Conceptualizing Politics

FIGURE 1.1
 
 The r
econstr
ucted w
est pediment of the P
ar
thenon.
 In the middle is the contest,
 w
on b
y the goddess,
 betw
een 
Athena and P
oseidon for
 
the patr
onage o
ver the city
.

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Politics and power  9
1225–1274), but also in Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who pushed Aristotelian-
ism out of political thought,
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 and later thinkers as different as Auguste Comte 
(1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and the theoretical sociologist Talcott 
Parsons (1902–1979). Other theorists maintained that a degree of regulated conflict 
is vital to politics, as a safeguard for freedom and as a motor of change for the better. 
In his commentary on Livy, written in 1513–1519 and published in 1531, Niccolò 
Machiavelli (1469–1527) praised the institutionalisation of conflict between the 
Senate and the common people as the masterpiece of Roman politics (Machiavelli 
1531, passim). The Federalist and the very Constitution of the United States regard 
political conflict as a constitutive element of the new polity and attempt at handling 
it in a system of checks-and-balances. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) went as far as to 
regard the relationship between friend and enemy (whoever is ‘existentially some-
thing different and alien’, 1927, 27) as the very essence of politics – a hypostisation
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of enmity that goes beyond the seminal importance of conflict.
As we will see later in more detail, democracy is by definition the regime that 
regards conflict and diversity as its core moment along with the rules preventing 
conflict from becoming murderous for the citizens’ lives and freedoms and disruptive 
for their safety and wellbeing. Conflict becomes proceduralized, which means that 
shared procedures are provided to come to terms with it; procedures that facilitate a 
temporary solution, which is to an extent pregnant with future conflicts, to be met 
again by the same or modified procedures. In this sense, democracy is the culmina-
tion of the conflictualist path, whose philosophical background is vividly illustrated by 
Max Weber’s picture of an irreducible ‘politheism’ of values. By saying ‘politheism’ 
Weber likened the plurality of conflicting values upheld in the various belief system 
inside a society or among cultures to the many gods and goddesses honoured in 
Greek and Roman mythology – as shown in both Parthenon pediments in Athens 
(see Figure 1.1) and celebrated in the temple called Pantheon (‘all gods’) in Rome.
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In other corners of political thinking, the alternative of conflict and integration 
is stretched over time: Marx and Engels saw class struggle as the motor of his-
tory and lastly emancipation, but their picture of the coming communist society 
is highly integrationist (plenty of wealth, full self-realisation of the individuals, the 
government brought down to a minimal technical function).
Procedures can, at best, provide the tracks on which conflicts unfold and are 
handled. What makes the characteristics of politics is that conflicts are sooner or 
later settled by power, the next station of our disassembled definition of politics.