What is politics?
This book begins questioning the very notion it is dedicated to, because with a philosophical approach, notions are not left in the unclear state in which they are used in common parlance. This shall be our method all throughout the book. But in the case of politics, a preliminary clarification is required even more so, given the array of meanings and nuances this word comes surrounded with. In the last decades the century-old endeavour to define politics according to a core goal such as the pursuit of the common good or the reconciliation of interests has mostly been abandoned, as scholars of politics have got to acknowledge that – given the irreducible plurality of conflicting aims that political actors pursue – no common language about politics could materialise, no convergence on questions such as: who is entitled to define what the common good is? is reconciliation of interests truly possible and, what is more, is it to everyone’s advantage instead of one party’s?
Rather than insisting on a teleological approach,1 scholars of politics have increasingly seen it as characterised by the items this human activity makes use of (power, influence, force) or results in (making collective decisions). This turn away from goal-setting has thus been looking for an encompassing formula capable of describing what kind of actions and phenomena take place under the heading ‘politics’, whatever aims, ideals or projects actors may strive for. Real individual and collective actors remain obviously highly teleological: they all pursue their own particular goals and uphold their particular (even if they are universalistic in content)2 values, thereby colliding or striving to form coalitions. Time and again they come to some (never perpetual) agreement as to the framework of rules under which to realise one’s own interests and life plans in an ordered and peaceful way. This is what the polity or лоλις/polis is about, as we shall see in the following chapters.
Against this background political philosophy is an attempt to understand the structures that originate from the games actors play with and against each other, the rules they set up willingly or unwillingly, and the principles under which they try to justify and coordinate their actions. Only on the basis of this complex understanding does it make sense for political philosophy to evaluate general goals such as justice, or the models of society such as democracy that actors mean to pursue in their political life. Without this frame of reference, mere normative indications as to how best shape the polity must remain futile. The political philosophy the reader will become acquainted with in these pages is rather different from what is meant by this expression in today’s mainstream literature.
On these premises I am now introducing the first, classical definition of politics: it is the social activity in which scarce and unequally distributed resources are allocated among conflicting parties by an authority whose legitimate power is guaranteed by force.
No doubt this is a highly conceptual and squared-off description of a multifaceted phenomenon. It follows the pattern used over sixty years ago by David Easton (1953). It is not the only image of politics to be found in this volume: recent developments, which shall not be anticipated here, have created the necessity to add a second definition, to be formulated in Chapter 7, Part II. Now, the best way to make good use of it is in the disassembling of its singular components, which we will comment upon separately: 1. activity, 2. resources, 3. conflict, 4. power and force, 5. legitimacy/authority. Components 1–4 are explained in this chapter, while the fifth one requires a separate and much larger discussion, which will be undertaken in Chapter 2.
***
Let us remark that here as everywhere in philosophical definitions we abstain from overburdening the definition with any anthropological reference to the actor’s ‘will’ (as Weber still did) or ‘interest’ that may lie behind her/his/its preferences; that the actor has preferences of whatever origin is all we need to know in order to examine their affirmation being rejected or resisted by other actors. To be minimalistic is a good premise for essential and elegant definitions.
The definition we have just given comprises all possible sorts of conflict, as defined by the use of violent or non-violent means (bargaining, arguments, persuasion, blackmail) or by the type of settlement (military victory, electoral success, favourable legal sentence, arbitration, agreement without manifest losers as in win-win games). More substantial is, however, the typology of conflict according to its field or source: conflict of interest, identity conflict, ideological conflict.8
Conflict of interest revolves around the acquisition of a larger slice of material or positional resources by actors that remain separated even if they may, in certain cases, coalesce. Self-interest remains their leading or exclusive driving force; among the participants in a coalition, no sense of a shared identity arises. As long as one has a clear mind about the interest s/he or it pursues, the prevailing course of action is led by either strategic or instrumental rationality: this means searching for the most efficient ways to achieve the outcome envisioned, in other words, for the best means in order to get to the goal indicated by self-interest. These means can include manipulating or coercing men and women, treating them in a strategic attitude; here ‘strategic’ (closely connected to ‘instrumental’) has nothing to do with the military and means employing whatever or whoever you may deem useful as a means for achieving a goal that is not itself an object of deliberation.
It is a still widespread reductionism of alleged Marxist origin to see the conflict of interest as the paramount or exclusive type of conflict, as if the others were its mere derivatives. They are not, and to think so precludes an articulate understanding of political behaviour. ‘Identity conflict’ has a very different nature, which is better understandable if we talk more properly of a conflict for the recognition of one’s own political identity. What political identity is will be explained in a later chapter; it is sufficient for now to think of it as the sense of belonging that keeps the members of a political group together.
