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| Via Boston Review. |
In Saturday's post-mortem on the Bernie Sanders campaign, contemplating the idea of the Sanders strategy for winning as a kind of bona fide and sort-of-Marxian theory (that certain classes of oppressed voters will respond to a certain kind of economic analysis of their situation and this is the way to get them to vote in greater numbers than they normally do) that has now been definitively shown to be false, I found myself wandering into some very big topics without adequate preparation, perhaps, and saying some things that maybe sounded more adventurous, or horrifying, than they actually were, and because I'd like to keep using these thoughts, I thought I'd spend some time pulling back to couch them in a more traditional political-science discourse.
Excruciatingly traditional, in fact, with the help of the trusty old Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and beginning with old Aristotle, who named the subject, πολιτικη επιστημη, politikē epistēmē, the science of things related to the polis, city stuff, by analogy with (say) physics, φυσικη επιστημη, physikē epistēmē, the science of material bodies, and so forth.
Politics
The idea of "politics" has a bad reputation, going back a ways, used, as Jordan was saying in the comments,
