ABSTRACT
In the senior common rooms of universities there are whispers to the effect that politics is a soft option, taught by people with little sense of intellectual discipline and read by students who have been scared by the difficulties of the ‘harder’ social sciences, such as economics. The American ‘case’, probably the most relevant for us m this country, is hardly encouraging. In the USA, proportionately much greater resources are put into the study of politics at the university level, and one has the impression that, at the lower educational levels, there is much more attention paid to ‘civics’. But the student of politics has a professional as well as a human interest in the wider problems themselves, at least to the extent that these are political problems demanding political solutions.
