Politics

“politics: as a general concept, the practice of the art or science of administering states or other political units. However, the definition of politics is highly, perhaps essentially, contested. There is a considerable disagreement on which aspects of social life are to be considered ‘political.”’At one extreme, many (notably, but not only feminists, assert that the personal is political, meaning that the essential characteristics of political life can be found in any relationship, such as that between a man and a woman, Popular usage, however, suggests a much narrower domain for politics: it is assumed that politics only occurs at the level of government and the state and must involve party competition. In the sense developed in Bernard Crick’s In Defense of Politics, the phenomenon of politics is very limited in time and space to certain kinds of relatively liberal, pluralistic societies which allow relatively open debate.

To say that an area of activity, like sport, the arts, or family life is not part of politics or is ‘nothing to do with politics,’ is to make a particular kind of political point about it, principally that it is not to be discussed on whatever is currently regarded as the political agenda. Keeping matters off the political agenda can, of course, be a particularly effective way of dealing with them in one’s own interests.

The traditional definition of politics, ‘the art and science of government,’ offers no constraint on its application since there has never been a consensus on what activities count as government. Is government confined to the state? Does it not also take place in church, guild, estate, and family?

There are two fundamental test questions we can apply to the concept of politics. First, do creatures other than human beings have politics? Second, can there be societies without politics? From classical times onward there have been some writers who thought that other creatures did have politics: in the mid-seventeenth century Purchas was referring to bees as the ‘political flying insects.’ Equally there have been attempts—before and since More coined the term to posit ‘Utopian’ societies with no politics. The implication is usually (‘Utopia’ means nowhere) that such a society is conceivable, but not practically possible.

A modern mainstream view might be: politics applies only to human beings, or at least to those beings which can communicate symbolically and thus make statements, invoke principles, argue, and disagree. Politics occurs where people disagree about the distribution of reasons and have at least some procedure for the resolution of such disagreements. It is thus not present in the state of nature where people make war on each other in their own interests, shouting, as it were, ‘I will have that.’ It is also absent in other cases, where there is a monolithic and complete disagreement on the rights and duties in a society. Of course, it can be objected that this definition makes the presence or absence of politics dependent on a contingent feature of consciousness, the question of whether people accept the existing rules. If one accepts notions of ‘latent disagreement,’ there is, again, no limit to the political domain.”

Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.