Politics - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Overview

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions

Group decision making

Group decision making is a situation faced when individuals are brought together in a group to solve problems. According to the idea of synergy, decisions made collectively tend to be more effective than decisions made by a single individual...

. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil government

Government

Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...

s, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the corporate

Corporation

A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...

, academic

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

, and religious

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

segments of society. It consists of "social relations involving authority

Authority

The word Authority is derived mainly from the Latin word auctoritas, meaning invention, advice, opinion, influence, or command. In English, the word 'authority' can be used to mean power given by the state or by academic knowledge of an area .-Authority in Philosophy:In...

or power" and refers to the regulation of public affairs within a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy

Policy

A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome. The term is not normally used to denote what is actually done, this is normally referred to as either procedure or protocol...

.
The word politics comes from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

word Πολιτικά

Politics (Aristotle)

Aristotle's Politics is a work of political philosophy. The end of the Nicomachean Ethics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the...

(politika), modeled on Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

's "affairs of the city", the name of his book on governing and governments, which was rendered in English mid-15 century as Latinized "Polettiques".

Unanswered Questions

In what way realists oversimplify the concept of power?

More

Quotations

La propriété, c'est le vol!

Translated: Property is theft!

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840), Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution". Alternately translated as "Property is robbery!"

I consider myself a citizen of the world! ~ Charlie Chaplin (refers to Socrates [?])

As a woman I have no country. As a woman, I want no country.

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

Commonly attributed to Emma Goldman, apparently this is a paraphrase of ideas she expressed in Emma GoldmanLiving My Life (1931)|Living My Life, (1931), p. 56

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. ~ President Abraham Lincoln

Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion. ~ Lord Acton Dalberg in 'Nationality', in The Home and Foreign Review (July 1862)

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, s:Dwight Eisenhower's First Inaugural Address|First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

Republicans are nothing more than Democrats with poor judgment.

Jacob M. Appel, Arborophilia|Arborophilia

More