Conceptualizing Politics

ash-Shuhadâ).
 13  Dante’s Ulysses travels on the high seas to his death driven by the invocation, addressed 
to his shipmates: ‘Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes, / But virtue to pursue 
and knowledge high’ (Inferno, XXVI). Joyce’s Ulysses’s travel through Dublin is fairly less 
high-spirited and more inward-looking.
 14  Post-colonial and subaltern studies, as they define themselves, can illuminate the reverse 
side of this story by revealing the costs paid throughout its course by the people of the 
colonies also with regards to the categories (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, 
beliefs, including their intersections) that help us describe their condition.
 15  ‘A commonwealth is a constitution of the entire people. The people, however, is not 
every association of men, however congregated, but the association of the entire number, 
bound together by the compact of justice, and the communication of utility.’ (Cicero 
BCE 54, I, 25, 39). In Latin, the outset of this statement sounds much more plain and 
clear: ‘Est igitur . . . res publica res populi . . .’ (in my own translation: the public issue or 
commonwealth is therefore the people’s affairs).
 16  ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God’, Matthew 
22:21 at http://biblehub.com/matthew/22–21.htm.
 17  In the Middle Ages, societas civilis was the Latin translation of Aristotle’s 
πολιτική  
κοινονία, which we now understand as political community.
 18  Marx 1843. Things are made more elusive by the German language that used to merge 
two meanings, bourgeois and civil, in the same adjective bürgerlich.
 19  Cf. Marx 1875.
 20  In an interview released on 23 September 1987, she argued ‘Who is society? There is 
no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families’ (cf. https://
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher).
 21  The emphatic use of ‘the community’ is more present in the USA than in Europe, where 
society is not as fragmented and the communitarians vs. liberals dispute hardly made any 
waves outside academic circles.
 22  For the past half century, this concept has been often cited in its German original, Öffen-
tlichkeit, made well-known in 1962 by Jürgen Habermas’s first book (1962).
 23  In the vocabulary – exit, voice, loyalty – of the great German American sociologist 
Albert O. Hirschman (1970), when members of an economic or political organisation or 
community are dissatisfied with the quality of its performances, they can either confirm 
their loyalty or voice their criticism or exit the group.

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The state  77
 24  A scholarly instance of this use or misuse is the title of a classic work in the theory of 
international relations: Politics Among Nations, by Hans Morgenthau (1948).
 25 Value-based in the sense of Weber’s distinction between wertrational (value-rational) 
and zweckrational (ends-rational), which helps understand that the idea of nation can be 
upheld by rational discourse, as large strains of French, German and Italian literature bear 
witness, beyond being emotionally cherished – a view irrationalist thinkers are unable to 
accept.
 26  Cf. Clark 2014.
 27  I prefer to use this Hebrew word (the destruction) instead of the more current term 
Holocaust, a term made popular by the eponymous American TV series of the late 
1970s.
 28  It depends, admittedly, on the quality and the openness to other disciplines of the law 
school that a new civil servant comes from.
 29  Massnahmegesetz/measure-law is the specific German name, and the trend towards this 
direction is common to many legislatures around the world.
 30  See  The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies. Report of the  
Secretary-General (2004), available at www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol= 
S/2004/616, 4.
 31  This was the case in the 1930s, as the US Supreme Court with a conservative majority 
tried to block many of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.
 32  The only attempted exception, the founding in Europe of a new polity on a legal path 
(Treaties of the European Union), will be addressed at the end of Chapter 6.
 33  Better known among scholars under its French name pouvoir constituant.
 34  And so did by suicide the Führer of that Reich, Adolf Hitler, whom Schmitt had ten years 
before lauded (‘the Führer protects the law’) after in 1934 he let the leaders of an unruly 
faction of the Nazi party be murdered without any legal justification.
 35  The notion of neutralisation is explained in Schmitt’s article Das Zeitalter der Neutral-
isierungen und Entpolitisierungen/The age of neutralisations and depoliticizations, pub-
lished as an Appendix to Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1963, 
79–95 – no English edition seems to exist.
 36  Cf. Chapter 2, note 1.