1.1 Modern Politics and the Field of Political Sociology
Political sociology is a relatively young discipline that, in recent decades, has gained increasing centrality through the identification of new research fields and the renewal of classic topics. Before considering this, we need to spend a few words on defining politics. Seemingly easy to define, it is a term that, in order to acquire scientific relevance, needs a serious conceptualisation.
The term “politics” derives from the Greek πολιτικος (politikos) which was meant to define everything related to the polis (the city). In general terms, it can be related to everything configured as civil, social, collective, public, as opposed to the individual and private dimension of life. The term “politics” has been handed down over the centuries thanks to the influence of the monumental works of Aristotle (383–322 BC). He attempted to define the best constitution of the state, not so much through mere speculation, as Plato had done before him, but rather through a careful study of human nature. For Aristotle, the human being is by nature ζῷον πολιτικόν (zoon politikon: political animal) who can realise himself only within the political community.
The political constitution is, for Aristotle, a “life system” in which individuals operate as an integral part of an organic whole. He came to the conclusion that citizens, by participating in the political management of the city, achieve their full human characterisation. A person who is not a citizen is cut off from the human community. Slaves, who are deprived of civil and political rights, for Aristotle are by nature mere “talking animals”, unrelated to any ethical and community dimension (Aristotle 1991).
Under the influence of Aristotle, politics was for centuries the characterisation of all the intellectual works focused on the study of a set of human activities for the organisation of the state and the civil society within a certain territory. In these activities, the polis is sometimes the subject, where acts such as controlling (or forbidding), with binding effect on all members of a particular social group, and the exercise of an exclusive domination of a given territory, belong to politics. However, the organisation of human society is not based only on the exercise of power, but also on the production and distribution of (scarce) resources necessary for the maintenance of a particular social group. Moreover, as happens in every power system, even political structures generate their own historical antagonist, when alongside any form of constituted power, it is possible for some form of counter-power to take shape. Such counter-power is made up of all those who oppose the dominant social arrangements, becoming protagonists in conflict.
The concept of politics is therefore closely linked to that of “power”, which essentially consists of all the means necessary to obtain some advantage (Hobbes 1984, 1997) or to produce desired effects (Russell 1938). Power thus presupposes a relationship between at least two actors. It is politically configured in different forms of authority and domination. Within each political relationship (power relation), the focus shifts to the specific means by which the particular form of political power (man over man) can be configured.
In this case, we refer to the different types of resources through which, historically, some social actors are able to secure the right to command. Prestige, wealth, and the ability to control information sources are crucial aspects, but in general political power is based on the ownership of the tools needed to exert physical force. Political power is coercive power in the strict sense of the word. In any society, it is the supreme power because of its ability to subordinate any other form of power. This does not mean that political power results exclusively in the use of force and in the exercise of violence. If so, any social group that under certain historical conditions was able to exert violence over other groups could be considered an actor endowed with political power, and this is obviously not so. Power (and violence) is therefore a necessary but not sufficient condition. A certain amount of “exclusivity” of the use of force is also required. In this case we speak of “monopoly” on the use of force which, in the case of Hobbes, would be the foundation of the modern theory of the state.
“Force” and “conflict” are thus two important features connoting the concept of politics, so much so that a scholar like Carl Schmitt (1927), taken up by Julien Freund (1965), stated that, in actual fact, politics coincides with the sphere of the friend-enemy relationship. For him, the highest application of politics lies in the nature of the antagonism between opposing groups that aim at mutual dissolution. Both Schmitt and Freund share the idea that politics has to do essentially with human conflict (and antagonistic conflict in particular) that does not involve a simple competition, as in the case of agonistic conflicts, but a real opposition. According to this view, any conflict between divergent interests becomes political insofar as it is translated into a struggle for power. The limitations of this approach are obvious. It rules out the possibility that (violent) conflict can be politically defused through cooperative and integrative strategies of socially conflicting interests. Moreover, politics, as a general concept, cannot be identified only by the means it uses, in this case force. The definition must be enriched, for example by identifying its function.
Philosophers have tried for centuries to answer the question about the aim of politics, trying to find its essence. But thanks to the achievements of modern social science, today we can say that there is no single absolutely valid aim. If political power can be partially identified with the exclusive use of force, it is clear that the aim of politics—that is the direction in which the potential or factual exercise of force is oriented—is determined by the dominant social group. From this point of view, there is not a universal aim but rather a set of historically defined aims. The history of political philosophy, however, is strongly influenced by a teleological perspective.
The greatest political thinkers were indeed quick to identify the ultimate goal of politics, adopting a prescriptive position. Aristotle argued that the goal of politics should be the “good life”. But today we know that the parameters of a good life vary according to the subjective needs of individuals and interest groups that politically organise themselves. The absence of a socio-historical form of the ethical concept of good life makes it analytically ineffective. Other medieval thinkers have proposed “common good” or “justice” as the ultimate goal of politics, falling into the same ethical limitation. Good life, common good, justice, are in fact abstract (and a-historical) concepts if they are not connected to the aspirations of the social (and political) groups that are subjectively (not universally) able to fill them with contents.
If the search for an ultimate goal of politics is likely to be futile, it is still possible to identify a minimum goal that, in sociological language, we could define as the “function of politics”. Scholars seem to agree that, while on the one hand the resources of politics are related differently to the ability of certain social groups to secure the monopoly of force (and violence), on the other hand these instruments are also aimed at the establishment of “order” within a specific social context. Therefore, the function (or minimum goal) of politics is to ensure a situation of “social order”, the conditio sine qua non for the pursuit of any other goal. Even the most militant movements that aim to overthrow the established order in a particular socio-historical context actually have the goal of building a new society based on a new order. Having identified the means and goals of politics, we can now attempt a general definition. Politics is the set of activities designed to regulate human coexistence in a given social context through a prearranged establishment of order. Such order can only be guaranteed if a social group can acquire the power given by the exclusive use of force .
Through this first general definition, we may assume the existence of an autonomous space for politics far from the classical Aristotelian conception that presupposed a substantial overlap between politics and society. The existence of such a distinction, which brings us closer to a modern conception of politics, has a specific historical derivation linked, in Europe, both to the spread of Christianity (which assumed that there was a certain gap between spiritual and temporal power) and to the development of the market economy, which deprived politics of control over economic relations, creating the distinction, then refined only in the modern era, between political society and civil society (that is, between the public and private sectors). According to this approach, politics had the task of organising social life and, in particular, orderly and peaceful coexistence within a certain territory, but it did not go beyond the sphere of the private life of every individual living in that territory.
In this context, the first major theoretical fracture historically took shape. It created the conditions for the formation of modern politics. We are referring to the fundamental separation between politics and morals (and between political analysis and theology), whose boundary lines have been weakened for centuries due to the temporal power of church institutions. In fact, political and religious morals compete for domination over the same territory, the field of human practice, with the difference that while morals refers to individual action and consciousness, politics and its ethics instead refer to the social and collective dimension, with the result that what is obligatory in morals is not necessarily binding...