ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to this volume we learned that the concepts and ideas which are at the heart of political study are themselves intellectual battle-grounds. Key terms like ‘power’ are linguistic, and often moral, minefields over which the student of politics has to pass with great care, and it is easy to confuse, or else conflate, the normative with the empirical or to transgress seeming rules about the basis of scientific inquiry. So in the study of politics very little can be taken for granted, and this caveat extends to what we study and how we study it.
