Short answers, pulled from the story.
Politics is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society, usually concerned with resolving issues within a society via a government. It is exercised across social levels, from clans and tribes to companies, sovereign states, and the international level.
The word politics has its roots in the Greek word polis, meaning "city," and in Aristotle's classic work Politiká. The singular form politic was first attested in English in 1430, coming from the Middle French politique.
Political moralism links politics closely to ethics and reaches its extreme in utopian thinking, a view associated with Aristotle and Bernard Crick. Political realism, associated with figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Harold Lasswell, holds that politics reflects a human desire for rule and self-interest rather than moralism.
The first states of sorts were early dynastic Sumer and early dynastic Egypt, arising around approximately 3000 BC from the Uruk period and Predynastic Egypt. Early dynastic Egypt was based around the Nile River, and early dynastic Sumer was located in southern Mesopotamia.
The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, is considered by political scientists to be the beginning of the modern international system, in which external powers avoid interfering in another country's domestic affairs. The Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel laid out that principle of non-interference in the mid-18th century.
Most governments are either monarchies, including constitutional monarchies, or republics, which are usually presidential, semi-presidential, or parliamentary, with republics being the most common. Regimes can also be classified by who runs them, as a democracy ruled by many, an oligarchy ruled by few, or an autocracy ruled by one.
The left-right political spectrum dates from the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly who supported the republic and the common people sat on the left and supporters of the monarchy and the Church sat on the right. According to Norberto Bobbio, the left treats social inequality as unethical or unnatural while the right sees most inequality as the result of ineradicable natural inequalities.