PHILIPPINE POLITICS

AND GOVERNACE
 ARISTOTLE
“Man by Nature, is a
political animal.”

“Hence it is evident that the state

is a creation of nature, and that
man is by nature a political
animal. And he who by nature
and not by mere accident is
without a state, is either above
humanity, or below it; he is the
‘Tribe less, lawless, heartless
one,’ whom Homera denounces—
the outcast who is a lover of war;
he may be compared to a bird
which flies alone.”
 POLITICS AND
POLITICAL SCIENCE
POLITICAL SCIENCE
The study of power in society, politics, and
government.
The dynamic character of human society and the
differences in context of different states have
resulted in different views, theories, and definitions
on the concepts of politics and governance.
Political science, the systematic study of
governance by the application of empirical and
generally scientific methods of analysis. As
traditionally defined and studied, political science
examines the state and its organs and institutions.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
The contemporary discipline, however, is
considerably broader than this, encompassing
studies of all the societal, cultural, and
psychological factors that mutually influence the
operation of government and the body politic.
POLITICS
The Greeks formulated the word politics during 4th
& 5th century. Politics was inseparable from life in
the polis shared by a certain group of people.
This concept of Politics may be old as the first
organization created by man.
According to Aristotle and Plato, humans are
not self-sufficing so they find the need to come
together as a community. From this union comes
the need for politics and governance to maintain
order within a society.
POLITICS
Heywood (2013) defined politics as an activity that
involves the interaction of people, whose
relationship is characterized by conflict and
cooperation, and who come together to solve such
disagreements through binding solutions. However,
politics is no utopian solution. There are
disagreements that remain as such.
DIFFERENT VIEWS ON
POLITICS
ART OF GOVERNMENT
Politics concerns the state. It focuses on the
personnel and machinery of the government.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Politics is the conduct and management of public
interest and therefore, political affairs.

COMPROMISE AND
CONSENSUS
Politics attempts to resolve conflict through
discussion, compromise, bargaining, and
consensus, wherein people arrive at a binding
decision.
POWER AND THE
DISTRIBUTION OF
RESOURCES
Politics involves the exercise of authority in the
production, distribution, and use of resources. This
describes who gets what and under what
circumstance.
Given the views on politics above, one may think that
politics only involves the state or the government. It
must be noted, however, that human beings relate to
each other not only in formal structures but also in
collective arrangements such as families, religions,
peer groups, or cultures.
Power is also exercised in these types of
relationships, making them political as well.
For instance, who decides on specific familial matters
is a venue by which authority is manifested. In
religious organizations, the existence of authority is
manifested as well in the presence of religious leaders
vis-à-vis the followers.
 HISTORY OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
St. Thomas Aquinas Christianized Aristotle’s
Politics to lend its moral purpose.
Aquinas took from Aristotle the idea that humans
are both rational and social, that states occur
naturally, and that government can improve
humans spiritually. Aquinas favoured monarchy but
despised tyranny, arguing that kingly authority
should be limited by law and used for the common
good.
DANTE
Italian poet and philosopher, Dante (1265-1321)
argued in De Monarchia (On Monarchy) for a single
world government.
At the same time, the philosopher Marsilius of
Padua (c. 1280-c. 1343), in Defensor Pacis
(“Defendor of the Peace”), introduced
secularization by elevating the state over the
church as the originator of laws.
EARLY MODERN
DEVELOPMENTS
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
The first modern political scientist was the Italian
writer Niccolo Machiavelli (469-1527). His famous
work, The Prince (1531), a treatise originally
dedicated to Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo de Piero de’
Medici.
An early Italian patriot, Machiavelli, believed that
Italy could be unified and its foreign occupiers
expelled only by ruthless and single-minded
princes who rejected any moral constraints on
their power.
Machiavelli introduced the modern idea of power—
how to get it and how to use it—as the crux of
politics. Machiavelli thus, ranks alongside Aristotle
as a founder of political science.
THOMAS HOBBES
The English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes also
placed power at the center of his political analysis.
In Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of
a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil
(1651), completed near the end of the English Civil
Wars (1642-51).
JOHN LOCKE
English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who
also witnessed the turmoil of English civil war—the
Glorious Revolution (1688- 89)—argued in his
influential Two Treatise on Civil Government (1690)
that people form governments through a social
contract to preserve their inalienable natural
rights to “life, liberty, and property.”
John Locke maintains that any government that
fails to secure the natural rights of its citizens may
properly be overthrown. Locke’s views were a
powerful force in the intellectual life of 18th century
colonial America and constituted the philosophical
basis of the American Declaration of Independence
(1776).
If Hobbes was the conservative of the “contractualist”
and Locke the liberal, then the French philosopher
Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-78) was the radical.
JEAN-JACQUE ROUSSEAU
Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) constructs
a civil society in which the separate wills of
individuals are combined to govern as the “general
will” (volonte generale) of the collective that overrides
individual wills, “forcing a man to be free.”
Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by French
revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who
distorted many of his philosophical lessons.
MONTESQUIEU
Montesquieu (1689-1755), a more pragmatic French
philosopher, contributed to modern comparative
politics with his The Spirit of Laws (1748).
Montesquieu also produced an innovative analysis
of governance that assigned to each form of
government an animating principle.
Montesquieu’s analysis concluded that a country’s
form of government is determined not by the locus
of political power but by how the government enacts
public policy.
ADAM SMITH
The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam
Smith (1723-90) is considered the founder of
classical economic liberalism.
In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argued that the
role of the state should be restricted primarily to
enforcing contracts in a free market.
EDMUND BURKE
The classical conservatism of the English parliament
Edmund Burke (1729-97) maintained that
established values and institutions were essential
elements of all societies.
Burke introduced an important psychological or
cultural insight: those political systems are living
organisms that grow over centuries and that depend
on a sense of legitimacy that is gradually built up
among their subjects. The early development of
political science was also influenced by law
JEAN BODIN
The French philosopher Jean Bodin (1530-96)
articulated a theory of sovereignty that viewed the
state as the ultimate source of law in a given
territory.
Many political scientists, especially in international
relations, find Bodin’s notion of sovereignty useful
for expressing the legitimacy and equality of
states.
 “19TH CENTURY
ROOTS OF
CONTEMPORARY
POLITICAL SCIENCE”
Contemporary political science traces its roots
primarily in 19th century, when the rapid growth of
the natural sciences stimulated enthusiasm for the
creation of a new social science.
ANTOINE-LOUIS-CLAUDE
Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy
(1754- 1836), who in the 1790’s coined the term
ideologie (“ideology”) for his “science of ideas”.
HENRY DE SAINT-SIMON
Henry de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), a founder of
Christian Socialism, who in 1813 suggested that
morals and politics could become “positive”
science. Saint-Simon collaborated with French
mathematician and philosopher, Auguste Comte
(1798-1857), considered by many to be the founder
of sociology, on the publication of the Plan of the
Scientific Operations Necessary for the
Reorganization of Society (1822), which claimed that
politics would become a social physics and
discover scientific laws of social progress.
HENRY DE SAINT-SIMON
The scientific approach to politics developed during
the 19th century along two distinct lines that still
divide the discipline.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
In the 1830’s the French historian and politician
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) brilliantly analyzed
democracy in America, concluding that it worked
because Americans had developed “The Art of
Association” and were egalitarian group formers.
Tocqueville’s emphasis on cultural values contrasted
sharply with the views of the German socialist
theorists Karl Max (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels
(1820-95), who advanced a materialistic and
economic theory of the state as an instrument of
domination by the classes that own the means of
production.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
According to Marx and Engels, prevailing values
and culture simply reflect the tastes and needs of
ruling elites.
The first separate school of political science was
established in 1872 in France as the Ecole Libre
des Sciences Politiques (now the Institut d’Etudes
Politiques).
In 1895, the London School of Economics and
Political Science was founded in England, and the
first chair of politics was established at the
University of Oxford in 1912.
