Conceptualizing Politics

An Introduction to Political Philosophy

Furio Cerutti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317037507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politics is hugely complex. Some try to reduce its complexity by examining it through an ideological worldview, a one-size-fits-all prescriptive formula or a quantitative examination of as many 'facts' as possible. Yet politics cannot be adequately handled as if it were made of cells and particles: ideological views are oversimplifying and sometimes dangerous. Politics is not simply a moral matter, nor political philosophy a subdivision of moral philosophy. This book is devised as a basic conceptual lexicon for all those who want to understand what politics is, how it works and how it changes or fails to change. Key concepts such as power, conflict, legitimacy and order are clearly defined and their interplay in the state, interstate and global level explored. Principles such as liberty, equality, justice and solidarity are discussed in the context of the political choices confronting us.

This compact and systematic introduction to the categories needed to grasp the fundamentals of politics will appeal to readers who want to gain a firmer grasp on the workings of politics, as well as to scholars and students of philosophy, political science and history.

Part I

What is politics?

1

Politics and power

What is politics?

This book begins questioning the very notion it is dedicated to, because with a philosophical approach, notions are not left in the unclear state in which they are used in common parlance. This shall be our method all throughout the book. But in the case of politics, a preliminary clarification is required even more so, given the array of meanings and nuances this word comes surrounded with. In the last decades the century-old endeavour to define politics according to a core goal such as the pursuit of the common good or the reconciliation of interests has mostly been abandoned, as scholars of politics have got to acknowledge that – given the irreducible plurality of conflicting aims that political actors pursue – no common language about politics could materialise, no convergence on questions such as: who is entitled to define what the common good is? is reconciliation of interests truly possible and, what is more, is it to everyone’s advantage instead of one party’s?

Rather than insisting on a teleological approach,¹ scholars of politics have increasingly seen it as characterised by the items this human activity makes use of (power, influence, force) or results in (making collective decisions). This turn away from goal-setting has thus been looking for an encompassing formula capable of describing what kind of actions and phenomena take place under the heading ‘politics’, whatever aims, ideals or projects actors may strive for. Real individual and collective actors remain obviously highly teleological: they all pursue their own particular goals and uphold their particular (even if they are universalistic in content)² values, thereby colliding or striving to form coalitions. Time and again they come to some (never perpetual) agreement as to the framework of rules under which to realise one’s own interests and life plans in an ordered and peaceful way. This is what the polity or лоλις/polis is about, as we shall see in the following chapters.

Against this background political philosophy is an attempt to understand the structures that originate from the games actors play with and against each other, the rules they set up willingly or unwillingly, and the principles under which they try to justify and coordinate their actions. Only on the basis of this complex understanding does it make sense for political philosophy to evaluate general goals such as justice, or the models of society such as democracy that actors mean to pursue in their political life. Without this frame of reference, mere normative indications as to how best shape the polity must remain futile. The political philosophy the reader will become acquainted with in these pages is rather different from what is meant by this expression in today’s mainstream literature.

1. A first definition of politics

On these premises I am now introducing the first, classical definition of politics: it is the social activity in which scarce and unequally distributed resources are allocated among conflicting parties by an authority whose legitimate power is guaranteed by force.

No doubt this is a highly conceptual and squared-off description of a multifaceted phenomenon. It follows the pattern used over sixty years ago by David Easton (1953). It is not the only image of politics to be found in this volume: recent developments, which shall not be anticipated here, have created the necessity to add a second definition, to be formulated in Chapter 7, Part II. Now, the best way to make good use of it is in the disassembling of its singular components, which we will comment upon separately: 1. activity, 2. resources, 3. conflict, 4. power and force, 5. legitimacy/authority. Components 1–4 are explained in this chapter, while the fifth one requires a separate and much larger discussion, which will be undertaken in Chapter 2.

