Politics

Used the same freedom of enquiry as the ancients, and are all the more readable and relThe earliest writers on politics, and I'm thinking of Plato and Aristotle here, felt free to draw insights from all areas of human knowledge, unlike modern academic writers who tend to put things into smaller and smaller compartments or focus more closely on one area of inquiry. For example, Plato would examine a whole political system and the philosophy that underlies it, whereas modern writers on politics might concentrate on one particular institution in that system, the House of Lords in England or on voting patterns within a country. With this focus, the bigger questions that the ancients dealt with, what is the best form of government or what is justice, tend to get left behind. Many writers on politics these days are university-based and so have to have specialised interests, and while they may make new and interesting discoveries in their special field, it is at the loss of a broader perspective, not to mention the loss of a general audience or readership. In the nineteenth century there were still writers who evant because of it.