a general
statement that informs the reader of little of the nature and scope of this discipline. The name of political
science, itself, tells practically nothing of the extent and objects of the discipline, except that it is the
scientific study of political phenomenon. In order to understand the term and the discipline as such,
attention must be paid to the two words making up the expression: Political and Science.
It will be also noted that political science developed from a philosophical or speculative inquiry of
man’s political behaviour to amore empirical and realistic study of the same. Aristotle was thus one of
the first Greek thinkers to engage in a logical, although idealistic, reflection on the nature of the state
and politics. According to him the state came into being when several villages came to be united in a
single community aiming at the collective good. He believed in the evolution of social institutions from
families to states, and that the state was the final stage in the growth of human relations. He was also
of the first thinkers to give a clear definition of the state, according to which the state is the political
community par excellence. This is view of the state, called organic, because it conceives the state as
being made up of living individuals (organisms) and their influence on and contribution to policies
can be contrasted with the older instrumentalist view of the Sophists, wherein the state was seen solely
as an instrument, a mechanism used to attain political aims. This instrumentalist view of politics and
state continued to hold sway in comparatively modern times with the theories of Machiavelli and
Hobbes. Due to the times of political and civil unrest in which they lived, both had rather pessimistic
views of mankind and human society. According to both of them, though in different terms, all political
means, whether approved by morals or not, must be used by the state to secure the rule of law and
peace among its citizen. Machiavelli was probably the first thinker to emphasise the direct practical
observation of political institutions, actors and events while Hobbes’ aim was to discover rational

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 13