Politics

In the early stages of academic study, students are invariably encouraged to reflect on what the subject itself is about, usually by being asked questions such as ‘What is Physics?’, ‘What is History?’ or ‘What is Economics?’. Such reflections have the virtue of letting students know what they are in for: what they are about to study and what issues and topics are going to be raised. Unfortunately for the student of politics, however, the question ‘What is Politics?’ is more likely to generate confusion than bring comfort or reassurance.The problem with politics is that debate, controversy and disagreement lie at its very heart, and the defini-tion of ‘the political’ is no exception.

The debate about ‘What is Politics?’ exposes some of the deepest and most intractable conflicts in political thought. The attempt to define politics raises a series of difficult questions. For example, is politics a restricted activity, confined to what goes on within government or the state, or does it occur in all areas of social life? Does politics, in other words, take place within families, schools, colleges and in the workplace? Similarly, is politics, as many believe, a corrupting and dishonest activity, or is it, rather, a healthy and ennobling one? Can politics be brought to an end? Should politics be brought to an end? A further range of arguments and debates are associated with the institution of government. Is government necessary or can societies be stable and successful in the absence of government? What form should government take, and how does government relate to broader political processes, usually called the political system? Finally, deep controversy also surrounds the nature and role of the state. For instance, since the terms ‘government’ and ‘state’ are often used interchangeably, can a meaningful distinction be established between them? Is state power benevolent or oppressive: does it operate in the interests of all citizens or is it biased in favour of a narrow elite or ruling class? Moreover, what should the state do? Which responsibilities should we look to the state to fulfil and which ones should be left in the hands of private individuals?

Politics

There are almost as many definitions of politics as there are authorities willing to offer an opinion on the subject. Politics has been portrayed as the exercise of power or authority, as a process of collective decision-making, as the allocation of scarce resources, as an arena of deception or manipulation and so forth. A number of characteristic themes nevertheless crop up in most, if not all, these definitions. In the first place, politics is an activity. Although politics is also an academic subject, sometimes indicated by the use of ‘Politics’ with a capital letter P, it is clearly the study of the activity of ‘politics’. Second, politics is a social activity; it arises out of interaction between or among people, and did not, for example, occur on Robinson Crusoe’s island – though it certainly did once Man Friday appeared. Third, politics develops out of diversity, the existence of a range of opinions, wants, needs or interests. Fourth, this diversity is closely linked to the existence of conflict: politics involves the expression of differing opinions, competition between rival goals or a clash of irreconcilable interests. Where spontaneous agreement or natural harmony occurs, politics cannot be found. Finally, politics is about decisions, collective decisions which are in some way regarded as binding upon a group of people. It is through such decisions that conflict is resolved. However, politics is better thought of as the search for conflict-resolution rather than its achievement, since not all conflicts are, or can be, resolved.

However, this is where agreement ends. There are profound differences about when, how, where, and in relation to whom, this ‘politics’ takes place. For instance, which conflicts can be called ‘political’? What forms of conflict-resolution can be described as ‘political’? And where is this activity of ‘politics’ located? Three clearly distinct conceptions of politics can be identified. In the first place, politics has long been associated with the formal institutions of government and the activities which take place therein. Second, politics is commonly linked to public life and public activities, in contrast to what is thought of as private or personal. Third, politics has been related to the distribution of power, wealth and resources, something that takes place within all institutions and at every level of social existence.

The Art of Government

Bismarck declared that ‘politics is not a science . . . but an art’. The art he had in mind was the art of government, the exercise of control within society through the making and enforcement of collective decisions. This is perhaps the classical definition of politics, having developed from the original meaning of the term in Ancient Greece. The word ‘politics’ is derived from polis, which literally means city-state. Ancient Greek society was divided into a collection of independent city-states, each of which possessed its own system of government. The largest and most influential of these was Athens, often portrayed as the model of classical democracy. All male citizens were entitled to attend the Assembly or Ecclesia, very similar to a town-meeting, which met at least ten times a year, and most other public offices were filled by citizens selected on the basis of lot or rota. Nevertheless, Athenian society was based upon a rigidly hierarchical system which excluded the overwhelming majority – women, slaves and foreign residents – from political life.

