The Tower of Babel of Political Theory and the Difficulties of its Teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to justify the teaching and learning of Politics in a civilian perspective of the Political Science studies in the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. It starts from a biblical myth to recognize the difficulty of any academy to establish a perfect educational curriculum because of the existence of multiple languages, methods, lexicons, and objectives of what Political Science means. It focuses its attention on the dichotomy, the identity and difference, in order to understand the stressful story of the existing political relation approaches. The previous context provides the perspective of three of the cultural determinations that cuts through the teaching of politics, namely: the cultural perspective, the historicist perspective and the legalistic perspective typical to Western life. The paper comes to the idea that if the intellectual effort is directed this way, it might lead to an academic and social domain in which the political culture can help in understanding, giving sense, and offering civic alternatives to face the conflicts of Colombian reality.