Comparative politics

The task of science is the reasoned interpretation of experience through the discovery of valid generalizations and the application of such generalizations to particular events. Science seeks theoretical and useful knowledge, to which both the unique and the familiar may contribute. Broadly speaking, students of politics, even political philosophers, have always seen their task as the
construction of science in that sense, despite profound differences with respect to the appropriate forms and fashions of the scientific enterprise. Their differences lie in their varied views on what constitutes a reasoned interpretation of events and how
to discover the general in the particular. Debates on their differences have certainly not declined in recent times. Witness the bitter sadness of Leo Strauss when, discussing the position of contemporary social science, he charges that the "greatest
representative of social science positivism, Max Weber, has postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts, because his soul craved a universe in which failure, that bastard of forceful sinning accompanied by still more forceful faith, instead of felicity and
serenity, was to be the mark of human nobility.” Yet elsewhere, Strauss argues for the view that political philosophy is “the attempt to replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things," a view of fundamentals that Weber would no doubt share. And surely, "knowledge" of the nature of political things implies knowledge of the empirical world of
man and his communities and an understanding of the various political arrangements through which men have, in their various ways and times, sought to live with one another. The acquisition of such knowledge is the end of comparative politics.
Comparative study is, of course, not the only way in which one can acquire political knowledge. However poor it may be in some respects, political science is extremely rich in the ways it has conceived that task. Some in political theory have sought, by reflection and by virtue of their own humanity and perhaps compassion, to consider the various aspects that make up the totality of political life and by their cogitations give it new meaning. This has been one of the tasks of political philosophy. Others have studied the detailed workings of government and its branches, seeking in the relentless gathering of facts some key to the ordering of events and some principles in the events themsel.es. Still others have sought to compare governments and societies,