In this light, politics can be understood to refer to the affairs of the polis; it literally means ‘what concerns the polis’. The modern equivalent of this definition is ‘what concerns the state’. This is a definition which academic political science has undoubtedly helped to perpetuate through its tradi-tional focus upon the personnel and machinery of government. Further-more, it is how the term ‘politics’ is commonly used in everyday language. For example, a person is said to be ‘in politics’ when they hold a public office, or to be ‘entering politics’ when they seek to do so. Such a definition of ‘the political’ links it very closely to the exercise of authority, the right of a person or institution to make decisions on behalf of the community. This was made clear in the writings of the influential American political scientist, David Easton (1981), who defined politics as the ‘authoritative allocation of values’. Politics has therefore come to be associated with ‘policy’, formal or authoritative decisions that establish a plan of action for the community. Moreover, it takes place within a ‘polity’, a system of social organisation centred upon the machinery of government. It should be noted, however, that this definition is highly restrictive. Politics, in this sense, is confined to governmental institutions: it takes place in cabinet rooms, legislative chambers, government departments and the like, and it is engaged in by limited and specific groups of people, notably politicians, civil servants and lobbyists. Most people, most institutions and most social activities can thus be regarded as ‘outside’ politics.

For some commentators, however, politics refers not simply to the making of authoritative decisions by government but rather to the particular means by which these decisions are made. Politics has often been portrayed as ‘the art of the possible’, as a means of resolving conflict by compromise, conciliation and negotiation. Such a view was advanced by Bernard Crick in In Defence of Politics ([1962] 2000), in which politics is seen as ‘that solution to the problem of order which chooses conciliation rather than violence and coercion’. The conciliation of competing interests or groups requires that power is widely dispersed throughout society and apportioned according to the importance of each to the welfare and survival of the whole community. Politics is, then, no utopian solution, but only the recognition that if human beings cannot solve problems by compromise and debate they will resort to brutality. As the essence of politics is discussion, Crick asserted that the enemy of politics is ‘the desire for certainty at any cost’, whether this comes in the form of a closed ideology, blind faith in democracy, rabid nationalism or the promise of science to disclose objective knowledge.

Once again, such a definition of politics can clearly be found in the common usage of the term. For instance, a ‘political’ solution to a problem implies negotiation and rational debate, in contrast to a ‘military’ solution. In this light, the use of violence, force or intimidation can be seen as ‘non-political’, indeed as the breakdown of the political process itself. At heart, the definition of politics as compromise and conciliation has an essentially liberal character. In the first place, it reflects a deep faith in human reason and in the efficacy of debate and discussion. Second, it is based upon an underlying belief in consensus rather than conflict, evident in the assump-tion that disagreements can be settled without resort to naked power. In effect, there are no irreconcilable conflicts.

The link between politics and the affairs of the state has, however, also generated deeply negative conceptions of what politics is about. For many, politics is quite simply a ‘dirty’ word. It implies deception, dishonesty and even corruption. Such an image of politics stems from the association between politics and the behaviour of politicians, sometimes said to be rooted in the writings of Niccolo`Machiavelli. In The Prince ([1531] 1961), Machiavelli attempted to develop a strictly realistic account of politics in terms of the pursuit and exercise of power, drawing upon his observations of Cesare Borgia. Because he drew attention to the use by political leaders of cunning, cruelty and manipulation, the adjective ‘Machiavellian’ has come to stand for underhand and deceitful behaviour.

