The Political
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The Political

Stefano Bartolini

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eBook - ePub

The Political

Stefano Bartolini

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About This Book

‘Politics’ is a noun that points to a field or sphere of human activity and interaction. ‘Political’ is an adjective that usually associates with other names to qualify and specify them. Political behaviour, political institutions, political participation and political groups denote special kinds of behaviour, institutions, participation and groups whose specialty resides in their being 'political'. What does this specification refer to? This is the question that this book aims to answer. The book unpacks the 'politics' understood as the production and distribution of 'behavioural compliance,’ as opposed to the view of politics as a distribution of values, an aggregation of preferences or a solution to social dilemmas. Starting from a motivational definition of elementary political action, the endeavour proceeds to a differentiation of compliance instigations in different social fields of interaction, characterised by various levels of confinement of the actors and of monopolisation of command.

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Chapter 1

Trajectories of the political

The domain of human action that we conventionally define as ‘politics’ is plagued with events and shattered by personalities. Moreover, it is an inherently dangerous domain, as through it men can injure and rob, not to mention ruin themselves. The realm of the political engenders no teleological optimisms or invisible hands, and the vigour of wills breeds no harmonious combination or good outcome. Hands are visible in politics and are often armed. Unsurprisingly, the discussion of the concept of ‘politics’ has always evidenced a striking diversity of perspectives and approaches, and a definite lack of a common vocabulary or of a dominant view. Therefore, although the reflection is hardly new, the questions of what is political, what is specific about it and what should be the knowledge task of the political scientist have proven particularly difficult to address. Even a short review of previous investigations and responses would keep us busy for a long time, and there is no scope in this book to analyse this large body of thought in critical depth.
Understanding of the political evolves, of course, and in this introductory chapter I briefly focus on its main trajectories to pave the way for my own elaboration. First, predominantly ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’ conceptualisations have alternated in the history of visions of ‘politics’. In the phases of horizontal predominance, politics spreads through all the interstices of the human experience, inextricably links to other dimensions of such experience and becomes ubiquitous and hard to grasp in its essential features. In the periods in which a vertical vision prevails, politics tends to be studied via characterisations that transcend its phenomenology, with definitions focusing on its essentialist nature and specific character.
Second, the vertical and horizontal conceptions of politics that have historically alternated have both been affected by a process of segmentation of the domains of human action in which politics has been progressively separated from other spheres of action, and the discipline of politics has been separated from the neighbouring disciplines of law, sociology, economics, theology, philosophy and so on.
Third, twentieth-century conceptions of politics continue to reflect the vertical and horizontal dimensions while engaging with a politics dismembered of its connections with other disciplines. Politics is connected with ethics in ancient Greek thinking, with God in the Christian ecclesia, with law in the formation of modern absolutist states and with society in the age of great social conflicts. It increasingly connects with economics in the age of its domestication.

HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL CONCEPTIONS

We recognise the starting point of any conception of politics in the Greek term πολιτικος, politicos, presumably, but not certainly, having the same pre‑Indo-European root as the term Πόλεμος, polemos, war. The famous Aristotelian definition of man as a ‘political animal’ (zoon politikon) was a definition of ‘man’, not of ‘politics’. ‘Politics’ as such was undefined. In the Greek experience, a man’s participation in the polis was not a part of his life but its essence. A ‘non-political’ man was a defective animal who had lost the plenitude of his fusion with and within the polis. The political intertwined so much with the human experience that it was undefinable as a separate sphere of life or activity. In fact, ancient Greek did not possess the word ‘social’ and did not distinguish political life from social life.1
In the Greek view, the polis was a particular and unprecedented way of managing internal affairs by virtue of one crucially innovative instrument: people talking one to one other as members of a collectivity of freemen and equals, sharing the duty and the right to constitute the polis and to generate and modify the specific arrangements to deal with its internal and external problems. This unprecedented innovation was verbally represented by the preamble introducing Greek laws that, as we have no systematic collection of Greek law, presumably started to be used in the seventh- or sixth-century BC: edoxe te boule kei to demo, ‘it seems right to the council and to the people’. The striking modernity of the formula lies in its pragmatism (it seems right) and in its reference to the ultimate source (the people).2 People were supposed to voice their views, discuss those of others, try to persuade each other and eventually come to final decisions (often by voting). The same people were in principle eligible to be empowered, temporarily, to lead the others. This vision of the political process eventually led to decisions regarded as agreed upon by the collectivity, and which could therefore be imposed on it and associated with sanctioning non-compliers, be they opponents or opportunists, under the revolutionary implied concept of isonomia, the equality of citizens before the law.3
Isonomia and self-determination of the free were not, however, the foundation of the term ‘democracy’, which we now use in a positive sense. While the classical Greek intellectuals unanimously praised equality and freedom, they did not praise democracy. Democracy betrayed its social character of government by the ‘poor’ in their own interest, rather than the more recent meaning of government by the many or by the majority.4 In Laws, Plato complains that government by the many, by the populace and therefore inevitably by the poor is not subject to laws but superior to them and the final arbiter of them. From this comes the usual preference for mixed forms of government.
Notwithstanding the diffidence about government by the multitude (democracy), this conception of politics was distinctly horizontal. ‘Politicalness’ was not a vertical relationship between the ‘governed’ or ‘ruled’ and the ‘government’ or ‘rulers’ but mainly pertained to the relationships among citizens (although coercion was certainly not absent).5 The horizontal dimension and its participation practices were so important that the political experience was unviable beyond a certain number of free citizens. Its survival was unthinkable with the constitution of broader territorial and demographic units. However, it is surprising to note how much the legacy of this very particular and clearly ‘unviable’ (in different political units) conception has shaped the Western understanding of ‘politics’. The revolutionary nature of this experience was so overwhelming that we have tended to universalise an idealised reconstruction of it through the political education of generations of intellectuals in the West.
This experience was not the only one and not the dominant one in the world before, during and after the polis. Beyond the Greek polis, small village communities, larger possessions of lords or even vaster empires managed such common goods and collective activities with completely different, if not opposite, understandings. The Greek thinking regarded none of these as ‘political’. All those experiences that repressed and denied, or reserved, the practice of language and reason for the management of collective affairs to a few privileged individuals were indeed regarded as ‘non-political’; a more ‘vertical’ dimension of the political dominated phases and realities unlike the small city and the constitution or reconstitution of large-scale political entities. It prevailed in successive Western and Eastern political experiences focusing on the empirically sharp differences that existed between rulers and subjects. This differentiation of roles resulted from a more marked differentiation and contrast of interests and from the corresponding idea that rulers have an interest in maintaining their subjects in a position of subordination and in denying them a possibility of self-determination and of defining and pursuing their own interests as separate from those of the rulers. The ‘vertical’ conception of politics emerges, therefore, from the profound asymmetries among different social components of a polity (of a larger size) and the struggle for power distribution following from these asymmetries of economic, ideological, symbolic or coercive resources. In this understanding, a part of society tends to define itself as the whole and to forget shared commitments to engage in compromise and mutual adjustment by imposing its own visions and interests.
