ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to show why the conception of politics used here requires an interdisciplinary approach, and to illustrate what this means in practice. The general argument is that if we are to understand the historical or contemporary politics of human societies, and especially the problems which occur within them, it is necessary to draw on the work of many disciplines both within and beyond the social sciences. The claim here is that the kind of framework used in this book provides a useful way of doing that in a preliminary fashion. Three central themes run through the argument.