Politicians themselves are typically held in low esteem because they are perceived to be power-seeking hypocrites who conceal personal ambition behind the rhetoric of public service and ideological conviction. A conception of politics has thus taken root which associates it with self-seeking, two-faced and unprincipled behaviour, clearly evident in the use of derogatory phrases like ‘office politics’ and ‘politicking’. Such an image of politics also has a liberal character. Liberals have long warned that, since individuals are self-interested, the possession of political power will be corrupting in itself, encouraging those ‘in power’ to exploit their position for personal advantage and at the expense of others. This is clearly reflected in the British historian Lord Acton’s (1834–1902) famous aphorism: ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Public Affairs

In the first conception, politics is seen as a highly restricted activity, confined to the formal exercise of authority within the machinery of government. A second and broader conception of politics moves it beyond the narrow realm of government to what is typically thought of as ‘public life’ or ‘public affairs’. In other words, the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the non-political’ coincides with the division between an essentially public sphere of life and what is thought of as a private sphere. Such a view of politics is rooted in the work of the famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In Politics (1958), Aristotle declared that ‘Man is by nature a political animal’, by which he meant that it is only within a political community that human beings can live ‘the good life’. Politics is therefore the ‘master science’; it is an ethical activity concerned ultimately with creating a ‘just society’. According to this view, politics goes on within ‘public’ bodies such as government itself, political parties, trade unions, community groups and so on, but does not take place within the ‘private’ domain of, say, the home, family life and personal relationships. However, it is sometimes difficult in practice to establish where the line between ‘public’ life and ‘private’ life should be drawn, and to explain why it should be maintained.

The traditional distinction between the public realm and the private realm conforms to the division between the state and society. The characteristics of the state are discussed in more detail in the final section of this chapter, but for the time being the state can be defined as a political association which exercises sovereign power within a defined territorial area. In everyday language, the state is often taken to refer to a cluster of institutions, centring upon the of government but including the courts, the police, the army, nationalized industries, the social security system and so forth. These institutions can be regarded as ‘public’ in the sense that they are responsible for the collective organisation of commu-nity life and are thus funded at the public’s expense, out of taxation. By contrast, society consists of a collection of autonomous groups and associations, embracing family and kinship groups, private businesses, trade unions, clubs, community groups and the like. Such institutions are ‘private’ in the sense that they are set up and funded by individual citizens to satisfy their own interests rather than those of the larger society. On the basis of this ‘public/private’ dichotomy, politics is restricted to the activities of the state itself and the responsibilities which are properly exercised by public bodies. Those areas of life in which individuals can and do manage for themselves – economic, social, domestic, personal, cultural, artistic and so forth – are therefore clearly ‘non-political’.

However, the ‘public/private’ divide is sometimes used to express a further and more subtle distinction, namely, between ‘the political’ and ‘the personal’. Although society can be distinguished from the state, it nevertheless contains a range of institutions that may be thought of as ‘public’ in the wider sense that they are open institutions, operating in public and to which the public has access. This encouraged Hegel, for example, to use the more specific term, ‘civil society’, to refer to an intermediate socio-economic realm, distinct from the state on one hand and the family on the other. By comparison with domestic life, private businesses and trade unions can therefore be seen to have a public character. From this point of view, politics as a public activity stops only when it infringes upon ‘personal’ affairs and institutions. For this reason, while many people are prepared to accept that a form of politics takes place in the workplace, they may be offended and even threatened by the idea that politics intrudes into family, domestic and personal life.

The importance of the distinction between political and private life has been underlined by both conservative and liberal thinkers. Conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott have, for instance, insisted that politics be regarded as a strictly limited activity. Politics may be necessary for the maintenance of public order and so on, but it should be restricted to its proper function: the regulation of public life. In Rationalism in Politics ([1962] 1991), Oakeshott advanced an essentially non-political view of human nature, emphasizing that, far from being Aristotle’s ‘political animals’, most people are security-seeking, cautious and dependent creatures. From this perspective, the inner core of human existence is a ‘private’ world of family, home, domesticity and personal relationships. Oakeshott therefore regarded the rough-and-tumble of political life as inhospitable, even intimidating.

