Conceptualizing Politics

Social philosophy is not the closest relative of political philosophy, and is even 
less so interchangeable with it. Epistemically, the object ‘society’ is different in its 
structure from the object ‘politics’; what is more, the representation of politics as a 
sub-sphere of society, entirely dependent on its dynamics, is a widely spread but not 
firmly founded bias – it is at the same time a low-value piece of Marxist heritage 
and a pillar of the conventional wisdom called sociologism (the attitude that inter-
prets whatever happens in the human being, its history and its relation to nature as 
an exclusively ‘social’ process). This is not to deny that social philosophy is an indis-
pensable conceptualization of phenomena interesting the society at large, and in as 
much, illuminates the background of phenomena that can reset the stage for politics 
as well, such as cultural globalisation or changing forms of individualism and emo-
tions. On the other hand, the lack of a stringent definition of its object (‘society’ 
is not as well-carved a concept as ‘politics’) and the overambitious aspiration to be 
the real-time interpreter of the Zeitgeist have misled some works in social philoso-
phy to engineer brilliant metaphors of the (for example, ‘liquid’) state of the world 
rather than provide analytically documented interpretations. Moreover, the unbri-
dled holism of these pictures does not contribute to their precision and verifiability. 
Lastly, a further motive for maintaining the distinction between the two disciplines, 
even where they can usefully cooperate, is that the normative dimension remains 
the exclusive business of political philosophy; this is not reversed by the fact that 
normative, if undeclared, statements can often be found in social philosophy as well.
The differentiation of social and political philosophy is as much a matter of 
epistemological clarity as it is the result of the history of politics and society, of 
which the latter became a sphere in itself, relatively autonomous from politics, 
only with the rise of the bourgeois society that in most of Europe and in North 
America accompanied the expansion of capitalism in early modern times – as doc-
umented also by economic liberalism (see above). More in general, politics was able 

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40  What is politics?
to become an object of scientific knowledge as a discipline of its own only after 
putting an end to, or at least attenuating, its original fusion with other realms of 
human activity and normativity, such as religion and morality. From the first steps 
in this direction taken during the Renaissance even before Machiavelli
9
 through 
Hobbes and Locke to the Enlightenment, this was the genesis of the scientific study 
of politics as a specific creation of modernity brought about with the decisive con-
tribution of political realism (cf. Chapter 10).
On hearing the expression ‘scientific study of politics’, (empirical) political sci-
ence would first come to mind for most people. Political science, with no further 
adjective, includes all mental efforts to come to grips with the elusive monster 
called politics, provided they respect basic intellectual standards, such as a clear and 
well-argued method including: clarity, consistency (non-contradiction), criteria of 
relevance for, and orderly partition of, the subject matter. In this sense, political 
philosophy also belongs to the large family of political science. Not so if empirical 
political science is meant, which was born in some conjunction with sociology at 
the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and first flourished in 
the 1930s and 1940s. Its ambition was to reach, with regards to politics, the same 
degree of precision as physics by addressing facts instead of debating theories, mak-
ing its findings verifiable by analysing facts with quantitative methods, primarily 
statistics. A further claim was to be able to abstain from value-laden judgements 
unlike ethics and political philosophy, thus respecting neutrality against all parties 
and all hypotheses involved in a matter of investigation; it is the attitude called 
by  Max Weber  Wertfreiheit/value freedom. These were positivistic premises, and in 
their pretences to deliver a firmly ‘scientific’ study of politics they must fail, accord-
ing to the post-empiricist turn in the science of philosophy and in science itself 
(Newtonian physics relativised by first relativity, then quantum physics and later 
quantum mechanics, along with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). Facts turned 
out to be themselves theory-dependent, thus losing the aura of being the last truth 
on reality; values turned out to be present even in allegedly value-free research. 
The related epoch-making changes in the image of science struggled to reshape 
the self-image of political science and were received in its epistemology rather than 
in the daily practise of numerous scientists, in which an unreflected confidence in 
the truth-bringing virtues of mathematically analysed ‘facts’ persists. This may be 
a consequence of the fascination exerted on political research by recent economics, 
itself fairly far from the broad approach of classical political economy. Along with 
the monopolistic preference for quantitative methods, which risk to be rough and 
distorting if not paired with a qualitative approach, this type of political science 
(for example the rational choice and its development, the public choice approach) 
imported from economics an image of the actor as being self-interested, rational 
and well-informed. This is, in many cases, not even heuristically productive of new 
knowledge, for example in the research upon what I have called the subjective 
side of politics. Once again, methods cannot be chosen or imposed regardless of 
the particular nature of the parcel of reality under inquiry; political identity shifts 
in a nation or federation require different tools from those that can help analyse 

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The subjective side of politics  41
the voting behaviour of a small community, a beloved object of empirical research. 
A further difficulty lies also with the extreme fragmentation of the research objects 
in political science; their relevance for the (empirically anchored) conceptualiza-
tion of politics is not always easy to grasp. A case in point is policy analysis, which 
is hardly the royal road to the understanding of politics as sphere of complex and 
intertwined processes. This posture sounds like an extreme reaction to the holism 
of political philosophy – a holism that is on the one hand a necessary piece of its 
epistemic status, on the other hand something often at risk of sliding into theories 
of everything.
All these drawbacks are not listed here to doubt the scientific validity of empiri-
cal political science, of which several types exist, by far not entirely prejudiced by 
those perplexing aspects. Especially in International Relations
10
 and International 
Political Economy, sound empirical research is being accompanied by a permanent 
interest in the understanding of processes and trends.
What is more generally the actual relationship between political philosophy, in 
the broad version illustrated in this Excursus, and political science? Political phi-
losophy is bound by its statute neither to refer to methodically analysed facts, used 
as empirical evidence for its statements, not to abstain from discussing and choos-
ing values. Besides, diverging developments as those sketched above have made its 
dialogue with political science uneasy. Nonetheless philosophers, since they also 
refer to alleged factual truths, do good whenever they check their assertions about 
a certain subject against those analytically researched by their empirical cousins. 
‘Facts’ are differently constructed according to the epistemology of the two disci-
plines, and a direct comparison is often naive. Yet contacts and exchanges are – most 
of the time and indirectly – stimulating and can prevent both partners from falling 
all too easily and as naive victims to empirical-analytical or philosophical blunders. 
It must, however, be said that in recent years the attention of the two disciplines for 
one another has not been significant; on both sides, the tendency to closure and 
self-sufficiency prevails.
Beyond political philosophy and political science, a third party or gender (tertium