ABSTRACT
Political science concerns itself with the life of men in relation to organized States. The study of politics must be an effort to codify the results of experience in the history of states. Political philosophy is never separable from the general body of ideas in a generation. The rediscovery of ancient Greece had enormous influence on the political systems of the sixteenth century, the history of classical scholarship is a chapter in the history of political philosophy. In the seventeenth century the form of political speculation is quite largely determined by attraction to, and repulsion from, Carte-sianism in its widest sense, and the method of the French philosophes was set, to a degree we have insufficiently examined, by the achievement of Isaac Newton in physics. Political science has not the axiomatic quality of mathematics. In its equations the variables are human beings whose uniqueness prevents their reduction to law in the scientific sense of that much-abused word.
