Handbook of Political Science or How I Got Over Political Science

I read this 800 page work edited by Goodin and Klingemann in three weeks, along with three other books. This is ironic since I never managed to get past chapter 1 during my five and a half years as a political science major.

I came away with the impression that political science is a vast and growing field, but I am not sure at all whether what political scientists do ever matters to the real world. I still think that politics is too important to be left to the politicians, and is, therefore, a subject worthy of close study. However, I now realize that the greatest contribution I can make is not as a scholar crunching numbers and building formal models that no one understands, but as a public intellectual, up to date with the debates in the academe and engaged with the task of translating and articulating them in a language that can be understood by policymakers and the public. Or, in keeping with the ideas of Aristotle, I can lead the polity myself, hoping that my background in political analysis can be of some help.

Finishing this book allows me to put some closure to political science as a phase of my reading life. Henceforth, I will read political science books not with a lingering sense of a project that was left incomplete, but out of a genuine desire to understand a 21st century global society in constant, rapid change.