Conceptualizing Politics

6.   Politics and power, a fatal connection?
After clarifying the main notions, it is now time for a commentary from several 
venture points.
First, politics, as it has been so far and will not cease to be, has been defined in 
this textbook according to its main tool or medium: power (complemented by 
influence). This  instrumentalist definition replaces the traditional one, in which poli-
tics was defined according to its aim. There are two reasons for this shift. One is that 
any single teleological definition makes a largely shared image of the nature and 
structure of politics impossible. This is not the case with the more neutral instru-
mentalist approach, which leaves room for the study of later developments related 
to the diverse goals people have in mind when acting politically.
The other reason is that, in this book – as already noted – we are interested in 
finding out what politics is and how it effectively works rather than shaping it in the 
way every one of us regards as the most conducive to justice or happiness. Not that 
we deem these goals to lie outside the field of political philosophy, but we regard as 
vain all theoretical efforts to design the best polity ever conceived that does not take 
note of how human beings and their groupings really act when acting politically.
As an illustration of the shift from the teleological to the instrumentalist view 
on politics let us look at the notion of common good. Aristotle and later Aquinas 
identified it substantively with virtue and happiness for all beings, i.e. for the com-
munity, as defined by philosophers, while in our time we – with the exception of 
Neo-Aristotelians – are rather inclined to share John Rawls’s procedural notion 
of common good as what we pursue when ‘maintaining conditions and achieving 
objectives that are similarly to everyone’s advantage’ (Rawls 1999, 205) – as defined 
by every single actor in an individualistic rather than communitarian way.
Second: in terms of the history of political thought, our definition of politics 
clearly goes back to the tradition of political realism, which comprises Thucydides, 
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and more recently Carl Schmitt, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–
1971), Edward H. Carr (1892–1982), Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) and Ken-
neth Waltz (1924–2013). This book’s relationship to realism is however substantially 
qualified and modified by the attention to recent developments that have made 
the realist approach insufficient, as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 10; even before 
and even more radically, that relationship is qualified by the focus on the adjective 
‘legitimate’ that in our definition of politics accompanies the very notion of power. 
I put the adjective in quotation marks because, first, the link between power and 
legitimacy is questioned by many and needs to be discussed, as will happen in the 
next chapter; and, second, this link does not hold in international politics in the 
same way as within the state, as we will learn in the corresponding Chapter 6.

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18  What is politics?
Accepting the link of politics and power does not need to be blind to its costs 
and dangers. First of all, if we stick to the basic link ‘no politics without power’,
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this implies that, power being an asymmetrical, vertical relationship, politics always 
entails a degree of inequality – this is a first problematic aspect of that link (granted 
that in most worldviews, inequality is seen as something negative that should be 
contained). This was very clear to the classics of contractarianism,
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 who regarded 
the equality reigning in the state of nature as lethal, since everybody can be killed 
by everybody, whereas the unequal, overwhelming power of the sovereign created 
by social contract can be expected to protect everybody. How much inequality is 
generated depends on the rules that set limits to power and regulate access to it, 
including the duration of office tenure. The asymmetry between rulers and ruled 
regards in any case not just the ability of the authority to issue commands (which 
may or may not come in the form of laws) and to employ force, but also in a 
larger amount of knowledge. Foucault insisted on the link pouvoir-savoir/power-
knowledge, but even aside from the pre-democratic examples he researched, this 
asymmetry holds in democracies too, in which a superior degree of knowledge 
remains an asset of the elite and the executive, not just in the field of intelligence.
On the other end, one (a person, a party, a country) must seek power, accepting 
the built-in inequality and other unpleasant features of politics, if one is serious 
with the goals s/he wants to achieve and the principles s/he proclaims – however 
tough or benevolent these goals and principles may be. There are certainly other 
paths on which one can try to achieve them, for example cultural reform, religious 
appeal, personal example; however, if collective goods are to be gained and evils to 
be avoided in a reasonable time and in an effective manner, politics remains the most 
promising way to go, to organise human society instead of abandoning it to chaos 
or to destructive conflict or indulging in lamentations and wishful thinking. Though 
politics may look disgusting to citizens, it remains a terribly serious business, whose 
cancellation overnight would only set out an even more violent and unequal world. 
Is it also a sombre business, poor in ideas and ideals, and must it be? This question 
will be answered at the end of Chapter 2 and later in Part IV of the volume.
Having this in mind, all demonization of politics as being such a dirty business is vain, 
because it suggests that we would be better off without politics; often it is also coun-
terproductive, as it makes distinguishing honest from corrupt politicians impossible.  
Almost one hundred years ago, in Politik als Beruf/Politics as a Profession Max Weber 
discussed in a vivid and stringent way the moral dilemmas in which one is involved 
when trying to balance effectiveness of action and the price to pay when engaging 
in politics (cf. Chapter 10, §2). The attention for these prices used to be a recurrent