Defining politics

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 723.

WHAT IS POLITICS?

Read the text and be ready to discuss it.

Reading Assignment

Politics is exciting because people disagree. They disagree about how they should live. How should power and other resources be distributed? Should society be based on cooperation or conflict? And so on. They also disagree about how such matters should be resolved. How should collective decisions be made? Who should have a say? How much influence should each person have? And so on. For Aristotle, this made politics the ‘master science': that is, nothing less than the activity through which human beings attempt to improve their lives and create the Good Society. Politics is, above all, a social activity. It is always a dialogue, and never a monologue.

Solitary individuals such as Robinson Crusoe may be able to develop a simple economy, produce art, and so on, but they cannot engage in politics.

Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live. Although politics is also an academic subject (sometimes indicated by the use of “Politics” with a capital P), it is then clearly the study of this activity. Politics is thus linked to the phenomena of conflict and cooperation. On the one hand, the existence of rival opinions, different wants, competing needs and opposing interests guarantees disagreement about the rules under which people live. On the other hand, people recognize that, in order to influence these rules or ensure that they are upheld, they must work with others. This is why the heart of politics is often portrayed as a process of conflict resolution, in which rival views or competing interests are reconciled with one another. However, politics in this broad sense is more a search for conflict resolution than its achievement, as not all conflicts can be, resolved.

Any attempt to clarify the meaning of ‘politics' must address two major problems. The first is the mass of associations that the word has when used in everyday language; in other words, politics is a ‘loaded' term. Whereas most people think of, say, economics, geography, history and biology as academic subjects, few people discuss politics in an impartial manner. To make matters worse, politics is usually thought of as a ‘dirty' word: it arises images of trouble, disruption and even violence on the one hand, and deceit, manipulation and lies on the other.

The second difficulty is that even respected authorities cannot agree what the subject is about. Politics is defined in such different ways: as the exercise of power, the exercise of authority, the making of collective decisions, the allocation of scarce resources, the practice of deception and manipulation, and so on.