Political identity can refer to a new or renewed (the former fascist countries, but also France after 1945) nation, a party, a social movement (industrial workers in the nineteenth century) or a cultural and political movement (feminism in the second half of the twentieth century). The recognition they look for is two-sided: it comes from the prospective members of the new actor, whom the initiators try to involve and convince, and from external players (the former imperial or colonial power, the existing members of the political system, international institutions). The new identity is not pre-existent to the struggle for recognition, and ripens only in the course of it – often in the fractured shape of opposing factions, as happened with national liberation movements. To make this visible, one only needs to replay the evolution of his country’s or her party’s identity. Identity formation and struggle for recognition are self-standing processes of cultural and political nature, deeply rooted in human anthropology, and in as much they accompany political life everywhere. By no means can they be reduced to their pathological developments such as nationalism or religious fanaticism and easily dismissed, as they represent a major moment in what in the second chapter of this Part I shall call ‘the subjective side of politics’.
There are obviously intersections between identity formation processes on the one hand and coalitions based on rationalised self-interest on the other. A new group striving to assert its identity may sometimes coincide with a coalition of people interested in gaining more wealth against formerly privileged groups. But the overlapping is never so broad and frequent as to allow for the assumption of a systematic coincidence; what is more, the drivers in identity struggles are essentially different from the materialistic and calculating mentality that dominates conflict of interest.
Ideological conflict comes closer to identity conflict, but should not be mistaken for it. At stake here is not the consolidation of a new collective actor and its recognition by other players, but rather its self-identification by a unifying and defining conception of humankind’s or a nation’s destiny – what in German is called Weltanschauung or conception of the world. Weltanschauungen are mostly exclusive and universalistic ideologies; they include all the possible faithful and deny the rights of all others. Soviet Communism in the Cold War was the paramount example,9 though some versions of Western ideology did not display a higher degree of inclusiveness. Throughout history monotheistic religions have time and again played the role of expansive and truth-touting ideologies; the recent emergence of fundamentalist and murderous positions in the Islamic world is witness to the fact that ideological conflict has not ended with the Cold War.
The three types of conflict are, in Max Weber’s words, ‘ideal types’, in the sense that they design conceptual models that only rarely come up in reality in their pure form and unmixed with each other. Concrete conflicts are often a mix of two or more types, in which, however, one type is prevailing and defining. This can be said of the archetypical conflict that opposes men to women, though often we should speak of sheer oppression and exploitation rather than conflict, because the element of resistance is weak or absent. Beyond all anthropological, socio-economic and religious aspects, this conflict also heeds direct political moments, as in the long-lasting exclusion of women from electoral franchise (even in Switzerland until 1971) and in the war against women (exclusion from education in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan until 2001 and in Taliban-infiltrated areas of Pakistan, later kidnapping, raping, enslavement of women and young girls in Africa and the Middle East after 2011) waged by Islamist10 terror groups since the end of the twentieth century. In light of these events, the ideological conflict pursued by an extreme version of Islam with its moderate versions and with liberal cultures comes together with the defence of the economic, social and political privileges men enjoy in societies in which the patriarchal power structures have so far survived all attempts at cultural modernisation. The cruel and despising attitude towards women (as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or LGBT people) displayed in this war binds together a political defence of privileges within the family and the community with pre-political, allegedly religious sense of superiority deeply rooted in a fragile and aggressive male identity, bred on violence. In this fusion the presence of both the ideological and the identity moment nourishes fanaticism, an attitude completely opposed to a reasonable way to manage politics and nonetheless so coessential to all conflicts in which gender, race, ethnic and religious aspects have played a role – from the persecution of heretics in the European Middle Ages through the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century to jihadism.
This differentiated account of conflict has a twofold sense. The practical sense is that whatever regime actors may choose for their polity, they must know how to come to terms with conflict in its three-tiered configuration and renounce any attempt at reducing the three types to just one, for example falling into the self-delusion that a settling of interest-based conflicts can also dissolve an identity conflict. Theoretically, the core question asks whether or not conflict is conducive to good politics, whether politics should get rid of it or coexist with it. This question sounds very normative, as if we were at this stage in the position to say what good politics is, or more in general as if the search for a ‘good’ model of politics were this book’s leading aim, which it is not. All of this will become clear later.
Different that the models of politics people have in mind may be, one feature is likely to be common to all or nearly all of them: ‘good politics’ always contains a certain degree of order and regularity, which makes the life of the people somehow possible, whatever the degree of liberty, equality or happiness the regime makes room for. Daily shoot-outs or complete administrative chaos – as we shall better see in Chapter 3 – do not fulfil what the people expect from politics. But how to bring about this result? Should conflict be regarded as a threat to civil (in the sense of non-feral) order and be possibly eliminated or marginalised? Does good politics mean an order in which conflict is prevented from coming up, and conflict-less integration is the supreme aim? This is the integrationist path in social and political theory, prevailing in antiquity (Aristotle, BCE 384–322) and the Middle Ages (Aquinas, 1225–1274), but also in Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who pushed Aristotelianism out of political thought,11 and later thinkers as different as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and the theoretical sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). Other theorists maintained that a degree of regulated conflict is vital to politics, as a safeguard for freedom and as a motor of change for the better. In his commentary on Livy, written in 1513–1519 and published in 1531, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) praised the institutionalisation of conflict between the Senate and the common people as the masterpiece of Roman politics (Machiavelli 1531, passim). The Federalist and the very Constitution of the United States regard political conflict as a constitutive element of the new polity and attempt at handling it in a system of checks-and-balances. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) went as far as to regard the relationship between friend and enemy (whoever is ‘existentially something different and alien’, 1927, 27) as the very essence of politics – a hypostisation12 of enmity that goes beyond the seminal importance of conflict.
