Conceptualizing Politics

EXCURSUS 1
What is political philosophy?

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The subjective side of politics  37
What I call
3
 reconstructive political philosophy investigates (reconstructs) the – mental 
rather than material – conditions, the deep-lying reasons and motives (including 
values and principles) under which human beings construct a political community 
or polity, acknowledge and preserve it also in the interaction with a plurality of 
such formations. We have already gone down this path, defining and connecting 
fundamental concepts such as: conflict, power/force, legitimacy/identity, obligation; 
we are now about to examine how these concepts interact within the state, with 
other states, and at the global level. Besides, the initial definition of politics is being 
enriched by the continuous attention to its nature (others call it the nature of ‘the 
political’), which will culminate in the discussion of its relationship to morality.
In this type of political philosophy, the leading research interest is to understand at 
a philosophical level what politics is rather than how it ought to be, how it works in 
the minds of the actors and what is possible within its present architecture or what 
should change in order to make certain values or goals more likely to be attained or 
certain problems more likely to be solved. Digging into real politics and resurfac-
ing armed with concepts that give us some ability to understand and master it is 
intellectually more difficult, but also closer to the real lives of men and women than 
stating, refining and celebrating the supreme values and principles one thinks to be 
best for human coexistence.
Normative political philosophy, on the other hand, is interested in determining 
what the best values and principles in giving order to the polity are with respect to 
human nature or God’s will or other worldviews, including the image of a social 
bond established by an assumed social contract. It is a discourse de optima republica, 
or about the best polity, to put it in the words of Cicero. Normative is also the 
argument against the worst principle, such as against the state in anarchism of its 
various kinds. The philosophical intention to keep freedom from serfdom or justice 
from injustice and to tell people how to act brings this type of political philosophy 
closer to ethics and moral philosophy;
4
 it is a difficult balancing act to avoid that 
the common normative interest leads to an unlucky merger of moral and political 
philosophy as well as to preserve the specificity of the latter. Political philosophy is 
not moral philosophy and remains an autonomous discipline, even if it has robust 
connections to it – as we shall learn in Part IV. As a vaccine against vain attempts at 
absorbing politics into morals, it is appropriate to remember that
•  political philosophy has to do with groups defined by interest, identity and 
institutions rather than with individuals engaged in an abstract search for jus-
tice, and
•  values and principles are relevant to the people’s real lot only in as much as 
actors are identified who are motivated to endorse them and to create ade-
quate forces and coalitions.
This vaccine was rarely used in the normative political philosophy of the last 
twenty (at least) years, in which little thought has been given to the specificity 
of politics, and the development of concepts runs in a way fully unaware of and 

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38  What is politics?
uninterested in real processes and real actors; political philosophy is often, and 
speechlessly, (without any epistemological justification) welded to moral philoso-
phy in an ancillary position. I shall dub this attitude normativism and, in the extreme 
case, hyper-normativism. The result risks to be futile (no real political situation or 
problem is grasped and conceptualized) as well as self-celebrating, as if all that phi-
losophy has to say about politics had been said by designing ideal models of justice 
or freedom and deducting from them maxims for any concrete case, regardless of 
other factors and categories politics consists of. An unpleasant side effect lies in the 
leeway this attitude gives to the bookish attitude to draw on the authority of an 
author or school while endlessly quibbling over her/his/its principles instead of 
putting them to test in the confrontation with situations and problems of political, 
ethical and theoretical relevance – not unlike what happened to Aristotle in the 
philosophical schools of the Middle Ages. John Rawls himself went the opposite 
way, taking more and more stock of real politics and institutions with every new 
publication, down to the twin track (the normative design of a covenant between 
states based on principles of justice paired to a strong attention to change in inter-
national relations) followed in his last book.
5
 Unfortunately, many of his followers 
lack the same humility and the same attention to the ‘thing itself ’.
6
As a practical conclusion, the readers will find in this book a version of political 
philosophy very different from, indeed opposed to, today’s mainstream thought and 
may find themselves to be disoriented. Normative categories – freedom, equality, 
justice and solidarity – will be examined at the end of the book, after acquiring 
knowledge of the entire structure of politics. Wherever appropriate, normative per-
spectives (such as universalism in space and, unexpectedly, in time) will be argued 
in the appropriate chapter, being worked out from the specific challenges politics 
is currently confronted with, rather than asserted as general, ever-lasting principles. 
Normative questions surface in the middle of reconstructive paths, as most notably 
in the case of legitimacy; the distinction of reconstructive and normative should 
not – as is true for all things human – be taken as if it were true only in its absolute, 
hence reified version. More in general the reconstructed map of what politics is and 
how it works defines the terrain within which normative arguments can develop 
in a way that is aware of the limits, constraints, challenges political action has to 
do with.
Illuminating is still Bobbio’s account of the three main research paths of political 
philosophy (Bobbio 1989, Chapter 3):
• 
the nature of political life or, as some prefer to say, of ‘the political’
• 
the search for the roots of political obligation
• 
the inquiry de optima republica, or about the best possible polity.
Though redefining the field, reconstructive and normative attitudes do not exhaust 
it. Political philosophy can also live in works dealing with its history, whether its 
focus be authors, traditions, schools, concepts or ideologies (the ‘-isms’). Reinter-
preting authors or works of the past always occurs through the lenses of the present 

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The subjective side of politics  39
and contributes to the self-awareness of the latter, provided the philosophical inter-
est is not suffocated by erudition or the mere reproduction of past works. On the 
other hand, political philosophy as systematic thinking, reconstructive or normative 
that it may be, can hardly do without exhibiting its own relationship to relevant 
authors from its history.
7
 More generally, it must be remembered – in a Weberian 
language – that the types of thought we are talking about are ‘pure’ or ‘ideal’ types, 
which help penetrate and classify the world of political philosophy, but come up 
rather rarely in their conceptual purity, as phenomenal reality consists here, as eve-
rywhere, of mergers, combinations, inter-penetrations – in a word, the incredible 
and incoercible, but also stimulating mess of which, talking to his friend, Prince 
Hamlet elegantly said: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than 
are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
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Let us now look at the relationships political philosophy has or could develop with 
other disciplines.