How to study politics?

Here I want to suggest you an exercise. You can (and I think you should) organise yourself a month-long course in political theory. How? By reading Ronald Syme The Roman Revolution.It is a very, very intense and unsentimental book covering the political transition of Rome, from Republic to Empire, and centred around the personal career of Octavian Augustus, a small-town bourgeois from the province to become the First Emperor.It is very rarely that I see a book so informative, and more importantly so realistic when it comes to the representation of political mechanics. Of how the things actually work in this world, based on the empirical evidence we have.You see, when people say ‘political theory’, what they usually mean is some kind of intellectual history (“what intellectuals have been writing on this or that”). Cool enough, but that is not what we are talking about.And when they say ‘political science’, they are usually referring to a modern pseudo-science, a poor & thoughtless…