雪軒齋隨想

Man is by nature a political animal - Aristotle "Politics, 1"

Politics is exciting because people disagree. They disagree about how they should live. Who should get what? 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 forth. 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 only emerges with the arrival of a Man (or Woman) Friday. Nevertheless, the disagreement that lies at the heart of politics also extends to the nature of makes social interaction 'political', and
how it should be studied. People disagree about both what it is that makes social interaction 'political', and how political activity can best be analyzed and explained.

Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general rules under which they live. Politics is thus inextricably linked to the phenomena of conflict and cooperation.

The heart of politics is often portrayed as a process if conflict resolution. (Hannah Arendt's definition of political power as 'acting in concert). However, politics in this broad sense is better thought of a search for conflict resolution than as its achievement, as not all conflict are, or can be, resolved.

The inescapable presence of diversity and scarcity ensure that politics is an inevitable feature of the human condition.

Any attempt to clarify the meaning of 'politics; must nevertheless address two major problems.
The first is the mass of associations that the word has when used in think of everyday language;
in other words, politics is a 'loaded' term. As long ago as 1775, Samuel Johnson dismissed politics as 'nothing more than a means of rising in the world', while in the nineteenth century the US historian Henry Adams summed up politics as 'the systematic organization of hatreds'.

The second and more intractable 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,and so on.

From this perspective, politics may be treated as an 'essentially contested' concept, in the sense that the term has a number of acceptable or legitimate meanings.

Source: Politics, Andrew Heywood

Posted by CeShine on Monday, January 02, 2006 at 4:46 PM | Permalink