Conceptualizing Politics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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PART I
What is politics?

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What is politics?
This book begins questioning the very notion it is dedicated to, because with a 
philosophical approach, notions are not left in the unclear state in which they are 
used in common parlance. This shall be our method all throughout the book. But 
in the case of politics, a preliminary clarification is required even more so, given 
the array of meanings and nuances this word comes surrounded with. In the last 
decades the century-old endeavour to define politics according to a core goal such 
as the pursuit of the common good or the reconciliation of interests has mostly 
been abandoned, as scholars of politics have got to acknowledge that – given the 
irreducible plurality of conflicting aims that political actors pursue – no common 
language about politics could materialise, no convergence on questions such as: 
who is entitled to define what the common good is? is reconciliation of interests 
truly possible and, what is more, is it to everyone’s advantage instead of one party’s?
Rather than insisting on a teleological approach,
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 scholars of politics have 
increasingly seen it as characterised by the items this human activity makes use of 
(power, influence, force) or results in (making collective decisions). This turn away 
from goal-setting has thus been looking for an encompassing formula capable of 
describing what kind of actions and phenomena take place under the heading 
‘politics’, whatever aims, ideals or projects actors may strive for. Real individual and 
collective actors remain obviously highly teleological: they all pursue their own 
particular goals and uphold their particular (even if they are universalistic in con-
tent)
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 values, thereby colliding or striving to form coalitions. Time and again they 
come to some (never perpetual) agreement as to the framework of rules under which 
to realise one’s own interests and life plans in an ordered and peaceful way. This is 
what the polity or 
лоλις/polis is about, as we shall see in the following chapters.
Against this background political philosophy is an attempt to understand the 
structures that originate from the games actors play with and against each other, 
the rules they set up willingly or unwillingly, and the principles under which they 
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