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Most European medieval and Renaissance political thinkers took a religious approach to the study of government and politics.
Which was strictly normative, seeking to discover the “ought” or “should” and rarely descriptive about the “is,” the real-world situation.
- Informed by religious, legal, and philosophical values,
- Sought to discover which system of government would bring humankind closest to the city of God, to the God’s will.Niccolò Machiavelli in the early sixteenth century introduced what some believe to be the central issue of modern political science:
the focus on power.
His great work The Prince was about the getting and using of political power.
Marxist theory of State
Engels wrote, that it is characteristic to the state to have “relative scarcity of material basis” - condition in which the productivity of labor enables a group of people to produce a surplus, that is, an amount of goods—food, clothes, tools—that is more than enough to enable them to survive, yet not enough to allow everyone to live in true abundance.
When productivity reaches such a point, society divides into classes: (a) majority working in exploitative conditions (b) a tiny minority who exploit the majority—that is, appropriate surplus and live in luxury without performing productive labor.
The division of society into classes in turn gives rise to the state.According to Marxists, society is divided into material base (or basis) and a superstructure
The base: instruments of production (machines, tools, raw materials), the social classes, and the relations between these classes.
The superstructure: political and cultural institutions - the state, churches, schools, etc., and corresponding ideational realms: politics, religion, science, art, etc. The state is the major element of this superstructure.
Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state immoral, unnecessary, and harmful and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy.
Anarchists believe that the state is inherently an instrument of domination and repression, no matter who is in control of it. Anarchists note that the state possesses the monopoly on the legal use of violence. Unlike Marxists, anarchists believe that revolutionary seizure of state power should not be a political goal. They believe instead that the state apparatus should be completely dismantled, and an alternative set of social relations created, which are not based on state power at all.[37][38]
Various Christian anarchists, such as Jacques Ellul, have identified the State and political power as the Beast in the Book of Revelation.
Pluralists view society as a collection of individuals and groups, who are competing for political power. They then view the state as a neutral body that simply enacts the will of whichever groups dominate the electoral process.[48] Within the pluralist tradition, Robert Dahl developed the theory of the state as a neutral arena for contending interests or its agencies as simply another set of interest groups. With power competitively arranged in society, state policy is a product of recurrent bargaining. Although pluralism recognizes the existence of inequality, it asserts that all groups have an opportunity to pressure the state. The pluralist approach suggests that the modern democratic state's actions are the result of pressures applied by a variety of organized interests. Dahl called this kind of state a polyarchy.[49]
Pluralism has been challenged on the ground that it is not supported by empirical evidence. Citing surveys showing that the large majority of people in high leadership positions are members of the wealthy upper class, critics of pluralism claim that the state serves the interests of the upper class rather than equitably serving the interests of all social groups.[50][51]
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