Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
Three fundamental works on democracy, between political philosophy and political science:
Dahl, Robert (1989) On Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Held, David (2006) Models of Democracy, third edition, Cambridge: Polity.
Sartori, Giovanni (1987) The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham: Chatham House 
Publishers.
On populism, no new encompassing research work has been published after:
Meny, Yves and Yves Surel (2002) Democracies and the Populist Challenge, London: Palgrave 
Macmillan.
An interesting survey is:
Baracani, Elena and Roberto Di Quirico, eds. (2013) Alternatives to Democracy: Non- 
Democratic Regimes and the Limits to Democracy Diffusion, Florence: European Press Aca-
demic Publishing.

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We are now coming a step closer to the full reality of politics by shifting from the 
singular, the state, to the plural, the states. Since the beginning of politics as a spe-
cific human activity, members of the political community had to put their mind 
to the needs and troubles inside the group as well as to the threats or opportuni-
ties coming from the inevitable contact with other groups. Policy has always been 
essentially foreign no less than domestic policy, as great even if diverging thinkers 
such as Hobbes, Kant and Hegel – but not their epigones – knew. Globalisation 
has eventually put an end to the shortsightedness of less recent textbooks, in which 
politics pretended to be all explained once the origin and the working of the state 
(singular) had been dealt with.
What follows in this Part is therefore not an application of or a marginal addition 
to the categories we have seen so far, but rather their re-examination within a new 
context along with new categories that will all lead us not only into the worldwide 
dimension of politics, but also to a revision, pressed by substantial novelties, of the 
very notion of politics we made the acquaintance of at the outset of our journey.
In this Part we consider two further dimensions of politics: international and 
global. They are still merged by most authors into one big chapter called ‘interna-
tional relations’, but I deem the sphere called ‘global affairs’ to have its own speci-
ficity, as it will be shown in the following chapters. The first, Chapter 6, deals with 
the classical themes of international politics: the nature of international relations, 
war and peace, and the restraints to war. Chapter 7 comprises the two, largely unre-
lated areas in which the word ‘global’ occurs: economic, but also social, cultural and 
political globalisation; global, or rather global and lethal challenges in the particular 
sense I am giving to this expression.