Political Philosophy and Political Science: The Scope from the South

Abstract

The author presents an element which she values as fundamental in her understanding of the role to be played by a political science with a scope from the South; that of the relationship that exists between a certain type of political philosophy and a new science of political behavior. The excluding role of Western political science towards the vast majority of world population and its confinement to the model offered by the countries that were the center of the industrial revolution conducts this science to its progressive exhaustion. New political science will be identified by inclusion and by the elimination of the reproduction of elite domination at the national and world levels. Given its status of alternative science in construction, metapolitology occupies a relevant place as a mediator for political philosophy that will assess the introduction of terms that become concepts and historical peculiarities that transform into identities resulting from plural changes that take place in real movement.

Keywords:

• political science
• metapolitology
• scope from the South
• neo-colonized countries
• emerging nature

Notes on Contributor

Thalia Fung is Emeritus Professor of the University of Havana, President of the Cuban Society of Philosophical Research, Member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Societies of Philosophy (FISP), author of Regularities and Particularities of the Socialist Revolution in Cuba (Havana, 1982, 1985, Buenos Aires and Moscow, 1987); Political Reflections and Meta-Reflections (Havana, 1998); Joao Pessoa (Brazil, 2009); The Political Science in the Transition to the XXI Century (Havana, 2000); Pistas (Projection) Political Philosophy and Political Science (Havana-Cali, 2006), and she has been scientific editor of more than 25 collective books about philosophy and political science from the South.

Notes

¹On this matter Yang Geng (2010, 499) says, “. . . the exposition of Husserl on the life-world makes me involuntarily think of the live-world theory of Marx.” He also refers to the construction of Phenomenological Marxism to Marcuse as the Marxist Husserl in the opinion of Habermas.

²See Giovanni Sartori (2004), who has qualified dominant political science as a useless science.

³On this matter see González Santamaría (2013).

⁴When he heard about Lenin's thesis, he said: “Lenin thesis stirred in me great emotion, . . . this is the path toward liberation” (Ho 2007, 17–18).

⁵Metapolitology could be considered as the theory and the history of political science. It has established a presence in state of the art political science together with other metas that serve as channels of communication for the terms of individual sciences and as mediation between them and philosophy (Fung 2006).

⁶Annual Conference held in Mali Losinj, in parallel with a Meeting of the Steering Committee of the World Federation of Philosophy in South Korea in 2008 and a new version in the Panel on Bioethics chaired by Dr. David Schrader during the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy held in Athens, August 3–10, 2013.