This book is devised as a basic tool for all those who, faced with politics, want first of all to understand it – to understand what politics is, how it works and how it changes or fails to change. In the Western tradition since the ancients (Aristotle and Cicero much more than Plato) and down to Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, this endeavour to understand politics has been pursued by creating and refining concepts capable of identifying its basic structures, constraints and normative alternatives. Concepts, or more exactly, categories, are the protagonists of this book; they require an attitude of abstract thinking capable of providing us with some orientation in the wide sea of events, processes, conflicting claims. As Max Weber and Norberto Bobbio knew, sticking to conceptual clarity and using an atlas of this region of human life make the best starting point for an unbiased inquiry into what politics is as well as into the possibility and the limits of change and reform – an inquiry that should accompany any attempt at giving politics and policy making one or another direction according to one’s own preferences. Politics as a tentatively rational activity needs a clear picture of its own architecture in order to keep illusion, self-delusion and ideological confusion away from itself – not an easy business indeed.
Concepts, however, are intended here not so much as they develop in the history of political ideas, which will appear on the stage only briefly and only where strictly necessary, but rather as forms of reflection (‘conceptualization’) on things, that is on processes taking place – primarily in our time – in the polities and the societies associated with them. Very much unlike in works aimed at devising ideal polities, in this book history, political science and anthropology will therefore play a role in the description of the stuff – political experiences of groups, peoples and humankind – that we are trying to adequately conceptualize. Yet notwithstanding all cross-fertilisation with other disciplines, in particular history, this book’s approach to politics remains highly philosophical. It tries – hence the title – to put the world of politics in concepts. The final result is expected to be a conceptual lexicon of politics.
As to normative categories, besides giving an account of the general debate on them, they will be introduced mainly in the specific configuration in which they arise from new evolutionary achievements and challenges (the uncertain future of liberal democracy; globalisation malaise; lethal threats such as the existence of nuclear weapons and the worsening of climate change). The search for an overarching formula of justice or freedom has in its generality little significance for the real politics addressing and afflicting real human beings. In the same line of thinking, fictional examples of moral dilemmas or behavioural prescriptions regarding the insulated individual – so frequent in writings somehow influenced by the analytic tradition – will not be discussed here, since people act in politics as associated individuals, or as citizens congregated in groups, movements, parties, nations under political or social rather than moral premises.
Is this a book just for philosophers? Hardly so. For readers with some background in philosophy and political science it will obviously be an easier read; but a good level of general culture and an ability to follow a formal, though not mathematized argument is indeed sufficient. What is then the point of reading this book? The following, I would think: if you want to achieve some unconventional understanding or practical orientation in front of the questions you feel to be confronted with while watching the news or going to the polls, a measure of abstract and overarching, hence philosophical, reconsideration of the issues at stake is a necessary help.
This textbook has the ambition to be possibly readable to not only a Western readership. I am fully aware that my underlying knowledge of the history and politics of non-European peoples does not match this ambition often enough; on the other hand a truly worldwide view on politics and history is still a fledgling. Besides, this book does not conceal its strong, though critically reconsidered roots in Western, especially European, culture and politics. Politics, and the thinking of it, does not exist without what I understand as political identity. Yet this is not irreconcilable, I like to think, with the scholarly attitude to give representation to all the relevant notions and opinions out of not just of tolerance, but curiosity as well. These used to be leading virtues of European modernity on its sunny side and should not stop before the multifarious and puzzling life-forms of politics.
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What follows is a summary of the book, presented in a narrative style.
Politics in its reality allocates resources and settles conflicts by the use of a type of power that is guaranteed by force, but in order to achieve acceptance and stability, political power must be able to legitimate itself, drawing on the values and principles that lie at the core of political group identity. Only legitimate power can generate a sense of political obligation and keep the polity together, thus allowing for peaceful conflict resolution and prevention – on the other hand, sooner or later the resource operated by political power is bound to generate new conflicts (Part I).
Politics, whatever the actors’ goals, generates on the whole some kind of order, which is underpinned by institutions. In political philosophy, several models of order – descriptive accounts of the origins of the polity and/or prescriptive designs of the ‘best polity’ – can be (and are here summarily) identified. With all of this in mind, the core political institution, the state, can be now defined, also in its relationship to society, the nation, the law and more in general to values. How can the state be ruled? This is the thorny subject matter of the chapter on government and democracy; on the latter a demythologizing view is proposed (Part II).
Next step: the state, and in particular the modern state, since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 cannot be understood without widening our vision to the states or the international system. War, peace and the widening web of international institutions – what can be called the ‘anarchical society’ – are described, especially with an eye on the European Union as an example of non-imperial pacification. The evolution of war towards nuclear war makes it, at the same time, unavailable as a Clausewitzian instrument of politics and suicidal for humankind and its civilisation. This is seen as the original global (and lethal) challenge, which can only be addressed if politics will be able to go beyond its classical definition mentioned above and will also (a problematic coexistence of different tasks!) become able to take care of the global commons and the survival of civilisation – this is the turn from modern to post-modern politics (nothing to do with the postmodernists’ views!). The specific features of the second global challenge – climate change – are discussed with regard to our attitude towards future generations (Part III).
