Conceptualizing Politics

feln), Hitler’s own party militia.
References
Heidegger, Martin (1927) Sein und Zeit/Being  and Time, transated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany: 
State University of New York Press, 1996.
Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain, New York: Oxford University Press.
Walzer, Michael (1977) Just and Unjust Wars, New York: Basic Books.

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This fourth and last part deals explicitly with normative political philosophy and 
examines its four fundamental categories: liberty, equality, justice, and solidarity. 
It does so in the light of the epistemological posture illustrated in Excursus 1, 
which entails two major differences from the mainstream literature in this field: 
political philosophy is not handled as a part of moral philosophy, as Isaiah Ber-
lin still described their relationship. Practical philosophy, in the Aristotelian sense, 
is rather seen as comprising the two self-standing, but obviously not unrelated, 
spheres. Besides, in the present account normativity does not begin only when 
its main categories are laid on the table, as it happens in the present chapter, but 
has already shown up at more than one station of our journey: the legitimacy-
identity- obligation complex highlighted the role values, principles and normative 
worldviews play in shaping the actors’ subjectivity, while the theory of global/lethal 
challenges in Chapter 7 explicitly argued a new obligation to do our best in order 
to ensure humankind’s survival. This obligation, which I call a meta-imperative, in 
the sense that it makes all other obligations possible and sensible, does not stem 
from a development of the categories we are going to examine in this chapter, 
though it has links to solidarity and justice. When normative problems involve our 
relationship to future generations and humankind against the background of our 
relationship to nature, we cannot expect the entire truth to come out of categories 
that over the course of centuries and in the context of one (Western) civilisation 
were devised with eyes focused on social relations among contemporaries.
In this part, however, it is not a task for a textbook to choose one normative 
doctrine out of many nor to give instructions and outline solutions to current 
problems such as those, say, raised by biotechnology or poverty or asymmetric war-
fare. It would be satisfactory enough if we were able to identify the problems, give 
them a name, and mark roadmaps that appear to be non-viable because they are 
too costly in material or ideal terms or laden with unacceptable consequences or 
unable to mean something for real political life. 
PART IV
Ethics and politics

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Liberty and equality have turned out in the last hundred years or so to be twin con-
cepts, building, however, a pair nearly as conflict-laden and possibly doomed – as 
in the case of ‘real socialism’ in the former Soviet bloc – as the Cain-Abel brother-
hood. They have competed and still compete for primacy in liberalism and liberal 
democracy, with liberty in the forefront as long as liberation from the totalitarian 
regimes of the twentieth century was the leading theme in politics and later, since 
1989, retreating because of two factors: the end of the Soviet Union with its liberat-
ing effects, which have made freedom something taken for granted and no longer 
exciting for more and more people around the world, and the involvement of 
freedom in neoliberalism, an ideology very effective in changing things in favour of 
a deregulated capitalism, but also passionately despised around the world because 
of the inequality it fostered. Stimulated by some new peak in inequality as well as 
by new scholarly inquiries into it, equality seems, at the time of writing, to be the 
temporary winner of the competition.
What we have just seen is a brief description of the Zeitgeist rather than a philo-
sophical investigation of the two concepts, which we will first describe separately 
before looking into their relationships. Beginning with liberty we will first clarify 
this notion into its two fundamental meanings (§1), then deal with equality and its 
justification, egalitarianism (§2), while the subject of rights (§3) and specifically the 
problem of their universality (§4) will occupy the second half of this chapter.