***

1. Politics is one of the activities human beings perform socially, possessing features that make it a very special social activity – working them out and preventing politics from being merged with society and social activity at large will be a principal care of this book. Politics remains in some respect what used to be in old times dubbed ‘the art of government’, that is, an eminent practical issue, and all attempts made in the time of positivism at establishing a ‘scientific politics’ could not but fail. To put it with the ancients, it is not theoretical knowledge (σоφία/sophia), but prudence (φρόνησις/phronesis) that leads us to good choices in politics. Sophia, in the meaning of clear, non-illusionary concepts and a habit of rational argumentation, can however be a great help in making the right choices in awareness of the consequences. This is why the insufficient ability or willingness of sectors of today’s politics to take good note of what science has to say about the world that we have to govern, be it economic insights or warnings concerning new technologies. The ‘art of government’ must fail if it does not respect scientific knowledge, as we shall see in the chapter on global/lethal challenges.
2. The resources involved in political struggle can be material (territory, energy sources, precious metals, financial capital) or positional/relational; in this case they only exist in the actors’ relationships and beliefs, as it was once the case with glory and honour and is nowadays with prestige, status and credibility.³To be politically relevant, resources must be scarce⁴ or unequally distributed or both (relative scarcity is the most frequent case), thus generating conflicts among particular actors, each striving to redress the inequalities in her/his/its favour,⁵ or in the best case in favour of the majority. Were actors altruistic and not interested in a different distribution of resources, there would be no politics. ‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary’, as James Madison (1751–1836) put it in The Federalist No. 51 (Hamilton et al. 1788, 266).
3. Scarce and unequally distributed resources lead to conflict, but the typology of conflict goes beyond those around resources. First and foremost we have to elucidate what we mean by conflict. Unlike in International Relations⁶ or the media’s language, in political philosophy as well as in theoretical sociology conflict does not mean armed conflict or war, and is rather seen as a general structure of social and political interaction. This meaning goes as far back as Heraclitus of Ephesus (BCE 535–475), who in his Fragment 53 wrote that ‘πόλεμος/polemos (strife, conflict, war) is both father of all and king of all’. For a conceptual definition of conflict we turn to Max Weber’s (1864–1920) formula for struggle, but also modify it slightly: it is the social relationship in which an actor strives to affirm her/his/its own preferences against other actors’ resistance.⁷

Let us remark that here as everywhere in philosophical definitions we abstain from overburdening the definition with any anthropological reference to the actor’s ‘will’ (as Weber still did) or ‘interest’ that may lie behind her/his/its preferences; that the actor has preferences of whatever origin is all we need to know in order to examine their affirmation being rejected or resisted by other actors. To be minimalistic is a good premise for essential and elegant definitions.

The definition we have just given comprises all possible sorts of conflict, as defined by the use of violent or non-violent means (bargaining, arguments, persuasion, blackmail) or by the type of settlement (military victory, electoral success, favourable legal sentence, arbitration, agreement without manifest losers as in win-win games). More substantial is, however, the typology of conflict according to its field or source: conflict of interest, identity conflict, ideological conflict.⁸

Conflict of interest revolves around the acquisition of a larger slice of material or positional resources by actors that remain separated even if they may, in certain cases, coalesce. Self-interest remains their leading or exclusive driving force; among the participants in a coalition, no sense of a shared identity arises. As long as one has a clear mind about the interest s/he or it pursues, the prevailing course of action is led by either strategic or instrumental rationality: this means searching for the most efficient ways to achieve the outcome envisioned, in other words, for the best means in order to get to the goal indicated by self-interest. These means can include manipulating or coercing men and women, treating them in a strategic attitude; here ‘strategic’ (closely connected to ‘instrumental’) has nothing to do with the military and means employing whatever or whoever you may deem useful as a means for achieving a goal that is not itself an object of deliberation.

It is a still widespread reductionism of alleged Marxist origin to see the conflict of interest as the paramount or exclusive type of conflict, as if the others were its mere derivatives. They are not, and to think so precludes an articulate understanding of political behaviour. ‘Identity conflict’ has a very different nature, which is better understandable if we talk more properly of a conflict for the recognition of one’s own political identity. What political identity is will be explained in a later chapter; it is sufficient for now to think of it as the sense of belonging that keeps the members of a political group together.

