Conceptualizing Politics

genus) has struggled to be identified: political theory. This label has been seen for a 
long time as a namesake for political philosophy, but cannot be said to be endowed 
with the same relevance and autonomy as its two elder cousins. It is now recog-
nised as a field of its own, though no broad agreement exists as to its definition, also 
because its nature is to live at the crossroads, defying epistemological straitjackets. 
It designs a theoretical view on politics that is philosophically trained, but looks 
at political processes using tools and results from political science. It is interested 
in predicting the future of political institutions, such as the state or democracy or 
political parties, and it does not refrain from value judgements.
Further, one transversal component of political studies (rational choice schol-
ars as well as normativists will disagree) is history. First of all, as history of political 
events, processes and institutions, its knowledge is an indispensable source of infor-
mation for political philosophy, as it reconnects categories to the real experience of 
societies and the effective channels of identity formation. Certainly, the old belief 

---

42  What is politics?
in historia magistra vitae died some two centuries ago,
11
 and so did three or four dec-
ades age the notion that a philosophy of history (Hegelianism, Marxism, progres-
sivism) can show the meaning of it and tell us where to head for. No such belief 
can exempt us from making ourselves our own normative choices in the middle 
of something like Weber’s ‘politheism of values’ mentioned in Chapter 1. Yet along 
with political science, history remains an essential dimension in which the political 
philosopher can reconnect to the variety and diversity of human life in social and 
political communities. The constitutional abstractness of philosophical thinking can 
only be strengthened by the challenge of conceptualizing ever new processes and 
events, rather than being exclusively busy with a sort of secluded self-refinement. In 
Chapter 7 on global challenges I shall try to show what this means.
The other version of history that matters for political philosophy is the history 
of political philosophy (or thought). By introducing this field, I am way far from 
implying the historicist sense that today’s political philosophy cannot be but the 
result and development of what our predecessors have thought about politics. It 
is now clear that this author is rather inclined to believe that political philoso-
phy consists of conceptualizing new aspects and problems of the reality we live 
in, being aware of what history contributes to their explanation and also with 
a view towards the future – as far as this outlook can be prudently performed. 
Taking stock of the conceptual languages philosophers of the past have invented 
and refined remains, however, an indispensable passage if we want to start our 
reflection on the present at the highest possible level of skilled formulation and 
elaboration – or simply avoid blunders or refished arguments introduced as if 
they were fresh discoveries. We hardly expect nowadays to meet ‘eternal truths’ 
in philosophy, but with respect to the mental structures that seem to be rooted in 
our anthropology – language, power, fear, freedom, sense of belonging – some of 
our predecessors in the world cultures have enriched us with reflections that can 
still tackle this or other essential aspects of the matter. As far as this is the case, it 
makes them ‘classics’, and no decent philosophy can be written without going 
back, whenever appropriate, to the lessons of the classics, which is also a way to 
highlight what is new or differently shaped in the problems we are confronted 
with. As far as warping arbitrariness is avoided, we can feel free to pick up from 
the classics the illuminating elements we may need in order to highlight a specific 
new problem, without overstuffing our relationship with them with the study of 
their whole system. This textbook tries to stick to these self-imposed criteria in 
our brief encounters with classics.
Finally, less easy to define, but important is the contribution anthropology can give 
to political philosophy. Both versions of anthropology are involved: philosophical 
anthropology, the reflection on ‘the nature of man’ in its classical definition, and 
cultural anthropology. The first one, present in all major political thinkers such as 
Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, is nowadays rather a reflection on how that nature, 
while containing constants in the relationship to nature and other beings, is also not 
uninfluenced by the technical change and the related shift in our attitude towards 
what is outside us, the world of objects. No philosophical project can ignore this 

---

The subjective side of politics  43
knowledge, or is condemned to assign tasks to or predict a future of an actor of 
whom we do not even ask if her or his traits will resemble ours. On the other, cul-
tural anthropology can illuminate how differently political forms such as democ-
racy can impact on populations and cultures.
This excursus must end mentioning a loophole that, for architectural reasons, 
will be filled in Chapter 4: it regards the relationship between politics and law, 
or political philosophy and jurisprudence, same or similar stuff, divergent lenses 
(epistemic devices) to look at it through. The essential nature of this relationship 
is testified among other things by the fact that up to a hundred years ago political 
philosophy did not exist as an academic discipline in most European university sys-
tems, while the state, power and politics were topics taught in juridical fields such 
as Staatsrecht/state law or constitutional law.
More remarks on the epistemological status of political philosophy will come 
in the next chapters in the framework of substantive topics, and particularly in 
Chapter 10.
Notes
  1  A discourse (
λόγος/logos) about science or knowledge (επιςτήμη/episteme).
  2  In the first chapter, dedicated to Feuerbach, in particular section C, of The German Ideol-
ogy, a manuscript written in 1845–1846 and first published in 1932 (Marx and Engels 
1845).
 3  The term is not of general and well-known use; my understanding of ‘reconstructive’ 
goes back to Bobbio – as explained in the first section of the chapter on the state in Bob-
bio (1989, 44ff.) – rather than Habermas (on his use cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Rational_reconstruction). ‘Analytical’ would not be perfectly adequate and engender 
misunderstandings.
 4  I shall abstain from the hopeless attempt to give clear definitions – dozens have been 
advanced, often convoluted – of these terms. In my own language use, ethics points at 
a rule-based behaviour of individuals and groups, while moral philosophy regards the 
individual as such and looks at the intention rather than the behaviour. But my use does 
not raise any claim of universalisation. More on this in Chapter 10.
 5  A Theory of Justice (1999a) and The Law of Peoples (1999b).
 6  This translates Hegel’s die Sache selbst, meaning the substantive issue or process under 
investigation, whose dynamics he recommended to grasp and conceptualize instead of 
insisting on one’s own principles and beliefs.
  7  To have a glimpse of this connection, one needs only to peer into the Table of Contents 
and the Index of two influential works, such as Rawls’s A Theory of Justice or Habermas’s 
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981); in this latter work that relationship is more 
explicitly worked out.
 8  Hamlet, 1, 5. More fitting in our case is ‘our philosophy’, as the text reads in the First 
Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works (1623).
 9  In 1440 the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla, a philosopher with high philological skills, 
proved the document attesting the donation of territory made by the Roman emperor 
Constantin in the fourth century to the Church was a fake, thus destroying the legiti-
macy of the papacy’s temporal power. His writing, however, was first published in Ger-
many after the Reformation.
 10  When capitalised these words refer to the discipline, in lower case to the real thing, the 
relations inter nationes.
 11  Cf. Koselleck 1979.

---