Political science studies how people are governed and how they use power. It also studies the constitutions, laws, and behaviors that go along with these systems and structures. This definition includes a lot of different types of government, as well as different types of law (Roman law, English common law, and so on), the history of political and legal institutions, and a lot more.

Most Influential Books in Political Science

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

By: Corey Robin , 2011

During his time as a professor, Robin (born in 1967) has worked at both Brooklyn College and New York's Graduate Center for the City University of New York. You can read more about conservative thought in Europe through this book, which is a history of conservative thought in Europe from the 1800s to the present. In it, the author says that conservative thinkers, even though they say they don't, have always wanted to keep power by keeping an undemocratic, hierarchical society in place. Another edition of the book was released in 2018, which expanded the book's history to include US President Donald J. Trump's time as president of the United States.

Democracy in America

By: Alexis de Tocqueville , 1835

Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, was born in Paris in 1805 to Norman parents who were aristocratic. He died in 1859 at the age of 50. During the Reign of Terror, his great-grandfather, Malesherbes, served as a minister for both Louis XV and Louis XVI. He died on the guillotine at the end of that time. Because Malesherbes served the Bourbons, he was a man of the Enlightenment who worked to change the old ways and had a big impact on his great-life. grandson's His ideas had a big impact on him. It must be said, however, that the "liberalism" of Malesherbes and Tocqueville was very different from the "liberalism" of our time. This "liberalism" was very different from the "liberalism" of our time, which was very different from the "liberalism" of our time. This is what happened to Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866) when the French government asked them to report on the US prison system. They went to North America together in 1731 to report on the prison system. They took a road trip from New York to New Orleans, then took the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to get back home from New Orleans. They also went through southern New England, upstate New York, the Great Lakes, and Canada's lower part. With his book, Democracy in America, Tocqueville went far beyond his original goal. It was a masterpiece and a social science classic that set new standards for objectively describing and analyzing social, economic, and political life, not just in the US, but across the world. When the book came out in Paris in 1835, it was called "De la démocratie dans l'Amérique." It was translated into English almost right away. In 1840, there was a second book. This is one of six English translations that have been done so far. Arthur Goldhammer, who translated it, made it in 2004.

Atlas Shrugged

By: Ayn Rand , 1957

Rand was a Russian-born writer and philosopher who lived from 1905 to 1982. Professional philosophers are becoming more interested in her nonfiction works today, but the general public still remembers her best for her novels, like the one on this page and the one that came before it, The Fountainhead, which was published in 1943. These books are long novels of ideas that show her radically libertarian, if not anarcho-capitalist, philosophical views. Both books show people who are both creators and builders. They choose to give up their life's work rather than let it be used by someone else. Atlas Shrugged shows a world where the people who are creative, like Atlas, carry the world on their shoulders go on strike. Rand's work has had a big impact on several generations of thinkers, especially economists. A surprising number of them say that Rand had an impact on them when they read her books at a young age. The book has been reprinted a lot.

The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution

By: Alexander Hamilton , James Madison , and John Jay 1787-1788

During the Second Continental Congress in 1775, the 13 American colonies sent representatives to Philadelphia. This was after the battles of Lexington and Concord and before a bigger war was on the way. That group wrote a document that made a central government out of a loose group of colonies. In 1781, these Articles of Confederation were finally agreed to. However, many people were unhappy with how weak and ineffective the new government was, so a new meeting was held in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new constitution that would make the federal government even tighter and the executive branch even stronger. Between May and September of 1787, a new document was made. It was sent to the states for them to sign. It was very heated in the press for the next two years about whether or not to change the federal government. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were three of the main people who pushed for the constitution to be put into place. Then, from October 1778 to May of 1788, they wrote 85 articles, mostly on their own, but a few together. They used careful logic and polished language to make the case for a stronger union. In May of 1788, these essays were put together and published in a book called The Federalist (also known as "The Federalist Papers"). There were a lot of different editions of The Federalist over the years, which helped make the new constitution happen in 1789.

Gulag: A History

By: Anne Applebaum , 2004

A detailed history of the USSR's use of prison camps, where criminals and political prisoners were forced to work very hard under very bad conditions in remote places in Siberia and other places. She is an American journalist who specializes in the history of Marxism, communism, and socialists. She focuses mostly on the countries of eastern and central Europe. As soon as the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Lenin ordered prison camps to be set up. In this book, she talks about how the prison camps were set up at the start. The term "gulag" is a Russian acronym that refers to the administrative body that runs the camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is famous for calling the camps scattered across Siberia a "archipelago." This is where the phrase "Gulag archipelago" comes from, which is also the title of Solzhenitsyn's great, three-volume history of the camps written in the 1970s. The end of communism and the fall of the USSR made it easier for Applebaum to work openly and get more government records. It's interesting that her short and easy-to-read treatment of a lot of the same material agrees with Solzhenitsyn's work on most of the big issues.

Theory of International Politics

By: Kenneth Waltz , 2010

He worked as a political scientist at UC-Berkeley and Columbia University from 1924 to 2013, when he died. A lot of different perspectives are looked at in this book about how countries and their governments work together. Among these are the main types of political theories, the main types of political structures that are actually in the world, the relationship between political structures and the economy, the relationship between political structures and the military, and the overall management of international affairs. The author is a "neorealist," which means that he thinks that the most important thing to focus on in international politics is the interests of each country.

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

By: Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray , 1994

Herrnstein worked as a psychologist at Harvard University from 1930 to 1994. Murray, who was born in 1943, is a political scientist who works at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This book is very controversial because it talks about a lot of different things about why different groups of people don't do as well on intelligence tests as they should. It's based on a lot of careful statistical analysis. After talking about the history of IQ tests, the book moves on to talk about things like how the performance gap affects things like family stability, education, employment, and crime. The book was slammed from the moment it came out because it was bad both conceptually and empirically. Nearly 30 years later, the debate is still going on because Murray is still an author and a public figure. Denunciations of the book now tend to say that it is racist and not worth serious discussion, so they don't want to talk about it.

---