Preliminary notes for a definition of politics and political science

Abstract

The use of the term politics is very popular in the everyday lexicon, it appears in hallway conversations, in national and international news, as well as in multiple spheres of daily life; likewise, it is present in academic conversations, for example, in university hallways, in congresses, even in talks that are apparently unrelated to politics. This proves that the term is commonly used, and its meanings vary according to the context in which it is mentioned.

The present study accounts for the polarity of the term politics, associating it mainly with an activity, which is studied by a discipline with a view to scientificity: political science. The exploration of the term inevitably leads to the not easy task of defining what politics is, which in turn leads to the unraveling of other relevant factors, such as the dimensions of politics, the relations with other disciplines and the social relevance of such activity.

The work aims to give a better understanding of the term, knowing that it is commonly used in the most everyday occasions. For this purpose, a review of different texts on political science is made, many of which make a historical exploration of the term and try to explain the origin of the activity and of the science that studies it, thus making it possible to consider different definitions of politics as an activity and of political science as a discipline that studies politics.