La scienza della politica tra “scientismo” e crisi d’identità. Una disciplina senza il politico

The article questions the specificity of political science as an academic discipline in the broader social, economic and legal research fields. It is argued that political science had acquired its specificity because of a distinctive theoretical approach and the method of investigation used. Political science as a discipline and as a research approach was distinguishable because of the emphasis on the nature of the political phenomena. “What is Politics?” was a core question for any political scientist, and normally the answer to this question led to the identification of conflict and power as the criteria of political behaviour. This theoretical orientation of the origins of political science involved both the formulation of empirically controllable concepts and the “modeling” interpretation of the observed phenomena. The comparative method served the purposes of the verification of the interpretative models. Both these two features of the foundation of political science are nowadays fading. Politics is not associated any more with conflict and power, but is instead reduced to various modalities of coordination of the social action. Theorizing at a general or even at a middle range level has been dismissed and the comparative approach has been today replaced by linear statistical methods of control of shortterm hypotheses. At present, political science risks losing its identity, because it is incapable of identifying “politics”, and because of the lack of theoretical-conceptual attention and the abandonment of the comparative method. Without “politics” and without “method”, political science is no longer distinguishable from public ethics, sociology, economics or the legal studies.