From a liberal viewpoint, the maintenance of the ‘public/private’ distinction is vital to the preservation of individual liberty, typically understood as a form of privacy or non-interference. If politics is regarded as an essentially ‘public’ activity, centred upon the state, it will always have a coercive character: the state has the power to compel the obedience of its citizens. On the other hand, ‘private’ life is a realm of choice, freedom and individual responsibility. Liberals therefore have a clear preference for society rather than the state, for the ‘private’ rather than the ‘public’, and have thus feared the encroachment of politics upon the rights and liberties of the individual. Such a view is commonly expressed in the demand that politics be ‘kept out of’ private activities or institutions, matters that can, and should, be left to individuals themselves. For example, the call that politics be ‘kept out of’ sport implies that sport is an entirely ‘private’ affair over which the state and other ‘public’ bodies exercise no rightful responsibility. Indeed, such arguments invariably portray ‘politics’ in a particularly unfavourable light. In this case, for example, politics repre-sents unwanted and unwarranted interference in an arena supposedly characterized by fair competition, personal development and the pursuit of excellence.

Not all political thinkers, however, have had such a clear preference for society over the state, or wished so dearly to keep politics at bay. There is, for instance, a tradition which portrays politics favourably precisely because it is a ‘public’ activity. Dating back to Aristotle, this tradition has been kept alive in the twentieth century by writers such as Hannah Arendt. In her major philosophical work The Human Condition (1958) Arendt placed ‘action’ above both ‘labour’ and ‘work’ in what she saw as a hierarchy of worldly activities. She argued that politics is the most important form of human activity because it involves interaction among free and equal citizens, and so both gives meaning to life and affirms the uniqueness of each individual. Advocates of participatory democracy have also portrayed politics as a moral, healthy and even noble activity. In the view of the eighteenth-century French thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, political participation was the very stuff of freedom itself. Only through the direct and continuous participation of all citizens in political life can the state be bound to the common good, or what Rousseau called the ‘general will’. John Stuart Mill took up the cause of political participation in the nineteenth century, arguing that involvement in ‘public’ affairs is educational in that it promotes the personal, moral and intellectual development of the individual. Rather than seeing politics as a dishonest and corrupting activity, such a view presents politics as a form of public service, benefiting practitioners and recipients alike.

A further optimistic conception of politics stems from a preference for the state rather than for civil society. Whereas liberals have regarded ‘private’ life as a realm of harmony and freedom, socialists have often seen it as a system of injustice and inequality. Socialists have consequently argued for an extension of the state’s responsibilities in order to rectify the defects of civil society, seeing ‘politics’ as the solution to economic injustice. From a different perspective, Hegel portrayed the state as an ethical idea, morally superior to civil society. In Philosophy of Right ([1821] 1942), the state is regarded with uncritical reverence as a realm of altruism and mutual sympathy, whereas civil society is thought to be dominated by narrow self-interest. The most extreme form of such an argument is found in the fascist doctrine of the ‘totalitarian state’, expressed in Gentile’s formula, ‘Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state’. The fascist ideal of the absorption of the individual into the community, obliterating any trace of individual identity, could be achieved only through the ‘politicization’ of every aspect of social existence, literally the abolition of ‘the private’.

Power and Resources

Each of the earlier two conceptions of politics view it as intrinsically related to a particular set of institutions or social sphere, in the first place the machinery of government and, second, the arena of public life. By contrast, the third and most radical definition of politics regards it as a distinctive form of social activity, but one that pervades every corner of human existence. As Adrian Leftwich insists in What is Politics? (1984): ‘politics is at the heart of all collective social activity, formal and informal, public and private, in all human groups, institutions and societies’. In the view of the German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), politics reflects an immutable reality of human existence: the distinction between friend and enemy. In most accounts, this notion of ‘the political’ is linked to the production, distribution and use of resources in the course of social existence. Politics thus arises out of the existence of scarcity, out of the simple fact that while human needs and desires are infinite, the resources available to satisfy them are always limited. Politics therefore comprises any form of activity through which conflict about resource-allocation takes place. This implies, for instance, that politics is no longer confined, as Crick argued, to rational debate and peaceful conciliation, but can also encompass threats, intimidation and violence. This is summed up in Clausewitz’s famous dictum, ‘War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means’. In essence, politics is power, the ability to achieve a desired outcome, through whatever means. Harold Lasswell neatly summed up this aspect of politics in the title of his book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How? (1936). Such a conception of politics has been advanced by a variety of theorists, amongst the most influential of whom have been Marxists and modern feminists.

