Conceptualizing Politics

hada ‘There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God’.
  5  All throughout this book liberalism is used in its original and still valid European meaning, 
while in America liberalism refers to the welfare state policies of the Democratic admin-
istrations since F. D. Roosevelt, who was the US president from 1933 through 1945. Still 
another meaning has the recent term ‘neoliberalism’, by which the re-energized laissez-
faire or market-friendly policies of Ronald Reagan (Republican US president 1980–88) 
and Margaret Thatcher (Conservative PM of the United Kingdom 1979–1990) as well 
as their later followers are indicated.
 6  The introduction of social insurance by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–
1898) in 1889 was aimed at stabilising the Kaiser’s authoritarian regime, rather than 
expanding democracy.
 7  In the 1920s, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) argued that the 
ethical and political values of liberalism can stand without laissez faire (liberismo) being an 
essential component of it, a view which was contested by the economist Luigi Einaudi 
(1874–1961).
  8  This matter is examined in Chapter 9.

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56  How politics works
 9  Libertarianism is an utterly elusive term making all attempts at a conceptual definition 
vain; in present language use, the association with anti-government positions, favouring 
full liberty for capital and private property, prevails.
 10  Nearly the same thing happened with the anarchism (from the Greek world a(n)-archia/
leaderless, lacking or rejecting a superior power) of the nineteenth and twentieth century, 
which killed kings, queens and presidents and officials, but left little theoretical heritage.
 11  Toter Hund, meaning a soulless and uninspiring remnant of the past.
 12  Both quotes are from Marx’s afterword to the second German edition (1873) of Capital, 
Book 1, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm.
 13  Marx, who did not love to design blueprints for the future, wrote a few essential notes 
about it in Critique of the Gotha Programme of the German Social-Democratic Party 
(1875); Engels’s prediction is in Engels 1883, 30.
References
Aristotle (335 BCE), 
Τὰ  πολιτικὰ/Politics, e-book available at www.gutenberg.org/
files/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm (Aristotle is thought to have composed his major works 
between 335-323 BCE)
Engels, Friedrich (1883) Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft/Social-
ism: Utopian and Scientific, available at www.slp.org/pdf/marx/dev_soc.pdf
Hobbes, Thomas  (1651)  Leviathan, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin, Oxford, New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
Marx, Karl (1875) Kritik des Gothaer Programms/Critique of the Gotha Program, available at 
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1848) Manifest der kommunistischen Partei/Manifesto of the 
Communist Party, e-book available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/
pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Neumann, Franz L. (1954) Angst und Politik/Anxiety and Politics, in The Democratic and The 
Authoritarian State, edited by Herbert Marcuse, Glencoe: Free Press, 1957, 270–300.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1762) Du contrat social/The Social Contract, e-book available at  
www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm