Monday, May 26, 2008

Science or just value?

Recently I become interested in political science. I bought a text book named Political science an introduction. And it is quite fun to learn something new.

I still remember what I was taught in middle school about political science. I realized the stuff my middle school teacher (Crazy Zhao) taught was rather "popular"(I don't think it is popular in other countries) political value than political science. Value and science are two different things. Value usually tells you what is "right" while science tells you how things are constructed. We were told in the class that capitalism would definitely be destroyed in the near future. The problem is can the concept "capitalism" be 100% applied to reality? The teacher had never thought about that.

Just like other theories, Marx's theories are also belong to political science. All theory are based on their fundamental concepts and assumptions. The fact is when we use a theory, we have already assumed its assumptions are correct. For example, when we applied ohm's law to a material, we already assumed the material have a linear characteristic. But it is not always true. Ohm's law can not be applied to non-linear materials such as semiconductor. Theories have their own limitations. Marx's theories are not exceptions.

If Marx’s theories were taught in a scientific way, the teacher should also tell the students the limitations. Unfortunately, in my middle school the teacher didn't follow that way. Marx’s theories were taught as correct fundamental theories in political sciences. That made political science lessons boring and resulted a lot of student in my class disliked studying political science which was supposed to be an interesting subject.

2 comments:

Brad Blackstone said...

This is informative and insightful. I'd like to know how you feel about the transition that has taken place in China (and in places like Vietnam as well), from a "Marxist" economy to one that's more market driven.

Guo Cheng said...

Because they started to think how to make the economic grow pratically. One of my professor said Deng Xiao Ping is a good engineer.