Conceptualizing Politics

FIGURE 3.1
   Persepolis. The highly integrated hierarchy (dignitaries, the king’s guard, 
tributaries carrying gifts) of the ancient Persian empire as represented on 
the walls of Persepolis (near Shiraz, Iran), built in the sixth century BCE 
and burnt down by Alexander the Great in BCE 330.

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50  How politics works
•  is meaningful within the framework of the community’s cultural and social 
values; in other words, they must fail if they are drafted at the drawing board 
and then imposed over the participants – as it often happened in colonial times. 
Here also lies a problem, though not an insurmountable difficulty in the legis-
lating activity of a post-national quasi-polity like the European Union.
It is now clear that the institutions we are talking about are both formal, or legal, 
and informal. The former prevail in domestic politics, since states all around the 
world have adopted the Western tendency to juridify all existing rules, except 
those that cannot be made explicit or public for reasons of decency or hypocrisy. 
Between states ‘international regimes’ (see Chapter 6) can be regarded as informal 
or semi-formal institutions.
Institutions are a key concept in jurisprudence and sociology, why not also in 
political philosophy? They play indeed a role in shaping the actors’ behaviour in as 
much as they
• 
define their roles, that is
• 
the motivations and interests that are possible within the given but also ever-
changing framework of shared rules, and
•  give information over my and the others’ expectations and the negative and 
positive incentives that can be brought to bear.
In a word, institutions shape the universe of meanings actors put in their own 
actions and recognise in the behaviour of others. They sustain a grid of interaction 
that is at the core of politics, of which they are along with power structures and 
decision making the key component. Politics is a power-decision-institution trinity or 
triangle. For actions or processes that lie outside this realm, the use of the adjective 
‘political’ (calling, for example, the writing of a song or the wearing of a piece of 
cloth, a political action) seems to be misplaced and inflationary – if we agree on 
using words in a binding and substantial way.
* * *
We cannot leave the explanation of order and institution without looking into an 
element we have so far barely mentioned: fear. In different versions, fear is a prem-
ise, a component, but also a product of politics. Fear is an emotion or, as writers of 
politics used to say, a passion;
2
 passions are elements of politics whose dynamics are 
different from, say, that of interest or obligation.
Fear is a premise of politics in the contractarian account of it: it is the fear of 
being killed, maimed and robbed by others in the state of nature that drives human 
beings, as we shall soon see, to seek respite and protection under the powerful claws 
of Leviathan; in the state of civility the natural and limitless fear of death and ruin is 
replaced by the fear of law (metus legis, in Hobbes’s Latin) and punishment, a pillar 
of peace and security.

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Order, institutions, models  51
Regardless of contract theory, we know fear to be present in a multifaceted way 
in our communal life: fear of war, terrorism, fear of losing one’s job and savings, fear 
of authoritarian developments in some countries, fear of losing the election along 
with one’s own status, but also fear of foreigners and immigrants. Fear is not like 
fear: we need a distinction. Fear can be a protective sentinel against real dangers 
that threaten our community, be it our town (in the case of an increased crime or 
unemployment wave) or humankind (in the case of a looming nuclear war). With-
out this reasonable fear, communities would be at risk, and would not prepare for 
lasting protection against, say, floods or cyber attacks. Let us call it realistic fear as to 
keep it from the neurotic fear that projects our inner sense of insecurity or panic into 
the faces of people with a different skin colour.
3
 The history of intolerance, rac-
ism and fascist movements is full of currents of neurotic fear, which, spontaneous 
or artificially fostered, is crucial to the build-up of pathological political identities 
(wall-identities, as we have seen in the last chapter). In a way, politics consists of rec-
ognising what is reasonably worth being feared, while at the same time dismissing 
all incitements to fear as an instrument of bellicose and irrational mass mobilisation. 
Without skillfully managing fear in its twin face, a political regime can hardly sta-
bilise itself and gain legitimation with the ruled.
Postmodernists believe no distinction makes sense and that fear is just a subjec-
tive, illogical feature, to which no reality check is relevant. This belief is similar to 
the refusal, mentioned in Chapter 2, to keep symbol apart from myth, thus main-
taining that all foundation narrative cannot but be mythical. This is all far from real 
politics, in which those distinctions are held valid and broadly used by actors. In 
particular, there are two criteria for keeping realistic and reasonable fear separate 
from the neurotic one: first, in a world shaped by technology, comes the check by 
science and scientific institutions, which can clarify questions, such as uncertainty 
about Genetically Modified Organisms or the so-far insufficient preoccupation 
with global warming. To make good use of scientific knowledge, however, a society 
has to be capable of open and free public debate, in which instances of the two 
fears are debated and citizens can develop an informed opinion. Though this does 
not happen in democracies alone, it happens at best in a democratic framework; the 
postmodernist enthusiasm for the blurring of distinctions witnesses, among other 
things, a disbelief in the ability of liberal-democratic procedures to have a better 
relationship to the truth than other regimes. This is now endangered by the non-
chalant relationship to the truth, in particular the scientific truth, shown by a new 
generation of populist demagogues, but also by the citizens attracted by the false 
claims, bizarre myths and emotionally overloaded beliefs that abound on the web.
The existence of neurotic fear – as well as the use made of it by fear-mongers 
and charlatans in order to bring confusion among the public and make them prone 
to populist and dictatorial leaders – has misled some authors to see only this side 
of the coin and to try to expel fear from (civilised, democratic) politics altogether. 
This is neither possible nor convenient because of the counter-intentional effects 
that come with the cancellation of an element of reality; a theoretically balanced 
and differentiated approach promises a better regulation of fear.

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