Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
On philosophy and politics: 
Geuss, Raymond (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
On the original Critical Theory: 
Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994) The Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Polity.
On Habermas: 
Rasmussen, David and James Swindal, eds. (2010) Habermas II, London: Sage, in particular 
Vol. 3.

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EPILOGUE
What drives people to politics
This is not a Conclusion, nor can a textbook really have a conclusion, since it is not 
written in order to prove and expand a substantive position upheld by the author, 
even if his views do not remain hidden – adherence to rigid neutrality whenever 
facing a controversial set of problems would be hypocritical and not credible.
This book started with the question ‘What is politics?’, and went on to exam-
ine how politics works and what it sets out both within political units and among 
them or globally; it also examined how politics interacts or should interact with 
other attitudes in human action such as morality. It ends now with the attempt to 
answer in an orderly, though succinct way, a question that has already peeped out 
somewhere: what drives people when they act politically, be they states, (wo)men 
or voters, followers or protesters? In this inquiry, which is clearly not limited to 
professional politicians, reconstructive political philosophy works with elements 
of knowledge deriving from philosophical anthropology and theoretical sociology.
We can identify four major driving moments of political behaviour, four basic 
types that only rarely come up alone, as they mostly make an impact in a mix that 
can be discerned only analysing single cases. We are now going to present them 
in an order that is not an order of priority; there is no recognisable general rule 
regulating their intertwinement in the concrete actions of men, women and groups. 
They are
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self-interest for one’s own preservation, which includes the enhancement of one’s 
own power as the best shield under which self-interest can be pursued. Jump-
ing from this Hobbesian vocabulary to the contemporary, economy-dominated 
one, we can speak of maximization of one’s own utility, achieved by prudential 
behaviour (classical language, as mentioned in Chapters 1 and 10) or instru-
mental/strategic action. These patterns apply to the hedgefund administrator 

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202 Epilogue
as well as to the labourer going on strike to improve her/his wage, and are the 
patterns assumed by rational choice theory and related theories, which have 
the fully informed and rationally choosing homo oeconomicus/economic man as 
their protagonist.
 
  On the one hand, this type of action is almost always present in political 
behaviour, even where other types of motivation prevail. There can be honest 
and wise men and women in politics, but – to reconnect to Madison’s dictum 
quoted in Chapter 1, §1 – hardly or very rarely any angels disregarding all self-
interest and never acting based on calculation. On the other hand, the unilat-
eral and oversimplifying attitude considering the latter to be the predominant 
or sole paradigmatic mode of political behaviour integrating all others, has 
blinded political science and made it unable to use a more complex and dif-
ferentiated grid, as required by a business as murky as politics. Moreover, self-
interest as a general formula is not what effectively drives people to act in this 
or that way: roughly defined, basic interests are interpreted by the actors in any 
given situation, in a way that is largely shaped by cultural and ideological fac-
tors of many kinds. Frequent is the case in which layers of the electorate vote 
and make choices in a way that is disadvantageous to their interest and will 
bring them, say, fewer jobs and higher taxes, or even war; and they do so under 
the influence of what the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) 
called idola fori/idols (or prejudices) of the marketplace (or more generally of 
social exchange).
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