1.What is Politics?
A: Political Social Reality.
B: Conceptions of Political and Social Reality.
C: Concepts, ideas and theories of political and social reality.
2. Max Weber’s Understanding of Politics
To know what politics is nowadays (i.e. in 1918) one has to know what a ‘state’ is.
‘Nowadays we have to say that a state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this ‘territory’ being another defining characteristic of the state.’ Weber: Political Writings CUP, ed P Lassman, p. 311
First Political Question: What is a state?
Weber’s conception of the Modern State
The state, like the political associations that preceded it historically, is ‘a relationship of rule [Herrschaft - dominion] by human beings over human beings, and one that rests on the legitimate use of violence (that is violence that is held to be legitimate). For the state to remain in existence, those who are ruled must submit to the authority claimed by whoever rules at any given time.’
What the modern state is and what it is not.
- The modern state is usually bound within a particular territory, over which rule is exercised – the country. But the state is not the country or land.
- The State is not identical with its leader.
‘L’état, c’est moi.’ Louis XVI
3.The modern state is an office or set of offices which are distinct from those who occupy them. (State Government)
Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1689) chapter 7 ‘Of Political or Civil Society’.
I. Kant Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) 45& 46. ‘The members of such a society (societas civilis), i.e., of a state, who are assembled for legislation are called citizens (cives).’
4.The modern state is not identical with society at large. It is a sphere within society.
(Political community is a particular kind of association distinct from other types social, economic etc.) Hegel was among the first modern theorists to explicitly distinguish between State and Civil Society. The state for Hegel is effectively part of society at large – for which Hegel uses the term Sittlichkeit or ethical life. The ethical life of a community consists in family, civil society and the state. EPR § 182 Addition. Civil society according to Hegel is the economic sphere in which individuals, in pursuing their individual self-interest, also serve, as an unintended consequence of their action, the common interest
“Hegel may not have invented the modern concept of the state, but he certainly does give civil society something like its modern sense. Before Hegel civil society in this specifically modern sense did not exist.” Manfred Riedel Between Tradition and Revolution p. 147
5.The modern state is not identical with civil society.
In a comment on Aristotle’s Politics Hegel claims that:
‘The Polis lacked ‘the abstract the abstract right of our modern times, which isolates the individual and as such leaves him be (so that he counts essentially as a person) and yet which holds everything together like an invisible spirit, - with the result that in no individual is there either the consciousness of or activity for the whole; the individual works for the whole, does not know why, he is preoccupied with the protection of his own individuality. It is divided/separated activity from which everyone has only a bit. Like in a factory where no-one any longer makes a whole thing, only a part and does not have the requisite capacities, while the act of putting the parts together is left to a few. Free peoples such as the ancient Greeks) had consciousness and activity only for the whole; moderns are for themselves as individuals unfree – bourgeois [bürgerliche] freedom is dprived of the universal, a principle of isolation. But civil [bürgerliche] freedom (in German we do not have two words for citoyen and bourgeois) is a necessary moment, which the old states did not recognize.’ Hegel: HistoryofPhilosophy Werke, 19 227-8.
6.The material basis of modern capitalist states (on which their effectiveness in large part depends) lies in the revenues and resources they draw from the economy, the circulation and exchange of commodities.
7.The modern state is not identical with the nation or people. Nationality and citizenship or statehood are different.
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher, wrote in his famous book The Concept of the Political, (1932), Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Politics is marked by the question who is my friend? And who is my enemy?
8.The state is a mechanism of (legitimate) authority and lawful rule that is distinct from the citizenry and those over whom that authority and rule are exercised.
9.The positive basis of the modern state lies in its mechanism of coercion and in its ability (where necessary) to coerce its citizens, in order to exact compliance and to establish social order.
10.The normative basis of the modern state lies in the legitimacy of it mechanism of coercion, and in the legitimacy of its laws and institutions. A modern state is legitimate when (most of) its citizens have reason to comply with its laws and participate in its institutions independently of their fear of the sanctions that attend non-compliance.
Weber on Legitimacy
Weber’s definition looks at first blush to define politics entirely in terms of the role and function of state - leads to a narrow definition of politics.
Weber starts off asking what is politics, but soon is forced to raise the question: the Second Political Question
What makes the state (or its laws or institutions) legitimate?
L1 - based on tradition or custom.
L2 - based on the charisma of a leader and of personal devotion
L3 - based on legality, the rule of law, belief in the validity of laws, and in the competence of those who devise and enforce them.
3.Third (Political) Question: what holds society (the state) together?
1.Power and violence
2.Agreements binding contracts.
3.Like-mindedness - Gemeinsinn - Gemeinschaft
Fredinand Toennies 1887: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
Shared values and traditions
Common Projects (Communitarianism)
M. Sandel “We can know a good together that we canot know alone.”
Result of processes of socialisation family upbringing, education etc. Hegel EPR §268A
[H]abit blinds us to the basis of our entire existence. It does not occur to someone who walks the streets in safety at night that this might be otherwise, for this habit of [living in] safety has become second nature., and we scarcely stop to think that it is solely the effect of particular institutions. Representational thought [Hobbes? Kant?] often imagines that the state is held together by force; but what holds it together is solely the basic sense of order that everyone possesses.
4.Markets
Conflicts
4.Politics in the Ancient World
4.1 ta politika – polis. The affairs of a polis. What is a polis?
4.2Aristotle’s notion of politics.
NE 1094 a/b
Political Science
philosophy of human affairs
NE X, 10, 1181 b15
Ethics Economics
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Since then our predecessors have left the area of political science uncharted, it is presumably better to examine it ourselves instead, and indeed to examine political systems in general, and so to complete the philosophy of human affairs...First, then, let us try to review any sound remarks our predecessors have made on particular topics. Then let us study the collected political systems, to see from them what sorts of things preserve and destroy city-states, and political systems of different types; and what causes some city-states to conduct politics well and some badly. For when we have studied these questions, we will grasp better what sort of political system is best; how each political system should be organized so as to be best; and what customs and laws should follow. Let us discuss this then, beginning from the first principles. (N.E. X 1181 b10-30)
Plato
Is the Republic a book on politics?
Jean-Jacques Rouseau: “the Republic is not a work on politics, but the finest treatise on education that was ever written.”
It can equally be seen as at reatise on psychology, metaphysics and morality.
Republic Gk. Politiea can mean republic but can also mean ‘constitution’ or ‘régime’
Republic I 331c What is justice? What is the quality or qualities that make the just person just?
Cephalus: to speak the truth and to give people their due. 331b
Simonides: doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s ennemies. 332d
Thrasymachus: justice is the inteest of the stronger. 338c The best thing (true happiness) is to appear just, but to be unjust. (Sophistry - art of persuasion.)
Glaucon: justice is at best a social expediency. 359
Socrates: Justice is always in one’s true interests. Justice is true happiness.
Justice is not just a quality of individual persons but of societies or poleis 368e. 369
The ideal city . NB Ideal = to logo = made out of speech or reason.
Does not mean ‘imaginary’ or not real, even if the Athenian polis is very far from the one envisioned by Plato.
The ideal person.
For Plato the person is the soul. The body is simply the prison in which the soul - Gk psyche or controlling consciousness - is housed. (Phaidon 82e 65c0)