As we will see later in more detail, democracy is by definition the regime that regards conflict and diversity as its core moment along with the rules preventing conflict from becoming murderous for the citizens’ lives and freedoms and disruptive for their safety and wellbeing. Conflict becomes proceduralized, which means that shared procedures are provided to come to terms with it; procedures that facilitate a temporary solution, which is to an extent pregnant with future conflicts, to be met again by the same or modified procedures. In this sense, democracy is the culmination of the conflictualist path, whose philosophical background is vividly illustrated by Max Weber’s picture of an irreducible ‘politheism’ of values. By saying ‘politheism’ Weber likened the plurality of conflicting values upheld in the various belief system inside a society or among cultures to the many gods and goddesses honoured in Greek and Roman mythology – as shown in both Parthenon pediments in Athens (see Figure 1.1) and celebrated in the temple called Pantheon (‘all gods’) in Rome.13
In other corners of political thinking, the alternative of conflict and integration is stretched over time: Marx and Engels saw class struggle as the motor of history and lastly emancipation, but their picture of the coming communist society is highly integrationist (plenty of wealth, full self-realisation of the individuals, the government brought down to a minimal technical function).
Procedures can, at best, provide the tracks on which conflicts unfold and are handled. What makes the characteristics of politics is that conflicts are sooner or later settled by power, the next station of our disassembled definition of politics.
While we all welcome the power of the sun to make life on earth possible or enjoy the purchasing power of our salary, when it comes to political power, many are likely to be wary of it or to loathe it from the outset. We will discuss later our attitude towards this ambiguous notion, but let us first find an agreement on what we mean by it.
For power in human and social relationships we have an overarching definition, which is in its simplicity logically elegant: power it is the ability of actor A to make actor B (or actors B, C, D …) act as B would not otherwise act. This definition is called relational because power is all-defined as a feature intrinsic to and deriving from the relationships among actors. It tells us nothing about the actors or the tools used by them, and it does without ‘thick’ notions such as will or interest. Power is not just actual power, as it is rather an ability – as Thomas Hobbes noted – projecting itself in the future, promising to bring us ‘some future apparent Good’ (Hobbes 1651, 58).
In this definition B would not act like that without A’s intervention, but not necessarily because s/he or it is opposed to A’s indications. For example, traffic laws and the enforcing agencies have the power to make a boy or girl who is learning to drive respect traffic rules, not however against their will or interest – on the road, driving by the rules is first of all in my own interest. Maybe we simply did not know about them, and do easily agree to submit to them; but without the power of the parliament passing the rules and the administration enforcing them, we would not drive in a regular manner;14 on the other hand, finding on every ride an agreement on how to drive with all other traffic participants would be infeasible, time-wasting and lastly life-destroying. Political power with the same formal features (legislation+enforcement in a sovereign polity) can result either in top-down impositions (‘pay more taxes’, ‘obey the conscription law and go to the front’) or in binding central coordination, as in the case cited.
Now, the scattered presence of this second moment of coordination does not go as far as to justify Hannah Arendt’s definition of power as ‘to act in concert’ (Arendt 1972, 143); this is a shapeless view on power and does not at all fit political power, from which the moments of verticality and asymmetry (see §6 in this chapter) cannot be removed. Even power instances in which the moment of coordination is significant cannot be seen as a ‘concert’ of equal voices, because in any case the coordinator possesses a better knowledge of the process than everybody else and insofar also more power.
All-inclusive (from the economy to human relationships in the family) as it is in its abstractness, the relational definition is a good basis for understanding power, though not capable of closing in on what we strive to grasp in its specificity: political power. We move therefore to a second definition, which indicates the instrument used by political power to assert itself, insofar as adding to the formal structure described in the first definition an element related to its content. This second instrumental or substantive15 definition reads: A’s ability to make B act as B would not otherwise do constitutes political power if it is guaranteed in the very last instance by A being able to use or threaten force for the implementation of her/his/its preferences. We will later see how in the entities called states, political power is endowed with the legitimate monopoly of force.
