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168 W. J. M. Mackenzie
stated (though not measured) in terms of these three dimensions; subject
matter, purpose, and the fundamentals of method.
The plan of this essay is to take each of these dimensions in turn, to analyse
its implications, and to point to controversies. It will then be possible to indi-
cate briefly the ways in which they are interdependent.
Finally, the main themes of research in progress will be indicated as compre-
hensively as possible. But the scope of political science is now so great that a
research review can be given here only in a very summary form. The object of
this essay is, as it were, to establish a map grid, not to fill in the details of the
map.
A. Subject matter
I. The place of definition
The definition of a science’s subject-matter comes normally at the end, not at
the beginning, of its inquiry. Nevertheless, in textbook exposition of the com-
pleted inquiry it would be proper to begin with a statement of its scope, framed
carefully after the event. In political science some authors do this, some do not;
among the former there are astonishing discrepancies in definition. For instance,
to take two extremely influential American authors, Parsons and Easton;’ the
former describes politics as the instrumental aspect of social organization (the
deliberate creation of purposive social structures), the latter defines politics as
‘the authoritative allocation of values’. A Marxist definition might accept
Parsons’s exposition so far as it goes; but it would adopt also the common
nineteenth-century view that political organization is ultimately concerned
with the application of compulsive force, and it would treat the political sector
or aspect of society as relatively subordinate. Professor Duverger (in his Intro-
duction ri lapolitique, Paris, Gallimard, 1964) offers a definition which is related
to Marxist thought yet goes beyond it: ‘in any society, organized power, the
institutions of command and control’. This in turn overlaps with what is perhaps
the most popular deiinition in England at present, that of Oakeshott, that
politics is the process of ‘attending to the general arrangements of a society’.
But Oakeshott’s definition also is part of a complex system of ideas, and it
would be impossible to discuss it adequately without explaining its intellectual
context as a subtle adaptation of the idealist tradition.
These examples are enough to show that if we attempted to define politics
here we should either accept a commitment at the outset of the argument or we
should be involved in the whole inquiry of political science, normative and de-
scriptive. It seems wiser to adopt MacIntyre’s dictum, formulated in relation to
ethics :
‘This is why it would be dangerous and not just pointless, to begin these
studies with a definition which would carefully delimit the field of inquiry.’4
It is safer to say that, so far as sociological, historical and linguistic inquiries
have gone, they have shown that in all but the very smallest societies there is
some concept of a function of politics or government, and generally also some