Political Scientist Quotes

The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology.... For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA...

Francis Fukuyama

'Canadian society' or the 'Canadian nation' cannot decide anything, because no one is in charge.

Thomas Flanagan

Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world

Space is only 80 miles from every person on earth — far closer than most people are to their own national capitals.

The G-Zero isn't aspirational, it's analytic. Unfortunately, it's also where we are.

I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high - whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops - is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them.

Andrew Bacevich

The theory of evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between members of the same species and even between members of different species.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

Thomas P. M. Barnett

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Peace is not achievable as a direct object of purposeful behaviour.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and that can be done by coercion, payment or attraction.

Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption.

The french revolution has not received more attention than it deserves; but in comparison disproportionately little attention has been given to the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. In a more modest way, these too helped fix the shape of the modern world. Specifically, most of the devices and ideas which have found expression in subsequent constitutions date from the experiments and theories of that day.

Francis D. Wormuth

What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.

Elmer Eric Schattschneider

In addition, a century or more of efforts to arrive at a feasible and politically acceptable mix of market and nonmarket elements has not produced a definitive, stable, or uniform solution.

Would you, like Benjamin Constant, have concluded that events as tumultuous as these ought to lead to the reestablishment of a liberal and constitutional order? If your name were Carl Schmitt, you would have done the exact opposite: you would have interpreted the tumult of your times as the best reason for getting rid of liberalism altogether.

The chances for a problem to rise on the decision agenda are dramatically increased if a solution is attached.

John W. Kingdon

I have lived half of my life in "Western society" and never encountered those principles [listed by the NYT as "Western"]. What is wrong with me. … So Mr. Bush stands for "gender equality, religious freedom, scientific inquiry and the rule of law" and I have never noticed?

As'ad AbuKhalil

Hayek's trade cycle theory was not in essence the same as Mises's.

Alan O. Ebenstein

Then what explains war among states? Rousseau's answer is really that war occurs because there is nothing to prevent it.

Right now, [the Israel lobby] has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.

In its distinctive strategy and internal dynamics and its rich intellectual tradition, Hizb al-Tahrir points up the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Islamist protest movements in the Middle East.

Suha Taji-Farouki

Scientific discovery, when viewed in detail, is an excruciatingly slow and painful process.

Herbert A. Simon

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

The overriding crucial implication of the structural adjustment policies was that the villagers would have to fend for themselves in all conceivable respects.