Politics, sociology, and balance between them

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Every knowledge or rather science has its own principles and theories. There are classical realism theories and controversial ones. This is natural when it comes to human effort whenever one comes across an experience or attempts to analyze a concept, either cultural, social or political, ending with a theory that interprets or explains the intended concept.

There are many theories in all experimental and human sciences, and every science has its principles, theories and basis upon which it stands. There are several political theorists who had an impact in the political spectrum. Their theories received significant admiration. If I were to mention one such theorists, it is Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (1888 – 1979), a French political economist and diplomat.

An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Therefore, there is a great concern for the scientific centers that usually launch a research initiative to look in depth into political and geopolitical conditions. Despite the great concern given to such centers, their role is limited to acquiring information, analyzing it, and conducting studies and more research which usually end up locked in cabinets and table drawers.

Even when such studies are used in scientific forums, they do not get a d e q u a t e a t t e n t i o n from the official bodies; even its recommendations are not taken into account. Delving into several dimensions of political science, it is not possible to exceed its solid relations with sociology. This is even after the independence of the political science and the continuous efforts of the political scientists in crystallizing cognitive, theoretical and institutional aspects.

The aforementioned aspects are meant to enable political science to successfully encompass itself for comprehending and understanding the political phenomena that create crisis in the political realm, forcing the political scientists to turn back to the society in a bid to understand the dimensions that need to be explained, not by using traditional political methods which continue to prove its difficulty to implement.

This necessary relationship between political science and sociology gives clear understanding of political phenomenon from the social scope, which ends up highlighting actual political priorities that are scientific solutions to the political crisis in question. It is unimaginable for a sociologist not to have strong relations with politics, given that it is difficult to detach a sociologist from politics in this regard due to overlapping roles between the political and social reality.

In this aspect, human sciences complement each other. For someone who studied political science, has to deal with history, and cannot overlook philosophy and eventually, he will land on sociology. Similar is the relation between archaeology and anthropology. When we look around us, we see many Arab universities having distinguished research centers with scientific credibility, and researchers.

However, the output of such centers do not receive even the minimal attention, which makes me wonder if our lives would be different if these research centers were given quarter of the attention that football or music receives.

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“Sociologists become politicians whether intentional or not” – Reymon Atouk.

By Yousef Awadh Al-Azmi

This news has been read 44789 times!