It is wrong to say that political power consists primarily or exclusively of force. Not even the prince of political realism, Niccolò Machiavelli, went so far, given that in Chapter XII of Il Principe/The Prince he wrote that state power relies on both ‘good laws’ and ‘good armies’ (Machiavelli 1532, 42). It is one thing to say that power uses or threatens force in the first place in order to impose its preferences; it is a very different thing to say that domestically or internationally political power sometimes uses force, but mostly employs other procedures to assert itself, while in any case, these other procedures are backed by A’s and B’s knowledge that, if they fail, force could (but will not necessarily) be in the very last instance brought to bear. B can be a tax evader, in the countries in which tax evaders can be given prison sentences, or a region on its way to unilaterally seceding from the home country, or a state caught in an irreconcilable tension with state A. Guaranteeing A’s power is different from being the whole of it, while force remains in the ‘horizon of expectations’16 of the participants of a political game. More on the link between political power and force as well as on the notion of influence will be said in the following.
Instead of force we can almost interchangeably say violence. I do not see chances for a conceptual distinction to be established, not at all in the untenable sense that force is legitimate whereas violence is not. When we say violence we are simply putting the accent on how B perceives the effect of the physical force applied by A on her or his body. Force or violence though it be, it is nearly always – except in duels between princes, abounding in literature rather than in history – organised force or violence (police forces domestically; armies, navies, air forces and cyber war units internationally), as political interaction happens among collective actors such as parties or countries.
Power guaranteed by force is not the only way how actor A can change the behaviour of actor B. Going back to the relational definition, A can try to drive B to acting as B would have not otherwise acted also without relying on the guarantee of last resort provided by force and without expecting B to act in a binding way according to A’s preferences. In this case we speak of influence rather than power, a concept that explains many an interaction in the political field and is particularly important in international relations. Influence is however a complement rather than an alternative to political power guaranteed by force, which mostly finds its culmination and stabilisation in state power, supported by the monopoly of legitimate force.
After defining political power, let us now look at the essential features with which it appears and works; then at its operating areas, instruments and modus operandi.
First, it is mostly institutionalised and legitimate. What institutions and what legitimacy are will be examined later, but let us hold that political power, even if originated by a revolution or coup or military defeat, has the tendency to last over time, to percolate into a stable framework of rules and authority and to resonate with the preferences and the models the population, or its majority, has in mind when thinking about the polity.
Second, it includes on the side of those ruled some possible degree of voluntary compliance with the preferences of the power holders. This excludes that a regime mostly consisting of the use or threat of force can be sensibly regarded as a form of political power. Forced dependence on arbitrary rule should be called domination17 rather than power; in the extreme case we have to do with state terrorism. In many European countries the Nazi occupation regime (1939 or later–1944 or 1945) was sheer domination by state terrorism and could not be said to be endowed with political power; so was Japanese rule in many of the occupied territories.
Compliance can be motivated by full or half-hearted convictions or else by an overall assessment that compliance is, for reasons of prudence, better than opposition or rebellion. Underlying it is some sharing of ideas and beliefs between the rulers and the ruled ones, or, in other words, a commonality of culture. Unlike in the famous, rather deterministic dictum by Karl Marx (1813–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1995),18 this phenomenon is well-taken in Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) notion of hegemony, seen as the ability of the ruling class or group to influence and reorient the ideas heeded by the people, who are thus inclined to consent to the existing regime.
Third, political power is universal, in the sense that its orders are valid against all and everybody (erga omnes in Roman law) within a given unity. This is another differentiation from force, which can have full sway only on those on whom it is actually applied or have to fear its imminent use.
The (legal, but also effective) universality of political power as far as exerted in the state is made possible by its pyramidal or top-down structure, which in the early modern European state was imposed after the ‘intermediate bodies’ (clergy, nobility, towns and guilds with special jurisdictions and feudal privileges) were deprived of any independence and brought under the central political authority.
***
Political power, in combination with influence, operates mainly in two areas:
Agenda-setting is no less important than decision-making power, sometimes even more so, as it can prevent crucial issues such as emerging faults in a country’s financial architecture or climate change from being addressed in the policy-making process. The openly political (in Parliament) agenda-setting process is obviously intertwined with the cultural background (values, worldviews) of a people and its elites. Ideas and beliefs matter in domestic as well as foreign policy more than it appears in the media.
The instruments of political power, as well as influence, are incentives and sanctions, or positive and negative incentives. Many things can be used as incentives in one way or another: money for politicians or their constituencies or clans, political friendship or enmity, positions to be attributed, allocation of prestige or infamy and more.
The modus operandi of political power, but far less of influence, are manifold, but the basic patterns are two:
The same holds for
As everybody knows, political power is intermingled with economic and cultural power and their many derivatives; the latter is also called ideological or in another profile ‘soft’ power (as differentiated from the ‘hard’ economic and military one). Domestically, as well as internationally, these several forms of power are often hardly extricable from one another. The question can be raised if one should not give up insisting on keeping these sorts of power from another and rather talk about power as one composite, multifaceted single item. I am going to argue against that, but before doing so it is advisable to specify what makes one form different from the others. The distinction is based on what constitutes the ultimate source of power in the several spheres: command over organised force for political power, ownership and/or control of the means of production for economic power, ownership and/or control over the shaping of ideas, images, beliefs and the related media (including the educational system) in the case of cultural power.