 “THE EARLY 20TH
CENTURY”
DEVELOPMENTS IN
THE UNITED STATES
JOHN W. BURGESS
Some of the most important developments in
political science, since it became a distinct academic
discipline have occurred in the United States.
Political science as a separate discipline in
universities in the United States dates from 1880,
when John W. Burgess, after studying at the Ecole
Libre in Paris, established a school of political
science at Columbia University in New York City.
Political science in the United States in the last
quarter of the 19th century was influenced by the
experience of numerous scholars who had done
graduate work at German Universities, where the
discipline was taught as Staatswissenschaft
(“science of the state”) in an ordered, structured,
and analytic organization of concepts, definitions,
comparisons, and inferences.
The highly formalistic and institutional approach,
which focused on constitutions, dominated
American political science until World War II.
The work of American political scientists
represented an effort to establish an autonomous
discipline, separate from history, moral philosophy,
and political economy.
WOODROW WILSON
Among the new scholars were Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924), who would be elected as president of
the United States in 1912, and Frank Goodnow, a
Columbia University professor of administrative law
and, later, president of Johns Hopkins University,
who was among the first to study municipal
governments.
Wilson and Goodnow’s writing showed an awareness
of new intellectual currents, such as theory of
evolution. Inspired by the work of Charles Darwin
(1809-82).
ARTHUR F. BENTLEY’S
Arthur F. Bentley’s, “The Process of Government”,
little noticed at the time of its publication in 1908,
greatly influenced the development of political
science from the 1930’s to 1950’s.
Bentley rejected statist abstractions in favor of
observable facts and identified groups and their
interactions as the basis of political life.
Bentley argued determined legislation,
administration, and adjudication. In emphasizing
behavior process, Bentley sounded idea that later
became central to political science.
ARTHUR F. BENTLEY’S
The principal impetus came from the University of
Chicago, where what became known as the Chicago
School developed in the mid-1920’s and thereafter.
CHARLES E. MERRIAM
The leading figure in this movement was Charles E.
Merriam, whose New Aspects of Politics (1925)
argued for a reconstruction of method in political
analysis, urged the greater use of statistics in the
aid of empirical observation and measurement, and
postulated that “intelligent social control.
Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell’s Non-voting,
Causes and Methods of Control (1924), which
used sampling methods and survey data and is
illustrative of the type of research that came to
dominate political science after World War II.
CHARLES E. MERRIAM
Many political scientists attempted to use Freudian
psychology to analyze politics, but none succeeded
in establishing it.
Merriam’s Political Power (1934) and Laswell’s
class Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)
—the title of which articulated the basic definition of
politics—gave a central comes into being, how it
becomes “authority, the techniques of power
holders, the defences of those over whom power is
wielded, and the dissipation of power.
LASSWELL
Lasswell focused on “influence and the
influential”, laying the basis for the subsequent
“elite” theories of politics.
Although the various members of the Chicago school
ostensibly sought to develop political science as a
value-free discipline, it had two central
predilections: it accepted democratic values, and it
attempted to improve the operation of democratic
systems.
LASSWELL
Power approaches also became central in the
burgeoning field of international relations,
particularly after World War II.
HANS MORGENTHAU
Hans Morgenthau (1904-80), a German refugee and
analyst of world politics, argued succinctly in
Politics Among Nations (1948) that “all politics is a
struggle for power”.
The totalitarian dictatorships that developed in
Europe and Asia in 1920’s and 1930’s and the onset
of World War II turned political science, particularly
in the United States, away from its focus on
institutions, laws, and procedures.
The constitution of Germany’s post-World War I
Weimar Republic had been an excellent model, but
it failed in practice because too few Germans were
then committed supporters of democracy.
JOSEPH STALIN
Likewise, the Soviet Union’s 1936 constitution
appeared democratic but in reality was merely an
attempt to mask the brutal dictatorship of Joseph
Stalin.
Works of this period focused on the role of elites,
political parties, and interest groups, on legislative
and bureaucratic processes, and especially on how
voters in democracies make their electoral choices.
This new interest in actual political behavior became
known as “behaviorism”.