POLITICS AS THE ART OF GOVERNMENT
The word ‘politics’ is derived from polis, meaning literally ‘city-state’. Ancient Greek society was
divided into a collection of independent city states, each of which possessed its own system of
government. In this light, politics can be understood to refer to the affairs of the polis. The modern
form of this definition is therefore ‘what concerns the state’. In many ways, the notion that politics
amounts to ‘what concerns the state’ is the traditional view of the discipline, reflected in the
tendency for academic study to focus on the personnel and machinery of government.