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The development of the social sciences, as of the physical and biological sciences, may be described as a drive toward objectivity. Men's earliest ideas about the environment in which they lived were undoubtedly a mixture of magic and crude, uncritical common sense. Only in a comparatively late stage of development of the human race did they begin to think about the things around them, either physical or social, in the spirit of reflective and critical inquiry into their nature and working, relatively free from religious or magical presuppositions. "Objectivity" may be interpreted, in fact, as the attitude of mind that develops when people first become able to regard features of their environment as "objects," or "things," behaving according to the laws of their nature and in response to the impact of external forces, rather than as animate beings behaving in an unpredictable fashion but subject to human control or manipulation through religious rites or magical procedures. This objectivity was achieved earlier, on the whole, in the realm of physical science than in that of social science. It is obviously easier to maintain an attitude of detachment toward physical objects than toward human beings.

Just as physical science is older than social science, and for somewhat the same reasons, politics is, in some respects, the oldest of the social sciences. One of the earliest achievements of mankind in the realm of social thought was the discovery of the state as an object which could be observed and studied with some detachment. So far as we know from the literature that has survived to our times, this was first accomplished by Greek thinkers fairly late in the classical, or "Hellenic," period and specifically, first of all, by Plato. There is reason to think that the appearance of definitely reflective political theory in Greece at about this time is no mere accident of history but was a natural outcome of the circumstances of the period. It is a significant fact that Plato made quite definite and considerable use of the method of comparison in his political dialogues, including the earliest of them, the Republic. The possibility of comparison is more or less prerequisite to the detached observation and study of anything. It is difficult, in the beginning, to achieve an attitude of intellectual detachment toward anything that one believes to be unique and incomparable. Up to about the time of Plato, the state, in so far as it was an object of reflective thought at all, was conceived as a sacred object, something to be dealt with by the thinker in the spirit of religion and morality rather than in the spirit of science. In the Republic of Plato, however, and still more plainly in the Politics of Aristotle, we find the state beginning to be regarded as a secular object, something that can be studied comparatively and can therefore be subjected to a kind of critical examination which it is not possible to apply to sacred things. The fact that Plato and Aristotle did use this comparative method evidently reflects the state of affairs existing in the Mediterranean world in their time. Classical Greece seems to have been the first situation in all human history in which a number of independent political societies existed in close juxtaposition to one another and in relatively free communication with one another. A Greek gentleman of Plato's time, of an inquiring mind, might inform himself rather accurately, by travel and from the reports of other travelers, concerning the form of government that existed in all of the Greek city-states at the time or had existed within, say, a century previous to his own time. Thus Plato had at his disposal what no student of politics and government who lived much earlier or outside the Mediterranean world could very well have had, viz., a body of data to which the comparative method could be applied. Neither the Republic nor either of Plato's later political dialogues, the Statesman and the Laws, can be classified as political science in the strictest sense of the term, nor for that matter can we classify the Politics of Aristotle as a scientific treatise, without reservations, but at any rate we may speak of these writings as works of political theory, as distinguished from codes of law or morals and from religious and moral exhortations relating to law and the state. It seems to be no serious exaggeration or distortion of the facts to say that the history of political theory begins with Plato.

What kind of social theory is it that we find in the works of Plato, particularly in the Republic, which is by common consent regarded as the most important of his political dialogues? In the first place, it is primarily and chiefly concerned with politics and government; only by straining a point can we classify the Republic as a contribution to economics or to any other variety of social theory than the political. It deals with the state and with forms of government, or constitutions, with the individual as citizen, and with other aspects of social organization only quite incidentally. In other words, for Plato and, as we shall see, for Aristotle social theory is political theory; and the need for any other kind of social theory is scarcely felt at all. The reasons for this are evident: in the period that ended in the time of Plato and Aristotle, community and state were practically one and the same thing throughout all Hellas, and any other forms of human association that might exist within the city-state were easily and naturally regarded as mere parts of the structure of the state. This view reflects the fact that the state was still, even to these great thinkers, something of a sacred object; that a distinction might be made between the religious organization and the political or governmental organization of the community had scarcely occurred to anyone. Economics was an art rather than a science--the art of managing an estate or carrying on commerce--and occupational groups, if any, were purely incidental features of the communal life. . .

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