Conceptualizing Politics

actor strives to affirm her/his/its own preferences against other actors’ resistance.
7
Let us remark that here as everywhere in philosophical definitions we abstain from 
overburdening the definition with any anthropological reference to the actor’s ‘will’ 
(as Weber still did) or ‘interest’ that may lie behind her/his/its preferences; that the 
actor has preferences of whatever origin is all we need to know in order to examine 
their affirmation being rejected or resisted by other actors. To be minimalistic is a 
good premise for essential and elegant definitions.
The definition we have just given comprises all possible sorts of conflict, as 
defined by the use of violent or non-violent means (bargaining, arguments, persua-
sion, blackmail) or by the type of settlement (military victory, electoral success, 
favourable legal sentence, arbitration, agreement without manifest losers as in win-
win games). More substantial is, however, the typology of conflict according to its 
field or source: conflict of interest, identity conflict, ideological conflict.
8
Conflict of interest revolves around the acquisition of a larger slice of material 
or positional resources by actors that remain separated even if they may, in cer-
tain cases, coalesce. Self-interest remains their leading or exclusive driving force; 
among the participants in a coalition, no sense of a shared identity arises. As long 
as one has a clear mind about the interest s/he or it pursues, the prevailing course 
of action is led by either strategic or instrumental rationality: this means searching 
for the most efficient ways to achieve the outcome envisioned, in other words, for 
the best means in order to get to the goal indicated by self-interest. These means 
can include manipulating or coercing men and women, treating them in a strategic 
attitude; here ‘strategic’ (closely connected to ‘instrumental’) has nothing to do with 
the military and means employing whatever or whoever you may deem useful as a 
means for achieving a goal that is not itself an object of deliberation.
It is a still widespread reductionism of alleged Marxist origin to see the conflict 
of interest as the paramount or exclusive type of conflict, as if the others were its 

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6  What is politics?
mere derivatives. They are not, and to think so precludes an articulate understand-
ing of political behaviour. ‘Identity conflict’ has a very different nature, which is 
better understandable if we talk more properly of a conflict for the recognition of one’s 
own political identity. What political identity is will be explained in a later chapter; it 
is sufficient for now to think of it as the sense of belonging that keeps the members 
of a political group together.
Political identity can refer to a new or renewed (the former fascist countries, but 
also France after 1945) nation, a party, a social movement (industrial workers in the 
nineteenth century) or a cultural and political movement (feminism in the second 
half of the twentieth century). The recognition they look for is two-sided: it comes 
from the prospective members of the new actor, whom the initiators try to involve 
and convince, and from external players (the former imperial or colonial power, the 
existing members of the political system, international institutions). The new iden-
tity is not pre-existent to the struggle for recognition, and ripens only in the course 
of it – often in the fractured shape of opposing factions, as happened with national 
liberation movements. To make this visible, one only needs to replay the evolution 
of his country’s or her party’s identity. Identity formation and struggle for recogni-
tion are self-standing processes of cultural and political nature, deeply rooted in 
human anthropology, and in as much they accompany political life everywhere. By 
no means can they be reduced to their pathological developments such as national-
ism or religious fanaticism and easily dismissed, as they represent a major moment 
in what in the second chapter of this Part I shall call ‘the subjective side of politics’.
There are obviously intersections between identity formation processes on the 
one hand and coalitions based on rationalised self-interest on the other. A new group 
striving to assert its identity may sometimes coincide with a coalition of people 
interested in gaining more wealth against formerly privileged groups. But the over-
lapping is never so broad and frequent as to allow for the assumption of a systematic 
coincidence; what is more, the drivers in identity struggles are essentially different 
from the materialistic and calculating mentality that dominates conflict of interest.