Journal of Political Sciences & Public Affairs
Open Access

Department of Politics, Sheffield University, South Yorkshire, England

Publications

• Review Article   
  Critical Comparison of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Positivism and Interpretivism as Two Approaches to the Study of Politics
  Author(s): Balamurugan Kaliyamurthi*
  
  Understanding politics gives people a choice between “Bullet or Ballot”. No doubt, Aristotle called politics as the ‘Master Science’. This paper will put positivism and interpretivism approaches side by side and analyse on their merits and constraints for utilising them as a study of politics. To address this, one needs to be clear on the fundamental question of why the study of politics requires different approaches. Ted Benton explains the requirement of a philosophical toolkit to study politics. Society is dynamic due to interaction between individuals, and it is subjected to change which Wright mills calls as social imagination. Fixing on what kind of truth a researcher is searching (for example male/female sex which is a universal truth or gender, a socially constructed truth) and accordingly finding that truth through various ways of knowledge acquisition.. View More»
  

  Abstract PDF