Political Science: An Idiosyncratic Retrospect of a Putative Discipline

Extract

THAT THIS ESSAY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OUT TO BE AS MUCH a matter of introspection as of retrospection should not, after all, have surprised me. As Pascal said, ‘la dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir qu'il faut mettre la première’. If the study of politics has changed over the last half century, why then, so have I. ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’. This is my apologia for starting off, not with my subject matter, but with myself!