Successive Western terminological innovations witnessed a continual tension between the horizontal and vertical dimensions. These remained influenced by the original Greek source but were found difficult to apply to the new realities on a different scale. The concepts derived from the word ‘polis’ shaped the understanding of successive horizontal experiences. If politiké indicated the art of government, politeia pointed to what we would today call the ‘constitution’ (or the ‘regime’), the form of government and the techniques and organisation for the distribution of offices and charges in the city government. But the same term also included the definition of citizenship, of its obligations and duties and, furthermore, in an inextricable mix, the citizens as a whole, their ‘togetherness’, and also their education, the ‘spirit’ of the city, the essence of the polis and citizenship as an ethical way of life.6 Therefore, Plato labels his work devoted to the living spirit, the ethos and definitely the essence of the polis as politeia – nowadays translated as ‘republic’ (res publica). Aristotle instead labels his treaty that deals with themes nearer to the modern positivist view of politics as study of the technical forms of government with a derivative term, politikon – now translated as ‘politics’ or ‘the political’.
The word ‘social’ was a Latin invention, although the medieval translators of Aristotle ended up attributing it to him. Latin thinking and language used civis and civitas for what the Greek labelled polites.7 However, civitas had lost most of the political connotation of the Greek politis as it was organised juridically in a juris societas. The Romans used the term res publica for what we could identify as ‘politics’. However, a ‘vertical’ dimension was also absent from this terminology.8
The original Greek terms disappeared for almost ten centuries until the rediscovery of the Aristotelian works in the thirteenth century. When these works were directly translated into Latin from Greek (in approximately 1260), the term ‘politics’ made a new entry on the scene. William of Moerbeke (1215), a Flemish Dominican, used a ‘Greekish’ version of the term, politikos, for which he was to be accused of monkish literalness. He might have chosen this literal translation out of uncertainty about the real meaning of the original term and therefore found it preferable to leave it ‘Greekish’. Perhaps modern languages acquired the lemma thanks to this insecurity about translation.9 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225) simply translated the term as ‘politics’. In the Middle Ages, the art of ruling and government persisted as part of the definition of politics, but there was nothing that resembled the idea of politeia, perhaps because there was nothing that resembled the specific territoriality of the Greek polis. Quite the contrary, one could say that in the ideals and praxis of medieval politics there was something alien and even hostile about the Greek concept of politeia. Christianity, the new element of togetherness, presented itself as hostile to politics on grounds of principle, as it was identified with the world of power, violence, abuse and temptation. The connection between ethics and politics was the opposite to the Greek one. Politics was not a source of ethical behaviour and the sphere of ethical action but rather its contrary. The Christian and medieval thinking (from St. Augustine) located ethics definitely outside politics, which was seen as something inevitably corrupt. Even medieval law presented itself as a law without politics. It was more an expression of society than of the state and manifested itself in traditions and orders that coexisted. They maintained themselves thanks to the inability of political power to unify and standardise all social manifestations because of its incapacity to extend itself to all areas of intersubjective relations, therefore allowing for wide areas of interference by competing powers.10
This was only the first of a complex series of linguistic and conceptual re-elaborations of the original polis/politikon terms that progressively represented the different political experiences of the Western world. The Middle Ages more explicitly conceptualised the vertical dimension in the political process by resorting to new and different concepts, such as dominium, princeps and principatum. Politics inevitably began to be more explicitly associated with this vertical dimension.
Unsurprisingly, the horizontal dimension of politics, which was absent from the concepts of politics and government in the Middle Ages, re-emerged forcefully in the thinking of the Renaissance city-states, having been rediscovered through the mediation of the Roman Republic and its ‘public law’. Undoubtedly, Machiavelli’s concept of virtù represents a form of heathen ideal that reproduces the Greek ideal of politics as ethics. However, a new alternation in the dominant ideal occurred with the demise of the Renaissance city-states before the growing influence of the new, modern, large territorial states. In the same vein in which the pre-modern conceptions of politics in the period 800–1300 had to refer to the Christian community and ecclesia, since the sixteenth-century discourse about politics has carried an ever-closer connection with the concept of the state, with constant association and reference to it. The new entity that consolidated through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressively monopolised political discourse. The development of the state allowed the redefinition of politics that, albeit differently, both Hobbes and Machiavelli operated. The concepts of ruling and being ruled, rulers and the ruled, obligations, laws and so forth were redefined in reference to the state. The modern-age and the post-Westphalian state-making process allowed a predominant vertical dimension of politics to re-emerge, strongl...

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