Before we embark on our exploration of the tradition of German Political Thought , we should ask ourselves a fundamental question: what is politics ? In conversation, we use the term very loosely: it can refer to party politics (“do I vote Labour or Conservative? SNP or Ukip?”), to global issues (“who will be the next President of America?”), or closer to home (and often more insidiously) to what is going on at work—“office politics” (“who moved my cheese?”). Yet the origin of the term is far more circumscribed and precise. 1
For the word “politics ” derives from the ancient Greek word polites, meaning “a citizen of the polis,” that is, of the city state. Those matters which were of concern to all citizens of a city and which, as a result, required a communal decision in order to resolve them, were called ta politika. Correspondingly, the conduct of the process whereby communal decisions were arrived at was called politike techne. In other words, politics originally had a precise, limited meaning: the conduct of politics took place in public, it was a privilege of all free citizens (and so, not of slaves) to participate in it, and it concerned itself exclusively with matters of public interest.
In the intervening centuries—indeed, millennia—the sphere of politics has broadened, as the public sphere itself has expanded and become more diverse. Alongside the spheres of economics (the world of business and commerce) and of society (the world of family, friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens), the sphere of politics has expanded and become increasingly entangled with those other spheres. (Can politicians create jobs? How much money should private financial concerns give to political parties? Then again, what is the private and what is the public sphere? Is it a purely private matter if a man hits or psychologically abuses his wife? Or she him?) As a result, the clear division found in antiquity between private and public, between economics and politics , has blurred to the point of almost disappearing completely.
We should also examine the origin of another word we shall be using: “theory .” For the political thought we shall be examining in this volume could also be described as “Political Theory ,” a major division of academic activity, particularly in universities in the United States. Again, the original meaning of the word “theory ” is perhaps slightly different from what we might expect, especially given the disdain displayed toward theory rather than practice (“that question is purely theoretical”) or the virtual hijacking of the term by literary theory (an approach to textual analysis that has broadened into cultural studies and often refers to itself simply as “Theory”). For the term derives from the Greek word theoria, meaning “sight” or “vision.” Essentially a contemplative act or activity, it refers to a kind of mental (or even spiritual) contemplation as opposed to practical actions (that is, praxis). Today, we use the term “theory ” more broadly to refer to any systematic, scientific attempt to develop a coherent explanation about an aspect of reality; whether the goal of this attempt is to explain, or to control, that reality, remains an open question. In the case of Plato especially, however, it is helpful to recall this primary meaning of theory.
We can turn to two twentieth-century thinkers in the German tradition for further explanation as to what politics involves. To use a term found in the work of the German Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), we could describe politics as a reflection of the fact that humankind is an animal symbolicum, i.e., a “symbolic animal.” 2 In the sense that Cassirer uses this term, he means that human beings, unlike other animals, inhabit a universe that is symbolic: that is to say, we inhabit a system that goes beyond the immediate present and physical contingency to develop a historical perspective, an ability to plan for the future and—ultimately—a sense of self. Writing in the 1940s, Cassirer—a German Jew who found himself in exile in the USA—was well aware of the problems of the contemporary politics of his age, which he discusses in The Myth of the State (1946). 3 Nevertheless, there is good reason to extend the list of different kinds of symbolic form with which Cassirer provides us in his philosophical masterpiece, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929)—language, myth , and knowledge (or scientific cognition)—and in his Essay on Man (1944)—myth and religion, language, history, and science—by adding “politics,” for it conforms exactly to the sense Cassirer gives to the term “symbolic form.” In 1921 Cassirer defined “symbolic form” as follows: “Under a ‘symbolic form’ should be understood every energy of mind [Energie des Geistes] through which a mental content of meaning [geistiger Bedeutungsgehalt] is connected to a concrete, sensory sign [konkretes sinnliches Zeichen] and made to adhere internally to it.” 4 Or as Cassirer put it in Language and Myth (1946): symbols are not “mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings” but “forces, each of which produces and posits a world of its own,” and thus “the special symbolic forms”—such as myth , art, language, and science—“are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and such is made visible to us.” 5 And understood in this sense, it is possible to talk about law as a symbolic form and to locate the heart of Cassirer’s thinking in the politics of the just individual. 6 In the sense that Cassirer and others use the term, we could think of “politics ” as a symbolic form as well.
At the same time, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) provides us with some more concrete definitions of the political. In a famous lecture, the second of a series given to a students’ political union in Munich in 1919 (during the German November Revolution in the wake of the country’s defeat in the First World War), Weber defined for his audience what he understood by “Politics as Vocation ”:
What do we understand by politics ? The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action. One speaks of the currency policy of the banks, of the discounting policy of the Reichsbank, of the strike policy of a trade union; one may speak of the educational policy of a municipality or a township, of the policy of the president of a voluntary association, and, finally, even of the policy of a prudent wife who seeks to guide her husband. Tonight, our reflections are, of course, not based upon such a broad concept. We wish to understand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state. 7
For Weber, the question of politics inevitably involves the question of power, including its expression as physical force (and, in this sense, as “violence”):
“Every state is founded on force,” said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.[ 8 ] That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of “state” would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as “anarchy,” in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state — nobody says that — but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions — beginning with the sib[ 9 ] — have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that “territory” is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics ” for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.This corresponds essentially to ordinary usage. When a question is said to be a “political” question, when a cabinet minister or an official is said to be a “political” official, or when a decision is said to be “politically” determined, what is always meant is that interests in the distribution, maintenance, or transfer of power are decisive for answering the questions and determining the decision or the official’s sphere of activity. He who is active in politics strives for power either as a means in serving o...