The Semantics of Political Science

Charner Perry

American Political Science Review, 1950, vol. 44, issue 2, 394-406

Abstract: That an animal, presumably a cousin of the simians and certainly very similar to them, has developed societies in which millions and even hundreds of millions of individuals live and act together in orderly relation to each other is one of the astounding facts of history; and an impartial observer would hardly be surprised if the incredibly intricate network of cooperation, overstrained, should suddenly tear apart. The aggregation of men into huge organized groups is, of course, relatively recent. For a million years or longer men or near-men lived an animal-like existence, scattered in small groups. It was not until fifteen or twenty thousand years ago that men, perhaps as a consequence of unprecedented pressure from the environment, organized groups of any considerable size; it is only within the last three or four thousand years that large-scale societies have existed; and it is only in the last three or four hundred years that complex orderly interplay and interaction among individuals and subgroups in societies have been developed.

Date: 1950
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:44:y:1950:i:02:p:394-406_05

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().