Abstract
Autore:
Ieraci Giuseppe
Titolo:
"La scienza della politica tra «scientismo» e crisi d’identità. Una disciplina senza il politico"
The article questions the specificity
of political science as an academic discipline
in the broader social, economic and legal
research fields. It is argued that political science
had acquired its specificity because of a distinctive
theoretical approach and the method of investigation
used. Political science as a discipline
and as a research approach was distinguishable
because of the emphasis on the nature of the
political phenomena. “What is Politics?” was a
core question for any political scientist, and normally
the answer to this question led to the identification
of conflict and power as the criteria of
political behaviour. This theoretical orientation
of the origins of political science involved both
the formulation of empirically controllable concepts
and the “modeling” interpretation of the
observed phenomena. The comparative method
served the purposes of the verification of the
interpretative models. Both these two features
of the foundation of political science are nowadays
fading. Politics is not associated any more
with conflict and power, but is instead reduced
to various modalities of coordination of the social
action. Theorizing at a general or even at a
middle range level has been dismissed and the
comparative approach has been today replaced
by linear statistical methods of control of shortterm
hypotheses. At present, political science
risks losing its identity, because it is incapable
of identifying “politics”, and because of the lack
of theoretical-conceptual attention and the abandonment
of the comparative method. Without
“politics” and without “method”, political science
is no longer distinguishable from public ethics,
sociology, economics or the legal studies.