In the end (Part IV), the relationship between morality and politics is examined, along with the main categories of normative political philosophy: liberty, equality, justice and – unlike in other accounts – solidarity. The main positions and the open problems in these fields – including those concerning human and fundamental rights – will be presented, along with the difficulties raised by any temptation to see moral and political philosophy as identical. A brief look at Critical Theory concludes this Part. But the volume also contains an Epilogue recapitulating all that drives us to political action as well as two Excurses: the first deals with the nature and limits of political philosophy, the second, with the philosophically significant relationship of politics and death.
Lastly, this book does not contain a chapter on gender because I prefer giving this fundamental and transversal issue the appropriate relevance wherever it comes into an interplay with other political categories.
Beyond the philosophical reflections that are the main content of this book, the hints at world history and world politics, the stuff from which my political philosophy is drawn, require enough space in and of themselves so that any additional content would overburden the volume and make it thicker in pages than I wanted. This is why the reader will not find here what can be easily retrieved on the Internet, from the description of events (such as battles, peace treaties, revolutions and parliamentary votes) to the biographies of notable protagonists (only the year of birth and death is indicated for a preliminary orientation; living persons’ names carry no such indication). This notwithstanding, to put some flesh around conceptual definitions, I have sometimes cited historical or economic or sociological facts that may not be immediately present to the mind of non-European readers.
The References at the end of each chapter contain the sources of the texts quoted in that chapter, which are kept at a minimum. Additionally, each chapter, as well this introductory note, is complemented with the indication of Further readings, in case the reader wants to learn more about certain topics. For ease of access, whenever possible, the e-version of books and articles is cited instead of the hard copy. Wherever it is important to know the year of composition or first publication of a book, this year is quoted, while the publication year of the edition actually used comes at the end of the entry.
Titles are quoted in their original language, followed by the English translation (italicised if corresponding to a published edition). Only on two or three occasions was it necessary to refer to a work lacking an English translation. I have introduced concepts based on ancient Greek and Latin using these languages, as well as in sporadic cases Arabic, Chinese and Russian words.
There is, in my view, a twin rationale for doing so. First, the triumph of English as lingua franca, a blessing for international understanding and scientific communication, should not lead to erasing the use of all other languages. It is as curious as it is lamentable that the love for diversity, celebrated with some pomp everywhere in Western societies, must stop at the language barrier, beyond which all is homogenised in English as if Babel had never existed or were still a divine punishment to be finally remedied. The other reason is that giving up all linguistic multiplicity and all erudition with the alleged aim of making a book or a discipline accessible to everybody makes them intellectually poorer, while a less standardised linguistic sensitivity remains open only to students of the very best and exclusive universities around the world. In some measure, it would amount to a hidden contribution to even more inequality.
In any case, the tiny opening made to linguistic diversity in this book is a signal and an offer to those who accept this stimulation, and an act of respect towards readers of mother tongues other than English. But do not make any mistake: the book can be fully read and completely understood in English only.
Conventional wisdom holds that political philosophy, as a purely conceptual exercise, is foreign to visual elements. In the case of a textbook, this is not necessarily true, but my wish to use images to complement the conceptual communication of the book’s contents has been to a large extent frustrated by complicated copyright concerns. The reader will thus find only a few illustrations printed in this volume; for the remaining chapters I have sometimes indicated web links leading to the images I intended to show. The reader will choose whether or not to make use of them.
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My MOOC (massive open online course) Political Philosophy: An Introduction, recorded in the Palagio di Parte Guelfa in Florence in 2013–14, is still available (2016) on the <iversity.org> platform, Berlin. It follows to a good extent the same road map as this textbook, but does not overlap with it.
Inspiration for this approach to political philosophy, which has been influencing my teaching for the past twenty-five years, came originally from the articles written in the 1970s by Norberto Bobbio for the Enciclopedia Einaudi and later translated by Peter Kennealy into English. In 1989, they were published by Polity Press, Oxford under the infelicitous, then fashionable title Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power; in it the subtitle is the true title, better corresponding to the original Stato, governo, società. I still recommend this book as a whole and will quote from it (Bobbio 1989) in the Further Readings.
There are two main reference works for philosophy in general online, which also contain entries regarding political philosophy, though our field is not their main focus:
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, it can and should be obviously widely used, provided the readers are able to distinguish well-carved and complete entries from those still in need of some or much additional work.
For a more analytical orientation tour in our field, two handbooks are useful:
Estlund, David (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gaus, Gerald and Fred D’Agostino, eds. (2013) The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, London: Routledge.
Whoever wishes to know more on a scholarly key about a number of categories, in particular normative in character, addressed in this book can make use of
Besussi, Antonella, ed. (2012) A Companion to Political Philosophy, Farnham: Ashgate.
Given this book’s theoretical rather than historical approach, an indispensable complement to it is a history of political philosophy. For a preliminary orientation see:
Klosko, George, ed. (2011) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Not to forget is a classical work, whose chapters deal each with a major thinker:
Strauss, Leo and Joseph Cropsey, eds. (1987) History of Political Philosophy, 3rd edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Since one thing is how philosophers of the past conceived of politics and polity, and quite a different thing how these effectively developed, equally important would be a worldwide comparative history of political institutions, which does not, however, exist. For Europe, two now classical research works can be cited:
Rokkan, Stein (1999) State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe, edited by Peter Flora et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tilly, Charles, ed. (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press.