Political Science: An Introduction

Rating:
Summary: "Unbiased?" Yeah, right!
Review: Let me start by admitting I have the Seventh Edition (2000), not the 2002 version. However, I doubt that there could be much improvement. This "textbook" can only be the product of gross incompetence or extreme bias, I will let you decide which.

For example, page 340 reads "It is true that some regimes commit acts of great evil; military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala killed thousands on the slightest suspicion of leftism. But how is it that these military regimes came to power? Why does system breakdown recur repeatedly in such contries?"

So, does the author not know that we, the US, overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz in Guatemalla, and Allende in Chile? Everyone else knows this...and does the author not know that Chile, prior to this installation of Pinochet, was the one stable democracy in Latin America? So how then is Chile a case of this "recur(ing) repeatedly? (sic)" It happened once. Does the fact that two of his three examples of internal "system breakdown" leading to regime change actualy represent partially, or largely, the external actions of a superpower interfering in the internal affairs of weaker soveriegn countries not seem to be problematic? How can these be used as examples of internal processes when everyone knows what really happened, and that is not it? The author, in order to assert this, must be grossly ignorant of history (thereby disqualifying him as a viable authority in the field) or, knowing history, must be intentionally and knowingly distorting it for political reasons (thereby making him unquestionably biased, intellectually dishonest, and also therefore unsuited for the field).

On top of that we have the unfortunately normal systemic incompetence of the Political Science field in general. "Theory" and "causation" are words which they have no grasp of the meaning of in academic discourse. Methodology is a joke; a pile of correlations mushed together with assertions and assumptions (some already disproven for a few decades elsewhere) to create just-so stories does not make a legitimate theory or even hypothesis. We know too much about human nature, via studies done in Psychology, Neurobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology, and empirical information from anthropology, primatology, and ethology, and theoretical and empirical knowledge supplied by evolutionary biology, to just "assume" that humans are rational and go merrily on our way as Political Science is still doing. There is a huge body of knowledge on this question now, entire books debate it back and forth. It is in no way legitimate to simply plead ignorance and continue to build huge mental constructs of how the world works based on assumptions we in no way can justify making given what is known.

If this field were in any way deserving of the word "science," the knowledge that a fundamental "assumption" was seriously in doubt would result in massive questioning of the veracity of the ideas based on that assumption. That has not happened.

I urge you all not to waste your money on this book, I could give many more equally damning examples but the above should suffice. I also suggest that Evolutionary Psychology would be a far more profitable course of study if you want to know about human political behavior.