Politics

Politics is the process by which individuals or relatively small groups attempt to exert influence over the actions of an organization. more...

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Although the term is most commonly applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in many human (and many non-human) group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.

Political science (also political studies) is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power.

A natural state

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his most famous work, Leviathan, in which he proposed a model of early human development to justify the creation of a government. Hobbes described an ideal state of nature wherein every person had equal right to every resource in nature and was free to use any means to acquire those resources. He claimed that such an arrangement created a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). Further, he noted that men would enter into a social contract and would give up absolute rights for certain protections. Hobbes made a second claim: that the solution to the aggression problem was a centralized authoritarian state, which he called Leviathan.

While it appears that social cooperation and dominance hierarchies predate human societies, Hobbes' model illustrates a rationale for the creation of societies (polities).

Another theory, proposed by biopolitics and based upon evolution is that politics is a macrotool created by man to organise itself for the collective survival of the group or polity. In effect, organising and promoting survival is the purpose, reason and practice of politics.

Early history

V.G. Childe describes the transformation of human society that took place around 6000 BCE as an urban revolution. Among the features of this new type of civilization were the institutionalization of social stratification, non-agricultural specialised crafts (including priests and lawyers), taxation, and writing, all of which require clusters of densely populated settlements - city-states.

The word politics is derived from the Greeks. Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments.

The oldest form of government was tribal organization. Rule by elders was supplanted by monarchy, often aided by military conquest, led to a system of Feudalism as an arrangement where a single family dominated the political affairs of a community. Monarchies have existed in one form or another for the past 5000 years of human history.

Read more at Wikipedia.org