the study of politics, and within these various schools of thought.
These should be thought of only as a sort of preliminary crude map of
the terrain to be covered, not as a rigorous analysis of what kinds of
writing on politics is possible, or as a series of watertight divisions.
However, it will be found that two writers within a ‘school’ generally
have more in common, and are more likely to agree on what has
already been established, and perhaps to refer to each other, than two
writers in different schools.
The three main contemporary academic approaches to the study
of politics can be described as ‘traditional scholarship’, ‘social science’
and ‘radical criticism’. With an element of exaggeration they might
also be thought of as the British, the American and the French
approaches (although the ‘American’ approach has gained much
ground in Britain and internationally in recent years).
‘Traditional scholars’ often approach matters on a rather piecemeal
basis looking at one specific country, political institution, theoretical
concept or writer in depth, often with the tools and preconceptions of
another academic discipline – especially history or philosophy. Thus
the core of the politics curriculum in Britain, at least until recently,
has been the study of individual British political institutions in their
historical context; the great political philosophers; and what was
misleadingly titled ‘comparative government’. The latter was, in
practice, largely the study of American, French and Soviet govern-
ment and politics separately. Often British courses have been part of
a humanities-oriented programme such as the Oxford PPE (Philo-
sophy, Politics, Economics) programme. A comparison of the leading
UK and US journals showed that the leading UK journal, Political
Studies, had 91 per cent of its articles focusing on institutional,
descriptive, conceptual or philosophical topics (including history of
political thought), whilst the American Political Science Reviewhad
74 per cent of its articles in the behavioural/empirical or deductive/
rational choice categories (Norris, 1994: 15). In continental Europe
politics has often been a subsidiary part of departments of faculties of
law, sociology or history.
‘Social scientists’ would denounce the traditional approach as
‘idiographic’ (a word derived from ‘ideogram’ – a personal mark or
signature), espousing instead a ‘nomothetic’ or generalising approach
in which the endeavour of scholars of politics must be ultimately to
derive general theories or laws about the nature of political behavi-8 POLITICS