Early modern development

The first modern political scientist was the Italian writer Nicola Machiavelli (1469 - 1527). His infamous work “The Prince” (1531), a treatise originally dedicated to Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, presented amoral advice to actual and would-be princes on the best means of acquiring and holding on to political power. Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which completed the secularization of politics begun by Marsilius, was based on reason rather than religion. An early Italian patriot, Machiavelli believed that Italy could be unified and its foreign occupiers expelled only by ruthless and single-minded princes who rejected any moral constraints on their power. Machiavelli introduced the modern idea of power - how to get it and how to use it - as the crux of politics, a viewpoint shared by today’s international relations “realists,” rational choice theorists, and others. Machiavelli thus ranks alongside Aristotle as a founder of political science.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) also placed power at the centre of his political analysis. In “Leviathan or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil” (1651), completed near the end of the English Civil Wars (1642 - 51), Hobbes outlined, without reference to an all-powerful God, how humans, endowed with a natural right to self-preservation but living in an anarchic state of nature, would be driven by fear of violent death to form a civil society and submit to a single sovereign authority (a monarch) to ensure their peace and security through a social contract - an actual or hypothetical agreement between citizens and their rulers that defines the rights and duties of each.

English philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704), who also witnessed the turmoil of an English civil war - the Glorious Revolution (1688 - 1689), argued in his influential “Two Treatises on Civil Government” (1690) that people form governments through a social contract to preserve their inalienable natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.” He further maintained that any government that fails to secure the natural rights of its citizens may properly be overthrown. Locke’s views were a powerful force in the intellectual life of 18th-century colonial America and constituted the philosophical basis of the “American Declaration of Independence” (1776), many of whose drafters, particularly Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), were well acquainted with Locke’s writings.

If Hobbes was the conservative of the “contractualists” and Locke the liberal, then the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was the radical. Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (1762) constructs a civil society in which the separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as the “general will” (volonté générale) of the collective that overrides individual wills, “forcing a man to be free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by French revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who distorted many of his philosophical lessons.

Montesquieu (1689 - 1755), a more pragmatic French philosopher, contributed to modern comparative politics with his “The Spirit of Laws” (1748). Montesquieu sojourn in England convinced him that English liberties were based on the separation and balance of power between Parliament and the monarchy, a principle later embraced by the framers of the Constitution of the United States (see separation of powers; checks and balances). Montesquieu also produced an innovative analysis of governance that assigned to each form of government an animating principle - for example, republics are based on virtue, monarchies on honor, and despotisms on fear. Montesquieu analysis concluded that a country’s form of government is determined not by the locus of political power but by how the government enacts public policy.

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) is considered the founder of classical economic liberalism. In “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776), he argued that the role of the state should be restricted primarily to enforcing contracts in a free market. In contrast, the classical conservatism of the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729 -1797) maintained that established values and institutions were essential elements of all societies and that revolutions that sought to destroy such values (e.g., the French Revolution) delivered people to irrational impulses and to tyranny. Burke thus introduced an important psychological or cultural insight: those political systems are living organisms that grow over centuries and that depend on a sense of legitimacy that is gradually built up among their subjects.

The early development of political science was also influenced by law. The French political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530 - 1596) articulated a theory of sovereignty that viewed the state as the ultimate source of law in a given territory. Bodin’s work, which was undertaken as the modern state was first developing, provided a justification of the legitimacy of national governments, one fiercely defended to this day. Many political scientists, especially in international relations, find Bodin’s notion of sovereignty useful for expressing the legitimacy and equality of states.