Word study

I. GIVE RUSSIAN EQUIVALENTS FOR:

To sustain; vigorous; inherent; to intertwine; strict; superficial; to subscribe to; consistent; crude; claim; ac­cess; implication; presupposition; background, preconcep­tion; bogus.

II. GIVE ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS FOR:

В широком смысле; выдвигать идею; надежный спо­соб; отделить; ценности; сталкиваться; надёжное средство; проверить гипотезу; тесно переплестись; неизменно; жиз­ненный опыт; личная симпатия; недостижимая цель.

III. MAKE UP WORD-COMBINATIONS FROM THE WORDS GIVEN:

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Reliable — knowledge; means; method; experience; po­sition; facts; data; source of information.

To accept - views; opinions; notions; theories; hypothe­ses; ideas; politics.

To give access to — objective knowledge; recent data; current events; scientific constructs.

To distinguish between — facts and values; truth and falsehood; normative and ethic beliefs; subjective and ob­jective evidence; determinism and behaviuorism.

To demonstrate — reliably and consistently; clearly and accurately; in a broad and narrow sense; deliberately and freely; brightly and vividly; for better or worse.

The only way is — to ignore the thinking subject; to confront these difficulties; to carry out repeatable experiments; to test this hypothesis; to distinguish truth from falsehood; to observe in detail; to explain by means of a new approach.

IV. TRANSLATE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES INTO RUSSIAN. PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE WORDS «FAIL» AND «FAILURE»

1. He failed his driving test and I have to drive every­ where.

2. You have failed to bring up your son properly. You are just a failure.

3. The participants of the conference failed to come to any agreement on the problem.

4. Perhaps the greatest threat to the accumulation of reliable knowledge thus comes not from bias as such, but from the failure to acknowledge bias, reflected in bogus claims to political neutrality.

5. His attempt to distinguish between empirical evidence and ethical beliefs failed completely.

6. He has never been in such an awkward situation, it was almost a failure.

7. They demonstrated their unwillingness to accept his ideas and failed, nobody supported them.

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V. DISCUSSION

Give a short summary of the text.

VI. LOOK THROUGH THE TEXT AND GIVE THE DEFINITIONS OF THESE WORDS: CONCEPTS, MODELS, THEORIES, PARADIGMS.

Concepts, models and theories

Concepts, models and theories are the tools of political analysis. A concept is a general idea about something, usually expressed in a single word or a short phrase. A concept is more than a proper noun or the name of a thing.

What, then, is the value of concepts? Concepts are the tools with which we think, criticize, argue, explain and analyze. Merely perceiving the external world does not in itself give us knowledge about it. In order to make sense of the world we must, in a sense, impose meaning upon it, and this we do through the construction of concepts. Quite simply, to treat a cat as a cat, we must first have a con­cept of what it is. Concepts also help us classify objects by recognizing that they have similar forms or similar

properties.

A cat, for instance, is a member of the class of 'cats'.

Concepts are therefore 'general'; they can relate to a number of objects, indeed to any object that complies with the characteristics of the general idea itself .It is no exag­geration to say that our knowledge of the political world is built up through developing and refining concepts which help us make sense of that world. Concepts, in that sense, are the building blocks of human knowledge.

Models and theories are broader than concepts; they comprise a range of ideas rather than a single idea. A model is usually thought of as a representation of something, usually on a smaller scale. In this sense, the purpose of the model is to resemble the original object as faithfully as possible. However, conceptual models need not in any way resemble an object.

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The terms theory and model are often used interchange­ably in politics. Theories and models are both conceptual constructs used as tools of political analysis. However, strictly speaking, a theory is proposition. It offers a systematic explanation of a body of empirical data. In contrast, a model is merely an explanatory device; it is more like a hypothesis that has yet to be tested. In that sense, in politics, while theories can be said to be more or less 'true', models can only be said to be more or less 'useful'. Analytical devices, such as models and microtheories, are constructed on the basis of broader macrotheories. These major theoretical tools of political analysis are those which address the issues of power and the role of the state: pluralism, elitism, class analysis, and so on.

At a still deeper level, however, many of these mac­rotheories reflect the assumptions and beliefs of one or other of the major ideological traditions. These traditions operate rather like what Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) called paradigms. A paradigm is a related set of principles, doctrines and theories that help to structure the process of intellectual enquiry. In effect, a paradigm constitutes the framework within which the search for knowledge is conducted.

