Conceptualizing Politics

5.   Objections and consequences
The reader may at this point be disappointed by the absence in these reflections on 
power of some questions that are otherwise widely discussed in publications
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 and 
public debates regarding the very same item, such as the field on which power is 

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Politics and power  15
exerted (preferences of the actors? or their needs or interests? declared or covert, 
illusionary or real?) or the conflicts (open and visible, as in the Weberian defini-
tion I have adopted above? or non-visible but possible?) that it temporarily settles. 
Others may miss notions introduced by Michel Foucault (1926–1984) such as bio-
power and governmentality, and largely used in the last decades.
My reasons for this absence, or the deflating of these and other notions like 
domination, are the following:
A.  This is an introduction to political philosophy (in the very specific understand-
ing of it, to be explained in Excursus 1), not to a general social theory that 
includes a phenomenology of life-forms in the society at large.
B.  Being this is an introduction, I aim at defining and explaining the elementary 
concepts that support the structure of political interaction, while not getting 
involved – as far as it goes – in a debate concerned with conflicting concep-
tions of politics and society endowed with a high amount of presuppositions 
and value-laden assumptions.
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 To  add – as suggested by Lukes – to decision 
making and agenda setting a third dimension of power, that is the power to 
prevent people from enacting the so far ‘latent’ conflict between the interests 
of those holding power and the ‘real’ interests of those excluded, requires a 
comprehensive philosophy of history and society indicating what the visible 
but elusive and what the hidden but ‘real’ interest of the people is, and what 
they should do in order to become aware of the latter and pursue it. Now, the 
philosophically most refined version of this theory remains Lukács (1923), the 
incunabulum of Critical or Western (as opposed to Soviet) Marxism. Accord-
ing to this eminent theorist (1885–1971) of Communism, the overturning of 
capitalism, not its reform – as social-democrats wanted to have it – was seen 
to be the real interest of the working class. Lukács wrote this at the dawn of 
Soviet Communism, and we cannot today ignore what this strategy led to in 
the history of the twentieth century: division of the left in Western Europe 
resulting in its weakening in front of Fascism, state terror with 10 million 
victims and economic backwardness in the Soviet Union. I shall pursue no 
further the question of the ‘real’ interest. Apart from the reasonable wish not to 
overburden our study of the elements of politics with philosophical disputes 
among various positions and ideologies, there are indeed in our time, unlike 
in the nineteenth century, enough open conflicts and well-articulated interests 
in and between our societies to make the search for ‘real’ but latent interests 
redundant.
C.  Having replied to some possible objection, let us now work out some con-
sequences deriving from our definitions. That politics lives among conflicts, 
their settlement by acts of power and influence and the new arising conflicts 
means that political processes normally end in the making of decisions about 
the conflict matter. Decision making has two sides, the political and the policy 
side. The former revolves around the conflicting parties, the conflict techniques 

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16  What is politics?
(from rational arguing to negotiating to cheating and threatening) and the 
crucial achievement of consensus in the public opinion, between parties and in 
the elites. In the policy corner the focus is on the issue at stake, its substantive 
features, the efficacy and efficiency of the solution found. As it happens, politi-
cal reasons (aimed at gaining consensus or neutrality from some less privileged