Politics

• 1. Introduction

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  Politics is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society, and the word itself carries a quiet history. It traces back to the Greek polis, meaning "city," and to Aristotle's classic work Politiká. The singular form politic first appeared in English in 1430, arriving by way of Middle French politique. Yet for a word so old, politics has never settled on a single meaning. It can describe a "political solution" that is compromising and non-violent. It can mean the art or science of government. It can also be hurled as an insult. Across clans, tribes, local governments, companies, and sovereign states, the same activity takes radically different shapes. So what counts as political at all? Who decides, and by what methods? And why have thinkers from Plato to Machiavelli disagreed so sharply about whether politics is closer to ethics or to raw power? The answers begin with a fight over the boundaries of the word itself.

• 2. Contested Definitions

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  Adrian Leftwich drew a line between extensive and limited views of what counts as political. The extensive view sees politics across the whole sphere of human social relations. The limited view restricts it to certain contexts, such as governance alone. A feminist perspective pushes against that narrowing, captured in the slogan "the personal is political," which disputes the divide between private and public issues. Robert A. Dahl offered another anchor entirely, defining politics by the use of power. These are not idle distinctions. Where you draw the boundary decides which conflicts a society is even willing to call political, and which it leaves quietly unexamined in the home or the workplace.

• 3. Moralists And Realists

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  Hannah Arendt described the Aristotelian view that "to be political…meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through violence." That is one pole of an old argument. Some perspectives treat politics empirically, as an exercise of power. Others see it as a social function with a normative basis, a split sometimes called the difference between political moralism and political realism. For moralists, politics is closely linked to ethics and reaches its extreme in utopian thinking. Bernard Crick insisted that "politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics, and other forms of rule are something else." The realists answer back. Figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Harold Lasswell are counted among those who saw politics as reflecting a human desire for rule and the aggrandizement of self interests rather than moralism.

• 4. Conflict And Cooperation

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  Elmer Schattschneider argued that "at the root of all politics is the universal language of conflict." Agonism takes a similar line, treating politics as fundamentally a clash between conflicting interests. Carl Schmitt pressed the point further, locating the essence of politics in the distinction of 'friend' from 'foe.' Against this stand the more cooperative visions of Aristotle and Crick. The Irish political scientist Michael Laver offered a balance between the extremes, writing that "politics is about the characteristic blend of conflict and co-operation that can be found so often in human interactions. Pure conflict is war. Pure co-operation is true love. Politics is a mixture of both." That mixture is the texture of everything that follows.

• 5. The Birth Of The State

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  Around approximately 3000 BC, the first states of sorts emerged in early dynastic Sumer and early dynastic Egypt, arising from the Uruk period and Predynastic Egypt. Early dynastic Egypt was built around the Nile River in the north-east of Africa, its boundaries reaching to where oases existed. Early dynastic Sumer sat in southern Mesopotamia, stretching from the Persian Gulf to parts of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. These were the first civilizations to define their borders, where earlier societies had known only frontiers. Up to the 12th century, many people still lived in non-state societies, ranging from relatively egalitarian bands and tribes to complex and highly stratified chiefdoms. Why states formed in some places and not others remains disputed. Voluntary theories hold that groups came together out of shared rational interest, often tied to agriculture and the pressures that followed. The hydraulic hypothesis ties the state to the need to build and maintain large-scale irrigation. Conflict theories counter that states arose through the dominance of one population over another, with some arguing warfare itself was critical.

• 6. From Empires To Nations

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  The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, is treated by political scientists as the start 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. Before nations dominated the map, the classic states of 18th-century Europe were multinational empires: the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Russian Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire. Such empires were absolute monarchies, ruled by a king, emperor, or sultan, with one ethnic group dominant and its language the tongue of public administration. In the Muslim world, Caliphates were established immediately after the death of Muhammad in 632, growing into multi-ethnic transnational empires. A few small states endured, among them Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, and the republic of San Marino. The nation state is widely seen as a 19th-century European phenomenon, helped by state-mandated education, mass literacy, and mass media. Germany and Italy came into existence partly through nationalist campaigns, with German unification preceded by a customs union, the Zollverein. National self-determination ran through United States President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, contributing to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after the First World War.

• 7. Mapping The Machinery

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  David Easton defined a political system as "the interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society." That machinery can be sorted in several ways. Most governments are either monarchies, including constitutional monarchies, or republics, which are usually presidential, semi-presidential, or parliamentary; republics are the more common. Regimes can also be classed by who runs them: democracy as rule of many, oligarchy as rule by few, autocracy as rule by one. By vertical integration, systems run from confederations to federations to unitary states. Beneath all of these sits the sovereign state itself. Max Weber defined the state as a political entity holding a monopoly on violence within its territory, while the Montevideo Convention requires a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into international relations. Politics also stacks by scale. Macropolitics affects an entire system or the relations between systems. Mesopolitics covers intermediary structures such as national parties, where Duverger's law holds that first-past-the-post systems tend toward two parties and proportional representation toward many. Micropolitics describes the actions of individual actors, often called political participation.

• 8. The Stakes Of Freedom

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  Democracy, in one description, is a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do, yet no single force controls what occurs. Among modern theorists, three conceptions contend: aggregative, deliberative, and radical. Aggregative democracy treats the goal as gathering citizens' preferences and combining them, with the most-voted policy winning. Joseph Schumpeter gave the minimalist version its most famous form in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a line later carried by William H. Riker, Adam Przeworski, and Richard Posner. Anthony Downs argued in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy that ideological parties are needed as brokers between individuals and government. Robert A. Dahl introduced the term polyarchy for societies whose institutions and free elections approach the democratic ideal. The left-right spectrum offers another lens, dating from the French Revolution, when supporters of the republic and the common people sat on the left of the National Assembly and supporters of the monarchy and the Church sat on the right. Norberto Bobbio framed the divide by inequality: the left treats social inequality as unethical or unnatural, while the right sees most of it as the result of ineradicable natural inequalities. Running underneath it all is freedom itself, split between negative liberty as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the absence of disabling conditions. In their purest form, libertarians become anarchists, arguing for the total abolition of the state, the point where the long argument over politics circles back to whether there should be any politics at all.