Politics
As a general concept, the practice of the
art or science
of directing and administrating states or
other political
units. However, the definition of politics
is highly,
perhaps essentially, contested. There is considerable
disagreement on which aspects of social life
are to be
considered ‘political’. At one
extreme, many (notably, but
not only, feminists) assert that‘the
personal is
political’, meaning that the essential
characteristics of
political life can be found in any relationship,
such as
that between a man and a woman. Popular usage,
however,
suggests a much narrower domain for politics:
it is often
assumed that politics only occurs at the level
of
government and the state and must involve
party
competition. In the sense developed in Bernard
Crick's In
Defence of Politics, the phenomenon of politics
is very
limited in time and space to certain kinds
of relatively
liberal, pluralistic societies which allow
relatively open
debate.
To say that an area of activity, like sport,
the arts, or
family life is not part of politics, or is
‘nothing to do
with politics’, is to make a particular
kind of political
point about it, principally that it is not
to be discussed
on whatever is currently regarded as the political
agenda.
Keeping matters off the political agenda can,
of course,
be a very effective way of dealing with them
in one's own
interests.
The traditional definition of politics, ‘the
art and
science of government’, offers no constraint
on its
application since there has never been a consensus
on
which activities count as government. Is government
confined to the state? Does it not also take
place in
church, guild, estate, and family?
There are two fundamental test questions we
can apply to
the concept of politics. First, do creatures
other than
human beings have politics? Second, can there
be societies
without politics? From classical times onward
there have
been some writers who thought that other creatures
did
have politics: in the mid-seventeenth century
Purchas was
referring to bees as the ‘political
flying-insects’.
Equally there have been attempts—before
and since More
coined the term—to posit ‘utopian’
societies with no
politics. The implication is usually (‘Utopia’
means
nowhere) that such a society is conceivable,
but not
practically possible.
A modern mainstream view might be: politics
applies only
to human beings, or at least to those beings
which can
communicate symbolically and thus make statements,
invoke
principles, argue, and disagree. Politics
occurs where
people disagree about the distribution of
reasons and have
at least some procedures for the resolution
of such
disagreements. It is thus not present in the
state of
nature where people make war on each other
in their own
interests, shouting, as it were, ‘I
will have that’ rather
than ‘I have a right to that’.
It is also absent in other
cases, where there is a monolithic and complete
agreement
on the rights and duties in a society. Of
course, it can
be objected that this definition makes the
presence or
absence of politics dependent on a contingent
feature of
consciousness, the question of whether people
accept the
existing rules. If one accepts notions of
‘latent
disagreement’, there is, again, no limit
to the political
domain.
— Lincoln Allison
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