PLSC 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Dysfunctional Family, Totalitarianism, Systems Analysis
Document Summary
Most people are drawn to comparative politics by tough questions with implications that resonate around the world. Unfortunately, because political scientists disagree about almost everything, there is no definitive list of such questions. The author of the text has chosen to focus on five of them because they meet three criteria: they show how uncertain and changeable our world is. In recent years, political scientists and others have made significant strides in understanding each of them: despite what we have learned, political leaders and average citizens alike are still far from finding definitive answers to any of them. Nea(cid:396)ly (cid:1007),000 yea(cid:396)s ago, the philosophe(cid:396) he(cid:396)a(cid:272)litus (cid:272)lai(cid:373)ed that (cid:862)(cid:272)ha(cid:374)ge is the o(cid:374)ly (cid:272)o(cid:374)sta(cid:374)t. (cid:863) we (cid:449)ill (cid:374)e(cid:448)e(cid:396) k(cid:374)o(cid:449) if his statement made sense for the greece he lived in, but it certainly does today. Between the start of the industrial revolution and the end of. World war ii, people invented more things than they had in all of history until that time.