The Science of Politics. An introduction by Josep M. Colomer

Political Scientist Josep M. Colomer has announced the release of his new textbook entitled The Science of Politics. An introduction, published under the imprint of Oxford University Press (2011). In his essay Implications from the disequilibrium of Mayority Rule for the study of Institutions, William H. Riker argued from a historical perspective, that Aristotle was interested in the study of institutions. The Greek philosopher argued that constitutions set the quality of social outcomes and also the moral character of individuals. Riker while warning us that the intellectuals of the time showed little interest in the study of medieval theologians which outlined his idea that Christianity first gave weight to the moral quality of individuals. – and by extension in the exercise of political rulers – and the quality of social outcomes in the Christian order depended on the moral quality of the rulers. Hence the clear understanding of the explanation Riker was the poet Thomas S. Eliot, in the essay The idea of a Christian Society (1940), the crisis of values in the Western world on the threshold of the first half of the twentieth century.

           

In his introduction to The Science of Politics Josep M. Colomer traces his idea of political science research grounded in regularities through the measurement of cases. The idea of research on the regularity of patterns in the performance of different institutions such as political action, polity, the electoral system and government, has as its background the idea of science, especially the science of classical physics. Following the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, I am thinking in Bertrand Russell, Colomer us in this introduction thirty propositions by way axioms of political science. Of course without the broad philosophical and historical perspective Riker. Colomer should be read within a wider cultural context, where history, philosophy and political science tend communicating vessels of knowledge. Never mind that the orthodox accuse us of heresy.