Political Survival, Catholic Theology, and Marxist Frameworks

Friday, August 7th, 2009

In discussing Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s fascinating thoughts on political survival, Anomaly UK makes this aside:

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed.

In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

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