Nature and scope of political theory
Answers
According to David Held , “ Political Theory is a network of concepts and generalizations about the key features of government , state and society .”
Scope of Political Theory :-
George Catlin has observed that political theory itself is divided into political science and political Philosophy .
Political science relies on empirical and logical statements , which are capable of verification . It insists on 'value free' approach .
Political science deals with ‘real' while political philosophy deals with the 'ideal' . According to this view point ,political science inquires into what individuals 'do' in a political situation while political philosophy tries to determine what they 'ought to do' to achieve the ultimate goal or purpose of human life .
Politics is a word that, ultimately, refers to a collective human experience and what people say about it— what they like about it, what they don’t like about it, how much and/or little they want rule of law to structure their collective life, and how new members to their collective life should be incorporated, if at all.
Political theory is the abstracting and re-imagining of that collective human experience, and is concerned with the rights and responsibilities of the individual human being as ‘citizen’ of a republic or ‘subject’ of a kingdom, and what their status is in a free-associative situation (aka ‘anarchy’); the education of the citizen or subject; the daily activity of citizen or subject and whether that activity supports their life materially and/or emotionally; how the citizen or subject optimally relates to another citizen or subject and the impact their relationship has on the collective experience; how the collective experience may be organized to optimally support citizens and/or subjects, or to assure its own continuity, or to both support citizens and/or subjects in ways that will assure its own continuity, or to minimize its own role so there are no ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’ but rather people freely living their lives with virtually nothing to structure it, including safety and security concerns.
Thus, political theory is at times a mirror, sometimes a microscope, and other times a telescope of what the human condition looks like experienced collectively, at different levels of the collective structure (e.g., the family, the neighborhood, the the city, the nation-state) and in different moments of a collective experience (e.g., moving over time from a high mortality rate, a low literacy rate, a low economic productivity with strong division in economic status between people, and a low status among the world’s nation-states; into a low mortality rate, a high literacy rate, a high economic productivity with weak division in economic status between people; and a high status among the nation-states of the world).