ABSTRACT
Thinking politically is a broad and vast enterprise; so vast that no one political scientist can ever be expected to ‘think politically’ in the widest possible sense. Thinking politically does require, and will always require, more modesty than other sciences. Modesty about facts and modesty about men are thus the basic canons of thinking politically. Political thinking begins with awareness that some underlying relations link events. The superposition of continuous and discrete elements of political life is perhaps the most baffling puzzle of political thinking. The difficulty relates to some of the deeper aspects of the many mysteries of political life. To think politically is to be able to see where there is a trend, or a break, in a pattern, be it of elections, or of a party system, or of democracy in a country. Political thinking has to be related, not to scientific thinking in other disciplines, but to the object of study of political analysis.
