‘Political Science is a master-science, “architectonic” in its character, from which all other practical sciences take their cue’ (Ernest Barker). Discuss. (1991)
The claim is Aristotle‘s, restated by Ernest Barker, the English interpreter and translator of Greek political thought (The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, 1906; The Politics of Aristotle, 1946). In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book I, ch. 2) Aristotle called politics the most authoritative, most truly master art (architektonike): it ordains which sciences a city shall study, commands prized capacities like strategy, household management and rhetoric, and, since it legislates what citizens must do and avoid, its end — the human good — includes theirs.
What “architectonic” means
- As the master-builder directs masons, politics directs rather than replaces the other practical sciences; they supply means, politics sets the end.
- Its object is the polis, the most sovereign and inclusive association, existing for the sake of the good life.
- The claim is about ends, not method: whoever decides the ultimate purpose of common life orders every subordinate activity.
The case for it
- Comprehensive reach of the modern state: education, health, industry and even family law are fixed by public decision. India’s Directive Principles commit the state to shaping economic and social life as a whole.
- Public policy as the meeting point: Harold D. Lasswell‘s idea of the policy sciences (1951) made political science the integrator of economics, psychology and law for public choice.
- Illustration: the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown of 24 March 2020, ordered under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, subordinated commerce, schooling and medicine to one political decision — politics legislating what citizens must do and avoid.
The critiques
- Liberal limited state: from John Locke to John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859), politics merely frames individuals’ pursuit of their own ends; Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) warned that a state directing all sciences towards one good slides into totalitarianism. The Supreme Court’s recognition of privacy in K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) fences off a zone politics may not command.
- Pluralists: Harold J. Laski (Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 1917) treated the state as one association among churches, unions and guilds, with no inherent primacy. Barker himself, in “The Discredited State” (1915), was sympathetic to this view.
- Marxists: the economic base determines the political superstructure; economics, not politics, is master.
- Autonomy of disciplines: sister disciplines developed their own methods; the behaviouralists‘ stress on integration made political science a borrower from them rather than their sovereign. The 1991 reforms themselves ceded much economic decision-making from planners to markets.
- Gandhian: M. K. Gandhi placed moral self-rule above the commands of a centralised state.
Assessment
Aristotle’s claim survives in a revised form. Politics cannot dictate the truths of medicine or economics, and constitutional democracy limits what it may command. But it remains architectonic in a procedural sense: it is the only arena where the competing claims of the other practical sciences are weighed, ranked and made binding — lockdowns versus livelihoods, growth versus ecology.
Conclusion
Political science is master not as a sovereign over other sciences but as their coordinator: it does not supply their knowledge, yet it decides, publicly and accountably, which ends that knowledge will serve.