Against the Authority of Books:Hobbes and the Invention of Political Science

In an age when political thinkers were writing books full of quotations of ancient and modern authors,Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury(1588-1679)developed a philosophical system which was based on scientific method rather than on the authority of books.He emphasized that the absurdities that philosophers fall into are actually due precisely to a lack of method and to the habit of quoting other thinkers as if the truth was to be found in their words.It is certainly not inappropriate to read what philosophers,historians,and poets wrote,whether for pure amusement or to find intellectual spurs useful for one’s own research and speculation;but the written word should not be confused with the truth.In the investigation aimed at discovering the truth in political matters,the philosopher must use his own intellect,relying on the strength of reasoning.Thus,political philosophy becomes a science:the science of“consequences from the accidents of politic bodies”.With his reflections on scientia civilis,Thomas Hobbes may be considered the inventor of political science.

Key Factors Affecting the Learning Effect of Ideological and Political Students in Colleges and Universities

In the process of ideological and political education,improving the timeliness of ideological and political education is a hot issue in theoretical research,and it has long been concerned by academic circles.This paper analyzes and discusses the factors that affect the study effect of ideological and political students in colleges and universities,which is of great theoretical and practical significance to improve the effectiveness of ideological and political education.At present,under the influence of the social environment,bad peer groups,network environment and insufficient practical and participatory teaching,ideological and political education in colleges and universities still have some problems such as weak effectiveness.In addition to the limitation of college students'social experience and the incongruity of physical and mental development,it is easy to produce negative attitudes towards ideological and political education in the age group which is prone to adverse psychology.These factors have greatly affected the effect of ideological and political education in colleges and universities.

An Analysis of the Current State of Civil Society Participation in Ensuring the National Security of Mongolia

In this article, the researchers tried to evaluate the contribution of civil society to Mongolian democracy and the problems faced by civil society. In addition, the article aimed to determine the unique national criteria of Mongolian democracy and the need to create an organization to monitor the process of democracy. The process of identifying important documents and ideals for the development of Mongolian civil society today is still in its early stages. It can be said that the approval of the democratic constitution and the first free and fair parliamentary elections as a country that has newly and restored democracy became another impetus for the creation of a new type of citizen organization. It is characterized by trying to study the changes that have occurred since this historical period at the intersection of political science and security studies. One of the most important issues today is to find out how many non-governmental and civil society organizations exist in Mongolia today, which are Western-oriented, focused on specific issues, have their own position and opinion, are specialized, and are capable of influencing government policy. On the other hand, in this article, we emphasize whether non-governmental and civil society organizations, which aim to hold the government accountable, and carry out influence and control activities, are fully developed.

Cross-Context News Corpus for Protest Event-Related Knowledge Base Construction

We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise various local and international English language sources from various countries.The corpus contains document-,sentence-,and token-level annotations.This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event-related information,constructing knowledge bases that enable comparative social and political science studies.For each news source,the annotation starts with random samples of news articles and continues with samples drawn using active learning.Each batch of samples is annotated by two social and political scientists,adjudicated by an annotation supervisor,and improved by identifying annotation errors semi-automatically.We found that the corpus possesses the variety and quality that are necessary to develop and benchmark text classification and event extraction systems in a cross-context setting,contributing to the generalizability and robustness of automated text processing systems.This corpus and the reported results will establish a common foundation in automated protest event collection studies,which is currently lacking in the literature.