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Notes Towards A Definition of Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2014

James Alexander
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Abstract

Politics has been defined in different and contradictory ways in the last century or so. If politics is to be a single subject of study then contradictory theories should be capable of being related together. In this article I argue that they can be related in terms of what I call the Aristotelian criterion. The article is in four parts. Firstly, I discuss the problem of defining politics; secondly, I introduce the criterion; thirdly, I consider five modern theories of politics (those of Arendt, Oakeshott, Collingwood, Schmitt and Rancière) in relation to the criterion; and fourthly, I use the criterion to put forward an original and capacious definition of politics.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 273 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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References

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25 This seems to be the view of certain ‘defences’ of politics written in imitation of Bernard Crick's famous book of 1962. I simply do not think this argument – made in Stoker, Gerry, Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar and Flinders, Matthew, Defending Politics: Why Politics Matters in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar – is necessary. These books simply confuse two things they want to distinguish: politics and ‘politicks’. Such books generate their energy through the confusion which follows when we at one and the same use the word politics to mean both the reality of rule and the ideal which complicates it. This confusion is embedded in our everyday language (where ‘distrust of politicians’ becomes ‘dislike of politics’, although it is nothing of the sort: we only distrust politicians because we expect good to come of politics). Nothing philosophical can be gained by simply accepting the confusion.

26 Dunn, op. cit. note 3, 15.

27 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1141b in the Loeb edition, ed. Rackham, H. (Camb. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934)Google Scholar, 347.

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32 About actual politics, it is perhaps relevant to say that I am no admirer of political science as such, agreeing more or less with what Oakeshott wrote about Lasswell in 1948 (‘laboured analysis’, ‘childish examples’, ‘obscuring abstractions’). See Oakeshott, Michael's review of The Analysis of Political Behaviour in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–1951 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 220–1Google Scholar. As far as I know, the closest study of political events ever written is Cowling's historical trilogy about British politics in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century (where there was sufficient archival material to sustain the closest possible analysis). See, for instance, the first of these: Cowling, Maurice, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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44 Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006)Google Scholar, 107.

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46 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, op. cit. note 31, 159.

47 Ibid., 161. Compare ‘a concern with the conditions of an association in respect of their desirability or cogency’, in Oakeshott, Michael, ‘The Vocabulary of a Modern European State’ (1975), in O'Sullivan, L. (ed.) The Vocabulary of a Modern European State (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008)Google Scholar, 261

48 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, op. cit. note 31, 162.

49 Ibid., 166. C.f. Oakeshott, ‘The Vocabulary of a Modern European State’, op. cit. note 47, 261: ‘Rulers may deliberate desirabilities, they may make “political” utterances recommending what they have done or about to do in terms of its desirability, and they may babble; but none of this is “ruling”.’

50 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, op. cit, note 31, 164.

51 Ibid., 163.

52 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Politics’ (1933), in Collingwood, op. cit. note 22, 118–123, at 119.

53 Collingwood, ‘Political Action’ (1928–29), in ibid., 92–109, at 96 & 100.

54 Collingwood, ‘Politics’, in ibid., 119–20.

55 Collingwood, ‘Political Action’, in ibid., 100 & 103.

56 Ibid., 106.

57 Collingwood, ‘Politics’ (1929), in ibid., 110–17 at 114.

58 Collingwood, R.G., The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943), 138–40.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 177–80.

60 Ibid., 180.

61 Ibid., 183.

62 Ibid., 189.

63 Ibid., 190.

64 Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political (1932) trans. Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 20.

65 Ibid., 26.

66 Ibid., 27.

67 Ibid., 66.

68 Ibid., 32.

69 Ibid., 30.

70 Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty trans. Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.

71 Rancière, Jacques, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Dissensus: On Politics And Aesthetics, trans. Corcoran, Steven (Continuum, 2010), 27–44Google Scholar, at 27. This summarises the argument developed first in Rancière, Jacques, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Rose, Julie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).Google Scholar

72 Ibid., 31.

73 Ibid., 32.

74 Ibid., 33.

75 Ibid., 35.

76 Ibid., 36.

77 Ibid., 40.

78 Badiou, Alain, Metapolitics, trans. Barker, Jason (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar, 15.

79 Ibid., 24.

80 Zizek, Slavoj, ‘The Lesson of Rancière’ in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Rockhill, Gabriel (London: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar, 70.

81 Badiou, op. cit. note 78, 46.