Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
On democratic legitimacy, an innovative book is:
Rosanvallon, Pierre (2011) Légitimité démocratique/Democratic Legitimacy, Princeton: Princeton 
University Press.
Two classical readings on national identity:
Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities, London: Verso (first published in 1983).
Renan, Ernest (1882) Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?/What Is a Nation? edited by Charles Taylor, 
Toronto: Tapir Press, 1996.
A research volume on elements and problematic aspects of a European identity:
Cerutti, Furio and Sonia Lucarelli, eds. (2008) The Search for a European Identity, London: 
Routledge.

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Hegel derided those who wanted to teach the method without tackling at the same 
time the very thing the method should open the way to, and compared them to a 
scholar pretending to learn how to swim before venturing into the water (Hegel 
1830, §10). Remembering Hegel’s sarcasm, I have abstained from talking about the 
method followed in this book – more exactly about its epistemological premises – 
before taking the reader on a tour through a certain amount of the material. Now, 
past two chapters, it is presumably possible to entertain readers about the notion of 
political philosophy after they have had a taste of what this thing looks like.
We are talking about the epistemology
1
 of political philosophy and not its meth-
odology because our discipline, being non-empirical and non-quantitative, is not 
subordinate to requests to exhibit its method as empirical-analytical science is. It is 
also clear that, as a scholarly discipline, political philosophy does not mean the gen-
eral orientation or the leading ideas inspiring in a partisan way a political actor – as 
it is understood in common parlance. We would here rather use the word ‘ideol-
ogy’, though the meaning of this word is ambivalent: on the one hand, it indicates 
doctrines and policy indications as expression of the culture and the interests of a 
social or political group. On the other hand, ‘ideology’ can still retain the mean-
ing, attributed to it by Marx and Engels,
2
 of false conscience or false representa-
tion of a social structure or situation, due not to a mendacious manipulation by 
the powerful, but to the objective deformation of the real state of affairs operated 
by the division of intellectual and manual labour. A third use of the term – more 
frequently adopted in this book – calls ideological the views that result rather from 
an overarching (political and social) Weltanschauung generating strong beliefs than 
a philosophical or analytical examination of the topic pursued in a critical attitude.
Against the widely spread opinion that acknowledges only one type of politi-
cal philosophy, nearly identical with ethics, this book sees in it the classical and 
articulated structure consisting of two main types: reconstructive and normative.