Conceptualizing Politics

44  What is politics?
References
Bobbio, Norberto (1989) Democracy and Dictatorship, Oxford: Polity.
Habermas, Jürgen (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns/The Theory of Communicative 
Action, vols. 1–2, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–1987.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1830) Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im 
Grundrisse/Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, available at www.marxists.org/refer 
ence/archive/hegel/works/sl/slintro.htm
Koselleck, Reinhart (1979) Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the 
Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process, in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik 
geschichtlicher Zeiten/Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2005.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1845) Die deutsche Ideologie/The German Ideology, available 
at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf
Rawls, John (1999a) A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John (1999b) The Law of People, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shakespeare, William  (1603)  Hamlet, 1.5.167–8, available at www.shakespeare-online.com/
plays/hamletscenes.html

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We have now in our toolkit the seminal elements of politics: conflict, power (along 
with force), legitimacy and obligation. Let us imagine we connect these single 
pieces with each other, feed them into an engine and set it in motion. What comes 
out? What are the main results of political life, when seen in its own dynamics?
Chapter 3 will deal with its main result, political order, and look into the several 
models of order that have come up in the history of political thought. Chapter 4 
will go down a further step on the staircase leading from abstract categories to 
concrete forms and focus on the paramount political institution, the state. The most 
widespread and ambitious form government has taken – really or nominally – in 
the last century or so, democracy, will draw most of our attention in Chapter 5. 
PART II
How politics works

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As with power, and even more than with it, the reader is now invited to clear her 
or his mind of all the associations and undertones that may usually accompany our 
first new acquaintance in this chapter: order. The order we are going to talk about 
is neither the grim logo of a ‘law and order’ police state nor a conservative appeal to 
stick by the given order of affairs instead of fantasising about change. Political order 
(§1) has as much to do with institutions as well as with fear (§2). Actors and thinkers 
have conceived of it in different, manners, which we will succinctly examine in §3.