艺术与社会科学杂志

An Innovation in Comparative Political Thought: The Application of Political History

Abstract

Catus Brooks

We do not wish to be guilty of introducing a new topic into comparative political thought (CPT), but we must proceed with this essay. For, we are sure that our introduction is not due to the poverty of invention, when one is forced to innovate as a result of desperation, rather than ingenuity. What we are inventing is a term called political history, a form of descriptive political thought. We invent this term in CPT because CPT allows me to apply a range of comparative devices in order to render political history successfully. Note by comparative devices, we mean both compare and contrast methods. These include, differentiation, finding connections by comparing theories, and comparing and contrasting something with itself, to determine inherent paradoxes or self-consistency. We use contrast as a method, for in rendering political history, looking at sameness with comparison is not enough, for difference would still remain. A dialectician might ask, when does complete sameness ever exist? Meaning that to exclude difference leaves an imperfect picture, which could result in the failure of rendering a topic. To classify, one must differentiate by contrast, examining the most important discrepancies of the differentiae