Conceptualizing Politics

2.   Political  identity
No polity can be perceived as legitimate if its members do not feel enough 
identity among themselves and with the polity, even if they find their idea of 
good government implemented and the substantive conditions for legitimation 
are satisfied. The same holds, only with readapted wording, for the legitimation 
of policies.
To understand this we have to first get rid of the conventional wisdom about 
identity in politics. In its elementary definition, which we will soon meet, it is not 
the same thing as racism, sectarianism, ‘politics of identity’, exclusive communi-
tarianism or the Francophone communautarisme ethnique. These are all pathologi-
cal forms of political identity, not its core; mistaking them for the core deprives 
political philosophy of an important tool for the understanding of how polities stay 
together or dissolve.
Let us understand political identity as the set of values, principles, memories and 
symbols that a political group (movement, party, nation state, alliance or federation) 
recognises as its own, in other words, what makes it possible for them to say ‘we’. 
More important than identity (the set) is self-identification, that is the process in 
which a group absorbs into its conscience those elements received from previous 
generations or a recent act of foundation, but also transforms them. Identity is 
neither pure path dependency, a burden from the past one cannot get rid of, nor 
something any generation can rebuild from scratch after a revolution – elements of 
the longue durée have resurfaced in post-revolutionary France or post-Maoist China 
years after those violent cleavages.
Samuel Huntington’s view – ‘We know who we are only when we know who 
we are against’ (Huntington 1996, 221) – is wrong, as it always happens with sim-
plistic pars pro toto arguments, in which a part or pathological case is taken as if 
the entire thing were at stake. There are, obviously, political identities relying on 

---

The subjective side of politics  29
opposition and exclusion, for example in extreme nationalism or Islamist funda-
mentalism, but in the more frequent and more fundamental cases, people define 
themselves according to positive and non-exclusionary patterns, though the 
moment of ‘being themselves and not someone else’ remains seminal. In a concep-
tual metaphor, political identity conjoins mirror-identity and wall-identity. Under the 
first, someone from the group (a new or re-founded party, a new or rebuilt nation 
state) determines in intellectual and constitutional debates and later in high political 
acts what its leading values and goals are; this conversation of the group members 
with themselves is the founding act of self-identification. Yet groups are situated in 
space, time and history, and their identity cannot be diffuse if it is to give consist-
ency to the group itself; this explains why it also contains a moment of distinction 
from other groups – the fledgling and limited humankind identity being an excep-
tion (see Chapter 7). This wall can be open and allow for encounters and explora-
tion between the groups, but it can also transform distinction into separation or 
exclusion or enmity – there are various kinds of walls.
4
 To name an illustration, the 
USA Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, contains a classical 
instance of balance between mirror (the ‘truths’ or values regarded as self-evident) 
and wall (the motives for separating from Britain).
Bearing the connection between legitimacy and identity in mind, three aspects 
now need to be clarified. First, the relevant identity is the political, neither the cul-