Now, the first and generic reason for keeping the various types of power from another is the superiority of distinction over conflation, which is – unfortunately not for all writers – an epistemological pillar.19 The second one is substantive: neither economic nor ideological power can give the rulers the pervasive and binding control over everybody’s behaviour that the chance of resorting to force confers upon them. Neither a financial tycoon nor an influential spiritual leader would have reason to, say, sing, ‘I have attained supreme power’, as the new tsar does in Act 2 of Mussorgsky’s Борис Годунов/Borís Godunóv (1868–72). That the US or the French president would not say so either is due to her/his limits as constitutional power-holder, not to a structural limit of political power. Due to its universal, binding and physically compelling character, this power – except in failed states or where a regime is fading – has a higher efficacy than the other types, as it can penetrate the society in all its pores – schools, police stations, government offices, courts and prisons are everywhere. Economic constraints can also spread everywhere, and the power of money or of its scarcity certainly does, but they are not tied to a single source of command, a single will. On the other hand, economic (rather than cultural) power needs a legal framework in order to operate: rules that bind debtors to repay their creditors, companies to deliver their products at the time written in the contract, employers to pay workers their full salaries on payday. Only political power can write these rules into law and enforce them, thus being an indispensable complement to other powers – though an anarcho-capitalist would disagree on politics being indispensable.
Having given an analytical clarification of the relationship between political and economic power, what remains to examine is the overall assumption on politics as just a reflex of economic power relations that can be found in different (from rough to differentiated) terms in the various Marxist traditions. Marx himself oscillated between regarding government as nothing but ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, as he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848, 5), and opening up in his late years to the chance for political processes different from the violent revolution of the Paris Commune to bring about the overcoming of class society.20 The deterministic dependence of politics on economic power was never a theoretically correct view, and cultural factors – as Max Weber21 showed more than a hundred years ago in his studies on the ‘economic ethics’ of world religions – are important in shaping economic and social structures. Worldviews, beliefs and ideas are of fundamental importance in shaping the reaction of individuals and communities to economic facts and conditions.
Today no scholar of politics would deny the relevance of economic factors and constraints, and a bright scholar would peer into the interplay of political processes with the shifting of economic structures and positions. But in many situations the much-talked-about ‘overwhelming power of the economy’ can turn out to be the failure of politics to set up timely and innovative strategies. To be overwhelmed in this case is obsolete politics and leaderships unable to catch up; they cannot reinvent themselves in a way capable to cope with the new constraints of the economy and technology and indulge in lamentation. Some reaction to modernisation and globalisation seem to go back to this pattern.
The reader may at this point be disappointed by the absence in these reflections on power of some questions that are otherwise widely discussed in publications22 and public debates regarding the very same item, such as the field on which power is exerted (preferences of the actors? or their needs or interests? declared or covert, illusionary or real?) or the conflicts (open and visible, as in the Weberian definition I have adopted above? or non-visible but possible?) that it temporarily settles. Others may miss notions introduced by Michel Foucault (1926–1984) such as bio-power and governmentality, and largely used in the last decades.
My reasons for this absence, or the deflating of these and other notions like domination, are the following:
On the other hand, political processes do not always lead to a decision, as they can be suspended, delayed, with any decision postponed – or reach a deadlock. The omission to decide is a political act as much as making a decision, and it understandably changes the initial settings of the process and generates consequences of its own – mostly the search for other solutions or other partners or other tools, including resorting to force. Time is an essential element in both politics and policy making, as it can change the physical configuration of the issue, the coalition supporting a certain solution, the perception of the issue among those concerned.24
Before this section comes to an end, it is wise to make possible equivocations explicit. I shall make three examples:
This section ends with a warning to non-Anglophone readers: do not underrate the importance of language, which mirrors different political and intellectual histories, in adding difficulty to the complexity of political affairs. In proper terms, ‘power’ overlaps neither with pouvoir (French) nor with poder (Spanish) or potere (Italian), not to speak of the confusing German couple Herrschaft and Macht or 政权(zhengquan/political power in Chinese). The English word is much more generic and neutral and therefore more flexible than most of its translations; the same holds for its Latin predecessor potestas, though ‘power’ and potestas (as well as κρáτος /kratos in ancient Greek) also fail to overlap (in some case ‘power’ translates imperium). When using translations we should always be aware of the major or minor equivocations due to the Tower of Babel in which, despite all homogenisation in globalisation, we – to our good luck – are living.
After clarifying the main notions, it is now time for a commentary from several venture points.