Political identity can refer to a new or renewed (the former fascist countries, but also France after 1945) nation, a party, a social movement (industrial workers in the nineteenth century) or a cultural and political movement (feminism in the second half of the twentieth century). The recognition they look for is two-sided: it comes from the prospective members of the new actor, whom the initiators try to involve and convince, and from external players (the former imperial or colonial power, the existing members of the political system, international institutions). The new identity is not pre-existent to the struggle for recognition, and ripens only in the course of it – often in the fractured shape of opposing factions, as happened with national liberation movements. To make this visible, one only needs to replay the evolution of his country’s or her party’s identity. Identity formation and struggle for recognition are self-standing processes of cultural and political nature, deeply rooted in human anthropology, and in as much they accompany political life everywhere. By no means can they be reduced to their pathological developments such as nationalism or religious fanaticism and easily dismissed, as they represent a major moment in what in the second chapter of this Part I shall call ‘the subjective side of politics’.

There are obviously intersections between identity formation processes on the one hand and coalitions based on rationalised self-interest on the other. A new group striving to assert its identity may sometimes coincide with a coalition of people interested in gaining more wealth against formerly privileged groups. But the overlapping is never so broad and frequent as to allow for the assumption of a systematic coincidence; what is more, the drivers in identity struggles are essentially different from the materialistic and calculating mentality that dominates conflict of interest.

Ideological conflict comes closer to identity conflict, but should not be mistaken for it. At stake here is not the consolidation of a new collective actor and its recognition by other players, but rather its self-identification by a unifying and defining conception of humankind’s or a nation’s destiny – what in German is called Weltanschauung or conception of the world. Weltanschauungen are mostly exclusive and universalistic ideologies; they include all the possible faithful and deny the rights of all others. Soviet Communism in the Cold War was the paramount example,⁹ though some versions of Western ideology did not display a higher degree of inclusiveness. Throughout history monotheistic religions have time and again played the role of expansive and truth-touting ideologies; the recent emergence of fundamentalist and murderous positions in the Islamic world is witness to the fact that ideological conflict has not ended with the Cold War.

The three types of conflict are, in Max Weber’s words, ‘ideal types’, in the sense that they design conceptual models that only rarely come up in reality in their pure form and unmixed with each other. Concrete conflicts are often a mix of two or more types, in which, however, one type is prevailing and defining. This can be said of the archetypical conflict that opposes men to women, though often we should speak of sheer oppression and exploitation rather than conflict, because the element of resistance is weak or absent. Beyond all anthropological, socio-economic and religious aspects, this conflict also heeds direct political moments, as in the long-lasting exclusion of women from electoral franchise (even in Switzerland until 1971) and in the war against women (exclusion from education in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan until 2001 and in Taliban-infiltrated areas of Pakistan, later kidnapping, raping, enslavement of women and young girls in Africa and the Middle East after 2011) waged by Islamist¹⁰ terror groups since the end of the twentieth century. In light of these events, the ideological conflict pursued by an extreme version of Islam with its moderate versions and with liberal cultures comes together with the defence of the economic, social and political privileges men enjoy in societies in which the patriarchal power structures have so far survived all attempts at cultural modernisation. The cruel and despising attitude towards women (as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or LGBT people) displayed in this war binds together a political defence of privileges within the family and the community with pre-political, allegedly religious sense of superiority deeply rooted in a fragile and aggressive male identity, bred on violence. In this fusion the presence of both the ideological and the identity moment nourishes fanaticism, an attitude completely opposed to a reasonable way to manage politics and nonetheless so coessential to all conflicts in which gender, race, ethnic and religious aspects have played a role – from the persecution of heretics in the European Middle Ages through the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century to jihadism.

This differentiated account of conflict has a twofold sense. The practical sense is that whatever regime actors may choose for their polity, they must know how to come to terms with conflict in its three-tiered configuration and renounce any attempt at reducing the three types to just one, for example falling into the self-delusion that a settling of interest-based conflicts can also dissolve an identity conflict. Theoretically, the core question ask...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I What is politics?
• Part II How politics works
• Part III World politics and the future of politics
• Part IV Ethics and politics
• Epilogue: what drives people to politics
• Index