The Essence of Politics

Extract

The Christian political consciousness has been deeply stirred by the revolutionary events of our time and many to-day feel the need for its revival. Christians widely recognise in this country that they have to fulfil a necessary function in the political order, and this no matter whether the duty is based on the dogma of the sinfulness of man and his necessary imperfection or on the doctrine of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, according to which man as ‘Zoon politikon’ is essentially interwoven by his nature with Politics. Christians are more or less inclined to accept to-day the fundamental thesis that Politics has its own natural right to exist and its own basis and independent sphere within the framework of the natural aims of a community.

This insight has in itself weighty implications, from the political-sociological point of view. For if Politics exists in its own right it cannot be considered a sham or an ideological cloak for the nonpolitical forces of society. This does not mean that economics, or religion, or legal or racial motives, which play so great a part in society, cannot enter the sphere of Politics. On the contrary, they do so to a large extent. But the point is that by entering the political sphere an economic, religious, legal or racial question, from the very fact of its being regarded politically, changes its essential peculiarity. Its former nature remains no longer the same. Aristotle would call this change a ‘metabasis eis genos.’ The question acquires a distinctively political character.