First, politics, as it has been so far and will not cease to be, has been defined in this textbook according to its main tool or medium: power (complemented by influence). This instrumentalist definition replaces the traditional one, in which politics was defined according to its aim. There are two reasons for this shift. One is that any single teleological definition makes a largely shared image of the nature and structure of politics impossible. This is not the case with the more neutral instrumentalist approach, which leaves room for the study of later developments related to the diverse goals people have in mind when acting politically.
The other reason is that, in this book – as already noted – we are interested in finding out what politics is and how it effectively works rather than shaping it in the way every one of us regards as the most conducive to justice or happiness. Not that we deem these goals to lie outside the field of political philosophy, but we regard as vain all theoretical efforts to design the best polity ever conceived that does not take note of how human beings and their groupings really act when acting politically.
As an illustration of the shift from the teleological to the instrumentalist view on politics let us look at the notion of common good. Aristotle and later Aquinas identified it substantively with virtue and happiness for all beings, i.e. for the community, as defined by philosophers, while in our time we – with the exception of Neo-Aristotelians – are rather inclined to share John Rawls’s procedural notion of common good as what we pursue when ‘maintaining conditions and achieving objectives that are similarly to everyone’s advantage’ (Rawls 1999, 205) – as defined by every single actor in an individualistic rather than communitarian way.
Second: in terms of the history of political thought, our definition of politics clearly goes back to the tradition of political realism, which comprises Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and more recently Carl Schmitt, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), Edward H. Carr (1892–1982), Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) and Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013). This book’s relationship to realism is however substantially qualified and modified by the attention to recent developments that have made the realist approach insufficient, as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 10; even before and even more radically, that relationship is qualified by the focus on the adjective ‘legitimate’ that in our definition of politics accompanies the very notion of power. I put the adjective in quotation marks because, first, the link between power and legitimacy is questioned by many and needs to be discussed, as will happen in the next chapter; and, second, this link does not hold in international politics in the same way as within the state, as we will learn in the corresponding Chapter 6.
Accepting the link of politics and power does not need to be blind to its costs and dangers. First of all, if we stick to the basic link ‘no politics without power’,25 this implies that, power being an asymmetrical, vertical relationship, politics always entails a degree of inequality – this is a first problematic aspect of that link (granted that in most worldviews, inequality is seen as something negative that should be contained). This was very clear to the classics of contractarianism,26 who regarded the equality reigning in the state of nature as lethal, since everybody can be killed by everybody, whereas the unequal, overwhelming power of the sovereign created by social contract can be expected to protect everybody. How much inequality is generated depends on the rules that set limits to power and regulate access to it, including the duration of office tenure. The asymmetry between rulers and ruled regards in any case not just the ability of the authority to issue commands (which may or may not come in the form of laws) and to employ force, but also in a larger amount of knowledge. Foucault insisted on the link pouvoir-savoir/power-knowledge, but even aside from the pre-democratic examples he researched, this asymmetry holds in democracies too, in which a superior degree of knowledge remains an asset of the elite and the executive, not just in the field of intelligence.
On the other end, one (a person, a party, a country) must seek power, accepting the built-in inequality and other unpleasant features of politics, if one is serious with the goals s/he wants to achieve and the principles s/he proclaims – however tough or benevolent these goals and principles may be. There are certainly other paths on which one can try to achieve them, for example cultural reform, religious appeal, personal example; however, if collective goods are to be gained and evils to be avoided in a reasonable time and in an effective manner, politics remains the most promising way to go, to organise human society instead of abandoning it to chaos or to destructive conflict or indulging in lamentations and wishful thinking. Though politics may look disgusting to citizens, it remains a terribly serious business, whose cancellation overnight would only set out an even more violent and unequal world. Is it also a sombre business, poor in ideas and ideals, and must it be? This question will be answered at the end of Chapter 2 and later in Part IV of the volume.
Having this in mind, all demonization of politics as being such a dirty business is vain, because it suggests that we would be better off without politics; often it is also counterproductive, as it makes distinguishing honest from corrupt politicians impossible. Almost one hundred years ago, in Politik als Beruf/Politics as a Profession Max Weber discussed in a vivid and stringent way the moral dilemmas in which one is involved when trying to balance effectiveness of action and the price to pay when engaging in politics (cf. Chapter 10, §2). The attention for these prices used to be a recurrent topos in world literature from Bhagavad Gita (with regard to war, third century BCE or later) to Sophocles’s Antigone (piety vs. reason of state, BCE 441), from Shakespeare (1564–1616) (particularly in Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard III) to Racine’s (1639–1699) Britannicus; later, in the last two centuries of Western literature, the attention shifted for several reasons to dramas that may mirror politics and society but play in the individual soul as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) and Thomas Mann (Doktor Faustus in particular, written 1943–1947). In political literature, in the hundred years since Weber’s speech, the sensitivity for the moral and intellectual troubles one has to reckon with when engaging in politics has only grown thinner.27
As we have seen, a degree of political inequality between who is in government and who is not is a preliminary unavoidable price we have to pay when accepting politics as the fundamental tool aimed at governing human society. The true problem is another one altogether: how much inequality and what kind of inequality? Should political inequality between those in government and the citizens be allowed to reinforce the existing social and cultural inequality, as it used to happen in Western countries during the ancien régime and began to change only with mass democracy and the welfare state? We will come back to inequality when addressing problems of normative political philosophy. As to the amount of specifically political inequality, the asymmetry between rulers and ruled ones has decreased in the wake of democratisation; on the other hand, the state as impersonal machine has nowadays a controlling power over individuals it could not dream of in the time of the old monarchies.