VII. READ THE TEXT AGAIN AND RENDER ITS CONTENTS IN RUSSIAN. MAKE USE OF THE DIAGRAM BELOW.

			Concepts
		Models or microtheories
	Macrotheories
Ideological traditions / paradigms

Examples: power, social class, rights, law

Examples: systems analysis, pub­lic choice, game theory

Examples: pluralism, elitism, functionalism

Examples: liberalism, Marxism, feminism

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• Politics is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live. As such, it is an essentially social activity, inextrica­ bly linked, on the one hand, to the existence of diversity and conflict, and on the other to a willingness to cooperate and act collectively. Politics is better seen as a search for conflict resolution than as its achievement, as not all con­ flicts are, or can be, resolved.

• Politics has been understood differently by different thinkers and within different traditions. Politics has been viewed as the art of government or as 'what concerns the state', as the conduct and management of public affairs, as the resolution of conflict through debate and compromise, and as the production, distribution and use of resources in the course of social existence.

• There is considerable debate about the realm of 'the political'. Conventionally, politics has narrowly been seen as embracing institutions and actors operating in a 'public' sphere concerned with the collective organization of social existence. However, when politics is understood in terms of power-structured relationships, it may be seen to operate in the 'private' sphere as well.

• A variety of approaches have been adopted to the study of politics as an academic discipline. These include political philosophy or the analysis of normative theory, an empiri­ cal tradition particularly concerned with the study of insti­ tutions and structures, attempts to introduce scientific rigour through behavioural analysis, and a variety of modern approaches including the use of rational-choice theory.

♦ The study of politics is scientific to the extent that it is possible to gain objective knowledge about the political world by distinguishing between facts and values. This task is nevertheless hampered by the difficulty of gaining access to reliable data, by values that are implicit j**litical models and theories, and by biases that operate within all students of politics.

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♦ Concepts, models and theories are the tools of political analysis, providing the building blocks of knowledge. However, they are only analytical devices. Although they help to advance understanding, they are more rounded and coherent than the unshapely and complex realities they seek to describe. Ulti­mately, all political and social enquiry is conducted within a particular intellectual framework or ideological paradigm.

VIII. DISCUSSIONQuestions for discussion:

— If politics is essentially social, why is not all social activity political?

— Why has politics so often carried negative associa­ tions?

—How could you defend politics as a worthwhile and ennobling activity?

—Is politics inevitable? Could politics ever be brought to an end?

— Why has the idea of a science of politics been so attractive?

—Is it possible to study politics objectively and without bias?

• What are the new political issues on the global agenda?

• Is politics an ideology?

• Can all the political disagreements be solved on the peaceful grounds?

• What attracts you in studying politics?

• Can we say that politics is the queen of social sciences?

UNIT VIII

I. READ AND TRANSLATE THE TEXT:

TAMING THE STATE

For more than 2,000 years, a dominant question in po­litical thought has been how to limit the powers of the

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state. The nature of the problem seems clear enough. The state must exist. This means that the state will always have the potential to use its coercive powers to exploit and repress its citizens. How can the abuse of these coercive powers be limited without weakening the ability of the state to fulfil its necessary functions?

The Greek philosopher Plato thought the solution was creating a special class of philosopher-kings: persons who were trained to be fair and restrained in their use of state power. However, it seems too much to expect people who have been placed in positions of immense power to practice self-restraint. Indeed, as Lord Acton claimed in a widely quoted maxim, «Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.»

Rejecting hopes that the state could be tamed by putting people of high character in power, political theorists searched for social arrangements that would limit the power of lead­ership positions, regardless of the character of the leaders. By the eighteenth century, political thinkers had con­cluded that two things were necessary to tame the state. First, a clear set of rules (procedures and laws) had to be established that defined the limits of state power and the manner in which that power could and could not be exer­cised. But rules by themselves mean nothing. Some of the most repressive regimes on earth have model constitutions that guarantee all sorts of rights and freedoms to citizens. Such guarantees do not mean anything unless they are embodied in a structure designed to ensure that the rules are observed. What kind of structure can this effect?

This leads to the second requirement for taming the state: a structure in which power is widely dispersed among many powerful groups. In this way, no one group can pur­sue its own interests without regulation; every group is checked by the other powerful groups acting to preserve their own interests. This aspect of taming the state was not so much discovered as it was something that just slowly evolved by trial and error. In fact, only after a considerable

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dispersal of power had occurred in England political theo­rists recognize the principle involved. So let's see what hap­pened and how it works.