The Marxist concept of politics operates on two levels. On the first, Marx (see p. 371) used the term ‘politics’ in a conventional sense to refer to the apparatus of the state. This is what he and Engels meant in The Communist Manifesto ([1848] 1976) when they referred to political power as ‘merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’. In Marx’s view, politics, together with law and culture, was part of a ‘superstructure’, distinct from the economic ‘base’, which was the real foundation of social life. However, he did not see the economic ‘base’ and the political and legal ‘superstructure’ as discrete entities, but believed that the ‘superstructure’ arose out of, and reflected, the economic ‘base’. At a deeper level, in other words, political power is rooted in the class system; as Lenin (see p. 83) put it, ‘politics is the most concentrated expression of economics’. Far from believing that politics can be confined to the state and a narrow public sphere, Marxists may be said to hold that ‘the economic is political’. Indeed, civil society, based as it is on a system of class antagonism, is the very heart of politics. However, Marx did not think that politics was an inevitable feature of social existence and he looked towards what he clearly hoped would be an end of politics. This would occur, he anticipated, once a classless, communist society came into existence, leaving no scope for class conflict, and therefore no scope for politics.

Particularly intense interest in the nature of politics has been expressed by modern feminist thinkers. Whereas nineteenth-century feminists ac-cepted an essentially liberal conception of politics as ‘public’ affairs, and focused especially upon the campaign for female suffrage, radical feminists have been concerned to extend the boundaries of ‘the political’. They argue that conventional definitions of politics, in effect, exclude women. Women have traditionally been confined to a ‘private’ existence, centred upon the family and domestic responsibilities; men, by contrast, have always dominated conventional politics and other areas of ‘public’ life. Radical feminists have therefore attacked the ‘public/private’ dichotomy, proclaim-ing instead the slogan ‘the personal is the political’. Although this slogan has provoked considerable controversy and a variety of interpretations, it undoubtedly encapsulates the belief that what goes on in domestic, family and personal life is intensely political. Behind this, however, stands a more radical notion of politics, defined by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics ([1970] 1990) as ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another’. Politics therefore takes place when-ever and wherever power and other resources are unequally distributed. From this viewpoint, it is possible to talk about ‘the politics of everyday life’, suggesting that relationships within the family, between husbands and wives or between parents and children, are every bit as political as relationships between employers and workers, or between government and its citizens. Such a broadening of the realm of politics has, on the other hand, deeply alarmed liberal theorists, who fear that it will encourage public authority to encroach upon the privacy and liberties of the individual.

However, if politics is conceived as the allocation of scarce resources, it takes place not so much within a particular set of institutions as on a number of levels. The lowest level of political activity is personal, family and domestic life, where it is conducted through regular or continuous face-to-face interaction. Politics, for example, occurs when two friends decide to go out for the evening but cannot agree about where they should go, or what they should do. The second level of politics is the community level, typically addressing local issues or disputes but moving away from the face-to-face interaction of personal politics to some form of representation. This will certainly include the activities of community, local or regional government, which in countries as large as the USA may well encompass two or more distinct levels of government. It also, however, includes the workplace, public institutions and business corporations, within which only a limited range of decisions are made by direct face-to-face discussions. The third level of politics is the national level, focusing upon the institutions of the nation-state and the activities of major political parties and pressure groups. This is the level to which conventional notions of politics are largely confined. Finally, there is the international or supranational level of politics. This is concerned, quite obviously, with cultural, economic and diplomatic relationships between and amongst nation-states, but also includes the activities of supranational bodies, such as the United Nations and the European Union, multinational companies, NGOs and even international terrorists. Politics, in this view, is everywhere; indeed, given the widespread potential for power-related conflict, politics may come to be seen as coextensive with social existence itself.