There is a second price that comes with political power. A power position is and has always been the outcome of a competition among persons and parties, a costly activity that requires money and a staff serving the leader – be it the clientes of a senator in ancient Rome, the courtiers of a medieval king or the secretaries and counsels of a present-day politician. In modernity, the personal staff and ‘war machine’ of a politician has become separated from the state bureaucracy. Now, gathering more consensus than the competitors and prevailing over them in a conflict is the essential function of politics as different from policy, which aims at the efficient solution of the problems faced by a community. But gaining consensus requires much more (costly) things than good arguments. Through this activity private money gains an illegitimate sway over political decisions, far from any transparency; or public monies are diverted to fund a leader or party. On the one hand, this is an endemic phenomenon, co-essential to politics, and promises to eradicate it altogether should be seen with some scepticism. On the other hand, it must be monitored and contained, as it represents a danger not just for democratic politics, but for politics in general, since it threatens to substitute the logic of political processes with the logic of short-term economic advantages.
It represents a danger also because the acquisition of tools for the competition can become self-referential and degenerate: this is egregiously known as seeking more power for the sake of power, more and more regardless of the goal or the view one wanted to assert in political conflict, and more and more for self-aggrandizement. The current populist view that sees this as the very essence of politics tackles a built-in danger and misses the real target, which is not to delegitimise politics altogether but to invent and reinvent checks and counter-poisons.
***
Let us finally highlight the philosophical implications of the theory of political power illustrated so far. Its premise, still very much in the contractarian tradition, is that the self-rule of human beings on the basis of perfect equality must fail, thus making the establishment of an unequal political power necessary in order to save them from self-inflicted lethal wounds. This view does not only rely on the fictional state of nature of the contract theorists, but also on the recurrent experience with failed states and the resulting ‘one man, one rifle’ (rather than one vote) equality (Lebanon in the mid 1980s, Somalia in the 1990s and later, Libya after 2011). Self-government is only possible in an established state with central power, rule of law and representative government.
There is another reason for the inevitability of political power. Governing a political community is a complex business requiring knowledge, skills and experience. With modernisation and later globalisation, complexity and the related requirements for government have only surged and become a professional activity (it can be learned, but not overnight, since it requires an increasing competence in issue-related policy making, well beyond political manoeuvring). Not everybody can fulfil its requirements – perhaps not even most of the professional politicians in charge do – and, what is more, not everybody has interest or vocation for this activity. Binding involvement in politics for everybody would result in a nightmare for the most. Entrusting politics to the institutional power structure and its officials therefore represents for all others an ‘unburdening’ or relief,28 which makes them free to pursue their own inclinations. The picture of a community in which everybody goes daily or weekly to the agorà (maybe the electronic one) and engages in deliberation over state affairs with all other fellow citizens is an idyll dreamt of by philosophers or literati unaware of how real citizens live in a mass democracy. In any case, it is less the intensity of citizens’ participation but rather the quality of the politicians and bureaucrats to which the daily management of the state is delegated that makes the difference.
The view underlying the previous considerations is a moderate anthropological pessimism: human beings are not really capable of successfully practising in their associated life the self-rule some have theorised and praised. Or at least not in the form of a power-less community, in which everybody is an equal decision-maker on all daily common affairs. The idea of a radical e-democracy in which everybody participates on a daily basis in government is only the last and least felicitous version of this idea, according to which government is not a difficult art that needs to be learned and everybody is at any time a fully informed and rational actor – two hardly credible premises (more in Chapter 5 with respect to direct democracy).
The alternative to a power-free egalitarianism in politics is obviously not submission, but rather the effort to keep power painstakingly under control and to minimise this necessary evil down to the size that is indispensable to its organising, protecting and relieving functions. To ask political power to prove its legitimacy is, as we shall soon see, the fundamental question that cannot only contain it, but also help it fulfil the task it has been created for.
1From Greek τέλος/telos or goal: based on the indication of goals.
2Justice or freedom for all is a universalistic claim, but upholding it within a plurality of opinions remains the particular value or belief of its supporters.
3In the Falklands (Spanish: Malvinas) War of 1982 between the United Kingdom and the Argentinian dictatorship, these relational resources were as much at stake as the possession of territory.
