What is politics? This seemingly simple question has become pressingly important in an age when some of the worldâs oldest democracies face radical and unsettling challenges.
The word âpoliticsâ is, of course, derived from the ideals and practices of the Greek polis. Aristotelian ideas about the polis lay at the core of European political philosophies which were then taken up and developed in many other parts of the world. For Aristotle, âthe end and purpose of the polis is the good life,â by which he meant not simply a physically sustaining existence but above all an ethically good, fulfilling, and meaningful life. Central to this good life were the notions of philiaâcivic friendshipâand reciprocity.1 Modern reinterpreters of these ideas have often used ancient Greek ideas loosely and flexibly, in ways that have little connection to the real world in which Aristotle lived2; yet the search for âthe good lifeâ remains central to political debate today.3
In East Asia, political ideas are shaped both by this exogenous tradition, which begins in Greece and Rome and flows through Western Europe and America, and by a long history of endogenous debates about virtue, prosperity, and social order. Central to these, too, are notions of the prosperous and ethically virtuous life. The many and diverse strands of Confucian, Neo-Confucian, and Daoist thought that emerged in Chinaâand were then taken up and reworked in Japan, Korea, and elsewhereâshared a concern with the creation of a harmonious and virtuous society. Though Confucian ideas are often seen as emphasising hierarchical order and obedience to the ruler, many currents of East Asian thought in fact gave ordinary people a vital part in the creation of the good society.4 There is, indeed, a recurrent motif in East Asian political thought which sees political virtue, harmony, and happiness as being created in the everyday lives of the population:
Someone said to Confucius, Why are you not in government? The Master said, The Shu says, âBe filial toward your parents, be friendly toward your brothers, and you will contribute to the government.â This too, then, is being in government. Why should you speak of being âin government?â5
In the twenty-first century, though, politics as it is generally practiced and understood seems far removed indeed from these dreams of philia and meaningful existence. In common parlance, âpoliticsâ is generally seen as referring to formal institutions and processes of government that occur at the national or regional level, and one of the most pervasive topics of recent political debate has been widespread public disenchantment with and alienation from these institutions and processes. In the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, ideological convergence between mainstream parties in the leading democracies was accompanied, in many places, by declining voter participation and increasing political apathy. In East Asiaâs major parliamentary democraciesâJapan, South Korea, and Taiwanâvoter participation rates showed a marked downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s.6 An opinion poll held in Britain in 2015 found that 73% of respondents believed that their country was ânot governed by the will of the peopleâ7; and when, in 2016, one senior American scholar chose to entitle his survey of US politics from 1968 to the present day Deadlock and Disillusionment,8 the title provoked barely a murmur of doubt or dissent.
It was against this background that 2015 and 2016 saw a dramatic upsurge of populism in many counties of the world, marked by events such as growing support for far right-wing parties in a number of European countries, the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in June 2016, the British Brexit vote of the same month, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016. This unstable and rapidly changing political landscape has prompted diverse responses, one of which has been a questioning of the very meaning and scope of politics itself. Writers and activists from a variety of backgrounds have sought to broaden and deepen the scope of our understanding of âthe political,â by directing attention to the many ways in which the search for a better social order and a more physically and psychologically sustaining way of life may be pursued, not just in the formal arenas of parliaments, party congresses, bureaucracies, etc., but also in small local communities and in everyday human life. Some of these efforts to rediscover the meaning of politics in unexpected corners of life have drawn on traditions of utopian thought and action9; others on anarchism or anti-authoritarianism10; others again avoid ideological labels and focus primarily on the practical ways in which people enact social and political agency in everyday life.11
The chapters that follow contribute to this search for the hidden faces of politics in daily life, and aim particularly to develop new ways of perceiving and understanding the process of âliving politics.â The notion of âliving politicsâ begins with a focus on actions: the small grassroots self-help actions that are examined in this book are responses to tangible, everyday problems. Such problems range from land dispossession to socio-economic exclusion, and from environmental disaster to the slow disintegration of rural social fabric. The defining characteristic of these small-scale quests for a better life is their informality: rather than lobbying states or formal political institutions to solve their problems through policy change, these groups address problems through direct self-help actionâinformal life politics. Understanding the process of living politics, therefore, involves a rethinking of the relationship between ideas and action. In this Introduction, we outline some starting points for that rethinking, before going on to sketch the trajectory of the volume as a whole.
Ideology, Post-ideology, and Beyond
Politics is generally assumed to be about ideology in the broad sense of the word. The political realm is occupied by contests between differing sets of ideas about the desirable state of the community, the nation, or the world. In modern pluralist systems, political parties have conventionally been seen as spread out across an ideological spectrum between left and right. Autocratic systems that allow no political debate, too, have typically been classified according to their ideological orientation, as right-wing or left-wing dictatorships.
Stephen Eric Bronner, in his survey of twentieth-century politics, classifies the political landscape of the past century according to traditions: democratic, liberal, communitarian, conservative, anarchist, socialist, fascist, communist. Traditions (in Bronnerâs sense of the word) are âforged from a given complex of ideas and goals, material interests and institutional strategies, as well as divergent styles and constituencies.â Tradition is âinherently informed by a project, an expressly political commitment, to turn ideas into reality.â12
Bronner emphasises that traditions often overlap. He highlights the debates that go on within each tradition, and the way that each has changed over time. Though the constellations of ideas which he terms âtraditionsâ remain the drivers of political action, he also observes how these longer-standing political traditions have been joined by others, particularly associated with the ânew social movementsâ of the 1960s and after: environmentalism, feminism, post-colonialism, and so on. But from Bronnerâs point of view, these new traditions have serious limitations as bases for political action. New social movements, which work across class lines, focus on âparticular interestsâ as opposed to the âgeneralizable interestsâ of more traditional ideological groupings.13 From this point of view, in order to build a radical politics for the future we need to go back to some of the core political traditions: âit is necessary to highlight the liberal and socialist values underpinning any creative reconstruction of progressive politics.â14
Others, on the contrary, have welcomed the declining influence of traditions such as liberalism, socialism, or Marxism. Anthony Giddens, like Stephen Bronner, sought a path to a revitalised âradicalismââa politics concerned with questions of social justice and equality. But unlike Bronner, he saw the cross-cutting identities of environmentalism, feminism, etc., not as a threat to this revived radicalism, but as its foundation. In his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right, Giddens (like Daniel Bell at the start of the 1960s, though from a different starting point) identified a key feature of the political landscape as being âthe exhaustion of received political ideologies.â15 Giddens saw this exhaustion as the result of a new conjunction of historical forces: the end of the Cold War, the uncertainties of globalisation and environmental crisis, and the rise of a âreflexive society,â where individuals were impelled to make their own choices based on personal assessments of complex information.16
In this environment, according to Giddens, the conventional rightâleft divide in democratic politics had lost much of its significance as new identities came to the fore. The old battles between left and right were battles of âemancipatory politicsâ (concerned with âlife chancesâ), but these had increasingly given way to a new âlife politicsâ (concerning âchoice, identity, and mutualityâ).17 This, he suggested, provided the basis for a new type of âbottom-upâ radical politics capable of building alliances across conventional dividing lines: âtackling environmental problems, for instance, certainly often demands a radical outlook, but that radicalism can in principle command widespread consensus.â18
Giddensâ view of politics is in some respects close to that of Ulrich Beck, who also emphasised the decisive shift caused by environmental crisis, globalisation, and an increasingly reflexive society. Beck in particular pointed to the crucial role of âsubpoliticsâ: the âdecoupling of politics from government.â This notion implies that politics is possible âbeyond the representative in...