Conceptualizing Politics

topos in world literature from Bhagavad Gita (with regard to war, third century BCE 
or later) to Sophocles’s Antigone (piety vs. reason of state, BCE 441), from Shake-
speare (1564–1616) (particularly in Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard III) to Racine’s  
(1639–1699) Britannicus; later, in the last two centuries of Western literature, the atten-
tion shifted for several reasons to dramas that may mirror politics and society but play 
in the individual soul as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) and Thomas Mann 
(Doktor Faustus in particular, written 1943–1947). In political literature, in the hundred 

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Politics and power  19
years since Weber’s speech, the sensitivity for the moral and intellectual troubles one 
has to reckon with when engaging in politics has only grown thinner.
27
As we have seen, a degree of political inequality between who is in government 
and who is not is a preliminary unavoidable price we have to pay when accepting 
politics as the fundamental tool aimed at governing human society. The true prob-
lem is another one altogether: how much inequality and what kind of inequality? 
Should political inequality between those in government and the citizens be allowed 
to reinforce the existing social and cultural inequality, as it used to happen in Western 
countries during the ancien régime and began to change only with mass democracy 
and the welfare state? We will come back to inequality when addressing problems of 
normative political philosophy. As to the amount of specifically political inequality, 
the asymmetry between rulers and ruled ones has decreased in the wake of democra-
tisation; on the other hand, the state as impersonal machine has nowadays a control-
ling power over individuals it could not dream of in the time of the old monarchies.
There is a second price that comes with political power. A power position is 
and has always been the outcome of a competition among persons and parties, a 
costly activity that requires money and a staff serving the leader – be it the clientes 
of a senator in ancient Rome, the courtiers of a medieval king or the secretaries 
and counsels of a present-day politician. In modernity, the personal staff and ‘war 
machine’ of a politician has become separated from the state bureaucracy. Now, 
gathering more consensus than the competitors and prevailing over them in a con-
flict is the essential function of politics as different from policy, which aims at the 
efficient solution of the problems faced by a community. But gaining consensus 
requires much more (costly) things than good arguments. Through this activity 
private money gains an illegitimate sway over political decisions, far from any trans-
parency; or public monies are diverted to fund a leader or party. On the one hand, 
this is an endemic phenomenon, co-essential to politics, and promises to eradicate 
it altogether should be seen with some scepticism. On the other hand, it must be 
monitored and contained, as it represents a danger not just for democratic politics, 
but for politics in general, since it threatens to substitute the logic of political pro-
cesses with the logic of short-term economic advantages.
It represents a danger also because the acquisition of tools for the competition 
can become self-referential and degenerate: this is egregiously known as seeking 
more power for the sake of power, more and more regardless of the goal or the view one 
wanted to assert in political conflict, and more and more for self- aggrandizement. 
The current populist view that sees this as the very essence of politics tackles a 
built-in danger and misses the real target, which is not to delegitimise politics alto-
gether but to invent and reinvent checks and counter-poisons.
* * *
Let us finally highlight the philosophical implications of the theory of political 
power illustrated so far. Its premise, still very much in the contractarian tradition, 
is that the self-rule of human beings on the basis of perfect equality must fail, thus 

