Conceptualizing Politics

§5 of Chapter 5).
This is, however, not the entire story. In the classical political economy of the 
Scottish (most eminently represented by Adam Smith, 1723–1790) and English 
Enlightenment, the freedom of man and his or her happiness were located in indus-
try and the market rather than in politics and its institutions; the state was seen by 
Smith only as the provider of external security, courts of justice and basic public 
works – and basic education, he added interestingly, against religious fanaticism 
as well as the ‘torpor’ created by the division of labour in the worker’s mind. This 
was the beginning of a never-ending controversy between politics and economy, 
the state and the market, as to which pole of this relationship can be credited 
with providing the best order for the associated life of human beings. Laissez faire 

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54  How politics works
liberalism vs. political liberalism,
7
 neoliberalism vs. liberalism/social democracy, 
Robert Nozick’s (1938–2002) argument for a minimal state (minarchism) vs. John 
Rawls’s (1921–2002) two principles of justice:
8
 these are only some episodes of the 
controversy, which is as old as the rise of capitalism as a force capable of shaping 
the entire society including politics. Never before in history has the economy held 
such sway on the whole of human life, a phenomenon later magnified by globalisa-
tion. A further, less influential episode is anarcho-capitalism, a right-wing version 
of libertarianism (a communist version also exists);
9
 it recommends giving back 
to the market all state functions, also giving up – as propounded by Murray N. 
Rothbard (1926–1995) – its monopoly of force. This is one of the many episodes
10
 
in which radical and marginalised theories, which fail to build up any significant 
political support, can nonetheless provide arguments and recipes of use to the strug-
gles developing in mainstream parties (libertarian positions have popped up in the 
debates inside the Republican Party in the USA since Ronald Reagan).
In a very distant corner in the gallery of order models we find Georg W. F. Hegel 
(1770–1831) and Marx, or rather Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. To be true, his-
toricist thinkers who see and justify political regimes on the basis of their corre-
spondence with a given stage of history (be it history of the Spirit/Logos or the 
class struggle) do not advance abstract models of polity. Hegel certainly did not; in 
any case, unlike his thoughts on the individual and freedom, his philosophy of the 
state makes him nowadays a ‘dead dog’
11
 even more so than he was in the 1850s, as 
Marx saw him with regret in this shape – and reacted by flirting (‘coquetting’) with 
Hegel’s dialectics in the philosophical passages of Capital.
12
 The ‘model’ devised by 
Marx and Engels belongs to the philosophy of history and political economy rather 
than political philosophy, and regards political regimes as resulting (like a ‘super-
structure’) from the respective stage of class struggle between ‘freeman and slave, 
patrician and plebeian, lord and serf . . . in a word, oppressor and oppressed’ – as 
they wrote at the outset of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 
1848, 14). The last stage – between bourgeoisie and proletariat – of this struggle 
was thought to lead to a revolution terminating all class oppression and introduc-
ing first an egalitarian society based on the principle that everyone gets as much as  
s/he contributes to society with her/his labour, later evolving into a higher stage of 
communism under the very different principle ‘from each according to his ability, 
to each according to his needs!’ The state as bureaucratic machinery is reduced to a 
minimum in the first stage and will disappear in the developed communist society, 
giving room – according to Engels – to a mere ‘administration of things’.
13
Of the two main traditions that developed from Marx and Engels, the socialist or 
social-democratic one merged somehow with progressive liberalism, giving shape 
and justification to the mainly European model of democracy we have seen above. 
The communist strain produced with Lenin (1870–1924) the model of a radically 
egalitarian society and cannot be separated from the disasters it produced: a party 
dictatorship that for a long while defended its political and ideological power and 
privileges by means of state terrorism (Stalinism killed more people by the millions 
than National Socialism) and after the initial post-revolutionary stage was never 

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Order, institutions, models  55
able to really boost productive forces. In North Korea, under Chinese protection, 
communism has even produced a dynastic monarchy or rather family dictator-
ship. That Soviet communism was, nonetheless, a model for decades, or at least an 
example (‘Let’s do like in Russia!’), for the revolt of oppressed people and some 
new regimes around the world, is telling about the force of myth and ideology in 
generating mass movements, as well as for the only relative and fragile availability of 
masses for rational information and open discussion. Worth noting is, however, the 
claim sometime raised by Chinese officials that their own conjunction of paternal 
and efficient party leadership (in fact a nationalist techno-bureaucracy) and capital-
ist economy (with a mix of public and private enterprise) represents an alternative 
to conflict-ridden Western democracy with its stagnating economy. It could be 
asked if this alleged model, hostile to diversity, plurality and productive conflict, 
has any ties with the ideal of harmony deriving from the Confucian tradition, but 
connections and influences are, on this general level, difficult to locate and prove.
This was a survey of the most relevant models of political order developed 
in Europe and later in America, which are still present today in the political and 
theoretical debate in a more or less influential way. In Chapter 5, §4 the question if 
China can be regarded as another model will be briefly addressed.
Notes
 1  Or pax augustea, the peace that prevailed in and around the Roman empire, which 
included all Mediterranean regions, from BCE 31 (Octavian’s victory over Marc 
Anthony) until at least AD 180 (death of Marcus Aurelius).
 2  For example Hobbes in Part I, Chapter 13 of Leviathan: ‘The passions that incline men 
to peace are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, 
and a hope by their industry to obtain them’ (Hobbes 1651, 86). More on passions and 
politics in the Epilogue.
 3  In this matter, I rely heavily on Franz Neumann’s seminal essay Angst und Politik/Fear 
and Politics, written in 1954 (Neumann 1954). Neumann, a German jurist who emi-
grated to the United States, was close to the Institute of Social Research, the New York 
site of the so-called Frankfurt School in the 1930–40s. I find translating Angst to mean 
‘anxiety’, as in the published English version, distorting.
  4  A follower of Hobbes in an Islamic country could easily adopt the Islamic creed or sha-