The oldest form of government was tribal organization. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments. Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics.

The word 'Politics' is derived from the Greek word for city-state, ' Polis'. All of which require densely populated settlements - cities. 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. Childe describes the transformation of human society that took place around 6000 BCE as an urban revolution. While it appears that social cooperation and dominance hierarchies predate human societies, Hobbes’s model illustrates a rationale for the creation of societies ( polities). Further, he noted that men would enter into a social contract and would give up absolute rights for certain protections. Noting that such an arrangement created a “war of all against all” ( bellum omnium contra omnes). 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. 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 human associations. One theorist, Harold Lasswell, has defined politics as 'who gets what, when, and how.'Īnother definition of 'politics' is: 'how power is distributed within a group or system'. the ability to impose one's will on another. Template:Elections Political science is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power, i.e. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. The method of making decisions for groups varies, but the act of decision making is the key component that characterises politics. Politics is the process by which decisions are made for a given society. Kernigh 18:21, 1 January 2006 (UTC) You can help make it better. I will divert the links from Introduction to Sociology to link to Wikipedia instead. Fork of Wikipedia:Politics and Wikipedia:Government with no credit to Wikipedia, and no work to fix this to work as a textbook module.

Politics definition sociology