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20  What is politics?
making the establishment of an unequal political power necessary in order to save 
them from self-inflicted lethal wounds. This view does not only rely on the fictional 
state of nature of the contract theorists, but also on the recurrent experience with 
failed states and the resulting ‘one man, one rifle’ (rather than one vote) equality 
(Lebanon in the mid 1980s, Somalia in the 1990s and later, Libya after 2011). Self-
government is only possible in an established state with central power, rule of law 
and representative government.
There is another reason for the inevitability of political power. Governing a politi-
cal community is a complex business requiring knowledge, skills and experience. 
With modernisation and later globalisation, complexity and the related require-
ments for government have only surged and become a professional activity (it can 
be learned, but not overnight, since it requires an increasing competence in issue-
related policy making, well beyond political manoeuvring). Not everybody can fulfil 
its   requirements – perhaps not even most of the professional politicians in charge 
do – and, what is more, not everybody has interest or vocation for this activity. Bind-
ing involvement in politics for everybody would result in a nightmare for the most. 
Entrusting politics to the institutional power structure and its officials therefore rep-
resents for all others an ‘unburdening’ or relief,
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 which makes them free to pursue 
their own inclinations. The picture of a community in which everybody goes daily or 
weekly to the agorà (maybe the electronic one) and engages in deliberation over state 
affairs with all other fellow citizens is an idyll dreamt of by philosophers or literati 
unaware of how real citizens live in a mass democracy. In any case, it is less the inten-
sity of citizens’ participation but rather the quality of the politicians and bureaucrats 
to which the daily management of the state is delegated that makes the difference.
The view underlying the previous considerations is a moderate anthropological pes-
simism: human beings are not really capable of successfully practising in their associ-
ated life the self-rule some have theorised and praised. Or at least not in the form of 
a power-less community, in which everybody is an equal decision-maker on all daily 
common affairs. The idea of a radical e-democracy in which everybody participates 
on a daily basis in government is only the last and least felicitous version of this idea, 
according to which government is not a difficult art that needs to be learned and 
everybody is at any time a fully informed and rational actor – two hardly credible 
premises (more in Chapter 5 with respect to direct democracy).
The alternative to a power-free egalitarianism in politics is obviously not sub-
mission, but rather the effort to keep power painstakingly under control and to 
minimise this necessary evil down to the size that is indispensable to its organising, 
protecting and relieving functions. To ask political power to prove its legitimacy is, 
as we shall soon see, the fundamental question that cannot only contain it, but also 
help it fulfil the task it has been created for.
Notes
  1  From Greek 
τέλος/telos or goal: based on the indication of goals.
 2  Justice or freedom for all is a universalistic claim, but upholding it within a plurality of 
opinions remains the particular value or belief of its supporters.

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Politics and power  21
  3  In the Falklands (Spanish: Malvinas) War of 1982 between the United Kingdom and the 
Argentinian dictatorship, these relational resources were as much at stake as the posses-
sion of territory.
  4  For positional goods such as prestige, scarcity results from their intrinsically competitive 
nature. Scarcity can be both absolute (absolute lack of a resource) or relative (the resource 
is unavailable to a group or area because of the way it is distributed). The threshold under 
which a resource is perceived as scarce and can ignite conflicts depends on the evolution-
ary stage of the society.
  5  The actor can be a man or a woman, but also a group or institution, therefore in alpha-
betic order ‘her/his/its’.
 6  The scholarly convention has it that this notion, if capitalised (IR), refers to the disci-
pline, while in lowercase the real thing is meant.
  7  Cf. Weber 1922, Chapter 1, §9.
  8  This triad was formulated by the sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno (cf. Pizzorno 1993).
 9  Properly speaking, the monopolistic pretence of the Communist Party of the Soviet 
Union began with the revolution of October 1917 and was reinforced around 1923 
by Stalin’s (1878–1953) theory of ‘socialism in one country’ and only attenuated 
when the Popular Front’s strategy was launched in 1935 at the Seventh Comintern 
Congress.
 10  I uphold the distinction between Islamic (adjective of Islam) and Islamist (adjective of 
Islamism, a totalitarian and extremist version of political Islam).
 11  Against Aristotle, Hobbes acknowledged conflict as the basic fact of life, but sought safety 
from it in the highly integrationist architecture of the covenant leading to the establish-
ment of Leviathan.
 12  To hypostasize something means to attribute the nature of a substance (
ὑπόστᾰσις) 
to elements that are rather accidental or changeable. I shall not enter a discussion of 
Schmitt’s notion of ‘the political’, being unable – unlike others – to perceive it as a major 
and still influential turn in the thinking about politics.
 13  Weber 1919 is the main source for his conception of politheism.
 14  Regula means rule in Latin.
 15  Substantive is what is related to the content as different from the form or method or 
procedure; substantial is what is essential and not accidental (or secondary, occasional) to 
an entity.
 16  I borrow this expression from Koselleck 1979.
 17  In today’s political philosophy, particularly in so-called republicanism, the meaning of domi-
nation is much debated and not unequivocally defined in the sense I have described. In 
my usage ‘domination’ is just one species of illegitimate power, not a concept alternative to 
power.
 18  ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is 
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx 
and Engels 1845, 67).
 19  See Excursus 1.
 20  Marx recanted the exemplary importance he previously gave to the Commune in a let-
ter to the Dutch socialist Domela Nieuwenhuis, available at www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm.
 21  The complete relevant writings are now available in the volumes I, 18–21 of the 
new  Max Weber  Gesamtausgabe, published between 1989 and 2016 in Tübingen by 
Mohr Siebeck. Partial English translations are The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of