Conceptualizing Politics

desverfassungsgericht in Germany and Corte costituzionale in Italy were given from their 
very beginning an analogue function.
 9 In Cicero’s formulation the three forms of government were interconnected by 
ἀνακύκλωσις/anacyclosis, the dynamics that let the three forms of government cycli-
cally change into each other by degeneration.
 10  I shall briefly come back to the issue of lying in politics in Chapter 10, §1.
 11  With the obvious exception of constitutional authorities such as supreme courts that are 
not elected by popular vote.
 12  The classic document for the differential description of ancient (Athenian) and modern 
politics is the essay by the French liberal thinker Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) De la 
liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes (Constant 1819).
 13  Addressed here are hyper-democratic illusions and self-delusions about the use of IT 
in political affairs, not at all the use of e-government procedures for the sake of public 
information and education, transparency of administrative processes as well as in local 
policy deliberation. On the other hand the rising role of ‘big data’ and algorithm-driven 
strategies in social life and electoral campaigns is problematic.
 14  In EU member states, populism is nowadays accompanied by euroscepticism or euro-
phobia aimed at ‘those in Brussels’ or ‘eurocrats’.
 15  One should perhaps add a third, more centrist type: regionalist populism, centred on 
the claim for autonomy or secession of the region’s ‘people’ from the nation state. My 
use of the term populism connects to its meaning in the European history of political 
vocabulary.
 16  Italian Fascism originally had populist traits, as did Peron’s movements in the Argentina 
of the Forties; much less so National Socialism. In Europe after 1945 episodes of pop-
ulism were the ‘Uomo Qualunque’ movement in Italy in the Forties and in the French 
poujadisme of the 1950s (led by Pierre Poujade 1920–2003). Fascinating is a comparison 
between present-day populism and its comparable predecessors in the Athenian democ-
racy, the demagogues. An eloquent document of populism is Donald Trump’s inaugural 
address (20 January 2017) as President of the USA, available at www.whitehouse.gov/
inaugural-address. As to the element of ‘post-truth’ present in populist rhetoric cf. Chap-
ter 10, endnote 6.
 17  This is a hint at the Spanish indignados movement of 2011. All the factors mentioned were 
at work in the Brexit referendum of June 2016, a striking example of how entrusting a 

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102  How politics works
historic policy decision to the ‘people’ runs against all the reasonable criteria of delibera-
tion in a representative democracy.
 18  It was first addressed polemically by the young Marx in Zur Judenfrage/On the Jewish 
Question (1844), a critique of bourgeois revolutions.
 19  On  the  topos, going back to Cicero, of historia magistra vitae/history is life’s teacher cf. 
Koselleck 1979.
 20  He lived from 1904–97 and was the country’s supreme leader from 1978–1992.
 21  See Huntington 1996.
 22  ‘An externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that 
cost or benefit’ (Wikipedia); diseases among the workforce that with the enforcement of 
more preventive measures by the factory owner could have avoided or the pollution of 
a river due to toxic industrial side-products are typical externalities.
 23  This attitude did not prevent them from using a strong state in order to implement neo-
liberal reforms, cf. Schmidt and Woll 2013.