4For positional goods such as prestige, scarcity results from their intrinsically competitive nature. Scarcity can be both absolute (absolute lack of a resource) or relative (the resource is unavailable to a group or area because of the way it is distributed). The threshold under which a resource is perceived as scarce and can ignite conflicts depends on the evolutionary stage of the society.
5The actor can be a man or a woman, but also a group or institution, therefore in alphabetic order ‘her/his/its’.
6The scholarly convention has it that this notion, if capitalised (IR), refers to the discipline, while in lowercase the real thing is meant.
7Cf. Weber 1922, Chapter 1, §9.
8This triad was formulated by the sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno (cf. Pizzorno 1993).
9Properly speaking, the monopolistic pretence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began with the revolution of October 1917 and was reinforced around 1923 by Stalin’s (1878–1953) theory of ‘socialism in one country’ and only attenuated when the Popular Front’s strategy was launched in 1935 at the Seventh Comintern Congress.
10I uphold the distinction between Islamic (adjective of Islam) and Islamist (adjective of Islamism, a totalitarian and extremist version of political Islam).
11Against Aristotle, Hobbes acknowledged conflict as the basic fact of life, but sought safety from it in the highly integrationist architecture of the covenant leading to the establishment of Leviathan.
12To hypostasize something means to attribute the nature of a substance (ὑπόστᾰσις) to elements that are rather accidental or changeable. I shall not enter a discussion of Schmitt’s notion of ‘the political’, being unable – unlike others – to perceive it as a major and still influential turn in the thinking about politics.
13Weber 1919 is the main source for his conception of politheism.
14Regula means rule in Latin.
15Substantive is what is related to the content as different from the form or method or procedure; substantial is what is essential and not accidental (or secondary, occasional) to an entity.
16I borrow this expression from Koselleck 1979.
17In today’s political philosophy, particularly in so-called republicanism, the meaning of domination is much debated and not unequivocally defined in the sense I have described. In my usage ‘domination’ is just one species of illegitimate power, not a concept alternative to power.
18‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 67).
19See Excursus 1.
20Marx recanted the exemplary importance he previously gave to the Commune in a letter to the Dutch socialist Domela Nieuwenhuis, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm.
21The complete relevant writings are now available in the volumes I, 18–21 of the new Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, published between 1989 and 2016 in Tübingen by Mohr Siebeck. Partial English translations are The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by T. Parsons (New York: Norton 2009), and the sections on the religion of China (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951) and on ancient Judaism (also Free Press, 1952).
22The most illuminating among them still is Lukes 2005, notwithstanding my disagreement expressed below on one of its positions.
23For this distinction cf. Rawls 1999, 5–9.
24On time and the future being elements of the upcoming reshuffling of the concept of politics see Chapter 7, Part II.
25Better known is Weber’s quote from The Profession and Vocation of Politics: ‘Anyone engaged in politics is striving for power’ (Weber 1919, 311).
26Thomas Hobbes, John Locke (1632–1704), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
27A broader look at how ‘dark’ politics is mirrored in the arts should include film and TV, from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible I–II (1944–1958) to All the President’s Men, from Frost/Nixon to House of Cards.
28The term (originally Entlastung) was introduced by the German social philosopher Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) to mark the role of social institutions for human life.
Arendt, Hannah (1972) On Violence, in Crises of the Republic, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 103–184.
Easton, David (1953) The Political System, New York: Knopf.
Foucault, Michel (1976) Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976)/Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, available at http://rebels-library.org/files/foucault_society_must_be_defended.pdf
Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, James Madison and John Jay (1788) The Federalist Papers, London: Dent, 1992.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragment 53, available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Heraclitus#Fragment_53
Hobbes, Thomas (1651) Leviathan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Koselleck, Reinhart (1979) Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten/Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Lukács, Georg (1923) History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971
Lukes, Steven (2005) Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave.
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1531) Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio/Discourses on Livy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1532) Il Principe/The Prince, edited by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1845) Deutsche Ideologie/The German Ideology Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1848) Manifest der kommunistischen Partei/The Communist Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Pizzorno, Alessandro (1993) Come pensare il conflitto/How to Conceive Conflict, in Le radici della politica assoluta e altri saggi/The Roots of Absolute Politics and Other Essays, Milano: Feltrinelli, 187–203.
Rawls, John (1999) A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schmitt, Carl (1927) Der Begriff des Politischen/The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Weber, Max (1919) Wissenschaft als Beruf/Science as a Vocation, in Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Routledge, 2009, 77–128 (this is the classical translation; a more recent one is in: Weber, Max (2004) The Vocational Lectures, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1–31.).
Weber, Max (1922) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft/On Law in Economy and Society, translated by Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Alternative conceptions of political philosophy are illustrated in the several articles of:
Klosko, George, ed. (2011) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Part I, Approaches, 11–74.