How Yuval Noah Harari might approach Political Science

Political science. The very phrase suggests a discipline dedicated to understanding the mechanisms of power, the art of governance, the organization of human collectives. But what, truly, are these mechanisms? What is this ‘power’ we so diligently study?

Look back not a few centuries, but tens of thousands of years. Before the empires, before the republics, before the very idea of a ‘state,’ humans lived in small bands. Cooperation, yes, but it was built on kinship, on immediate personal bonds, on shared fear and shared desire. Then came the cognitive revolution, and with it, the ability to imagine things that did not exist. This was the true genesis of our political orders.

What is a king? A tribe? A constitution? They are not tangible objects like a stone or a tree. They are, fundamentally, inter-subjective realities. They exist only in the minds of millions of people who agree, more or less, to believe in them. A nation-state, this dominant political fiction of our age, is a story we tell ourselves about who we are, who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them,’ and how we ought to organize ourselves. This story, like money or religion, has become immensely powerful, shaping our allegiances, our conflicts, and our very identities.

Political science, then, is largely the study of how these collective fictions are constructed, maintained, and sometimes, violently dismantled. It is about understanding the narratives that allow millions of strangers to cooperate for common goals, and the fragility of those narratives when challenged by new stories, by biological realities, or by the simple, inconvenient truth that none of these grand structures have any inherent meaning beyond what we choose to ascribe to them. The real project is not just mapping the existing political…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Yuval Noah Harari’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.