THINGS POLITICAL: A STUDY OF THE OBJECT OF POLITICS

This work is an inquiry into the nature of politics. I will argue that the idea of a "political sphere" emerged primarily in reference to the subject matter of political science, and therefore its nature is that of a scientific object (chapter 1). Building on recent and less recent debates among social science methodologists and philosophers of science, I will defend a realist approach to the explanation of political phenomena (chapter 2). I will then proceed to work out the implications of this realist approach concerning the nature of its object(s) of study (chapter 3). My conclusion is that political phenomena consist solely of the effects of the causal properties of individual entities, and that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a "political sphere" at the ontological level. Such a scientific object must instead be seen as the product of the classification of political phenomena into kinds with increasing degree of generality, at the top of which lies the class of all political phenomena – i.e. the political domain. In line with the realist approach I defend, I contend that such classifications are based on stipulations about the similarities between individual phenomena rather than on general features that such phenomena actually share (chapter 4). Finally, I will conclude that despite their relative arbitrariness, such classifications constitute representational models whose validity can be tested on the basis of their explanatory power (chapter 5).