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There are two main concepts of politics: politics as a sphere and politics as an activity. The history of the concept is present in the contemporary conceptual struggles, and the disputes surrounding the concept form an inherent part of the concept itself. With the principle that the “political life itself sets the problems for the political theorist” (Skinner, xi), the language of political agents gains priority over that of theorists. The conceptual history of politics emphasises breaks and turning points in the process of conceptualization.

The Study Of The Polis

The ancient Greek polis was formed in opposition to the despotic oikos of traditional monarchies. The rise of an egalitarian and participative regime among the male citizens in the classical Athens provoked new conceptualizations of the polis among the historians, playwrights, Sophists, and philosophers.

The Politics of Aristotle refers to a discipline of studies on the polis, its regimes, and its citizens. For Aristotle, the polis refers to a distinct type of community, and he analyzed the Greek political practice in terms of politiké techné, as an art, opposed to the “science” of the polis. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle opens another line of conceptualization calling “political” the deliberative speech in the assemblies dealing with contingent issues of future. The phronesis and deliberation aspects were close to the political analysis of Greek Sophists and playwrights.

The study of the Roman city-republics was called scientia civilis, and since the twelfth century, many Italian authors emphasised the similarities between autonomous city-republics with the ancient poleis. Translations, such as William Moerboke’s thirteenth-century Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politica, transferred the Greek vocabulary into Latin. In the universities of early modern monarchies the subject matter of Politica extended to all kinds of rule—government and the state.

Politica and its vernacular translations referred to a discipline, a science, or an art. The early modern discipline of politics covered an umbrella of governmental and administrative questions. The “science” of politics was confronted with the arts of phronesis, emphasizing “politic, clever, or cunning” measures. In the sixteenth century, the gradual formation of the state contributed to the practice to call politics a normative doctrine. In the Westphalian regime after 1648, the interstate relationship almost became a paradigm of political questions.

The vernacularization of the political vocabulary also contributed to conceptual shifts. In English, the adjective politic, or political, refers to three nouns: policy, polity, and politics. Originally, policy alludes to the regime, and with the coinage of polity, policy was left to a normative doctrine. In Oceana, when James Harrington calls Machiavelli “the only politician,” he still refers to a thinker of politics.

From The Discipline To The Phenomenon

Once no polis or autonomous cities existed anymore, the umbrella discipline of politics contained nothing outstandingly “political.” The academic disciplines differentiated in the eighteenth century according to their subject matter. A residual sphere outside ethics, law, or economics was left to the discipline of politics. In this situation, however, new proposals for interpreting the autonomous political sphere were offered. For example, to John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “political” referred to the metaphorical space of contractual relations, opposed to the state of nature.

After the late eighteenth century, a process of contamination between the discipline of politics and its subject matter took place, and speaking of politics as a separate phenomenon gradually replaced the discipline of politics. In the course of the nineteenth century, the discipline became completely obsolete, and the English noun politics turned from the plural into the singular.

This horizon shift from the discipline to the phenomenon is visible in both the sphere and the activity concepts of politics. The origins of the latter are detected in that the English nouns policy and politician received a temporal connotation. The normative discipline of policy was transformed so that policy became a line followed in the diplomatic and governmental activity.

The activity of politics was initially located within the sphere of politics; however, during the nineteenth century, it became possible to speak of the activity of politics independently of spheres. The spatial and temporal concepts offer partly competing interpretations of what is decisive in politics and refer partly to different levels of abstraction. According to the spatial concept, everything that belongs to the political sphere is politics, but the temporal view requires a further qualification of the distinctively political activities. The two concepts regularly appear in different combinations with each other. For example, Hannah Arendt insists both on the public sphere and the per formative activity as essential aspects of politics.

Politics As A Sphere

The spatial concept of politics concerns the demarcation of the sphere of politics. Many scholars contend that spheres like religion, morals, law, and economics are better known than politics. The reason lies in the tacit assumption that these spheres manifest a higher degree of constancy and regularity than politics. In other words, politics as a sphere has remained both diffuse in its borders and vague at its core.

The residual character of politics has practical consequences and legal issues. Since the first half of the nineteenth century, issues such as the status of political crimes, prisoners, and associations rose to the agenda. At the 1899 Hague peace conference, a vote was even held on the question of which issues are political in international relations.

The distinction between the public and the private sphere forms the traditional core of the spatial concept of politics. The strong tendency to identify the political with the public still holds for thinkers like Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Rorty. However, making this distinction renders the borders between the private and the public endlessly interpretable and subject to conflicting demarcations. Thinking of politics in terms of a sphere is also a target of criticism among many feminist scholars.

In the course of the twentieth century, more abstract spatial terms to conceptualize politics have risen, and the key metaphor of academic political science has been the political system. The metaphor relies on the interconnectedness of the parts in a whole and has been challenged. For example, Ulrich Beck’s concept of sub politics insists on the crucial political role of the margins of the sphere. Spatial metaphors of politics may also separate the focus from its background. Regarding politics as an arena, forum, stage, or theatre renders the distinction between the sphere and activity concepts fluid, because these metaphors also allude to performing an activity.

The abstraction the political has become popular in recent sphere concepts. Hans Morgenthau systematized this notion in the juridical debates of Weimar Germany, as did Carl Schmitt with his Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political). In the postwar era, post-Schmittian thinkers from Julien Freund to Chantal Mouffe continued this line. Mouffe follows Martin Heidegger when distinguishing the ontological category of the political over the merely ontic category of politics (Mouffe, 8–9). French scholars such as Régis Debray or Pierre Rosanvallon insist, along with Schmitt, on the stability of the political over the fluidity of mere politics.

Politics As An Activity

“Politics is an activity,” not a thing, writes Bernard Crick (36). The historical links of the temporal contingency of politics to the deliberative rhetoric are evident. Nonetheless, the activity of politics results from drawing new horizons for politics in a complex process of conceptualization since the nineteenth centur y. Early works such as Carl von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (On War) and Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) use the activity concept of politics fairly consistently.The democratization and parliamentarization of politics served as historical conditions for a more systematic thematization of the contingent, contested, and controversial activity of politics. Different topoi (themes, conventions, rhetorical figures) regarding the interpretation of the crucial moment of politics can subsequently be constructed.

Competence, prudence, and judgment all have direct links to the criteria of suffrage in the context of the political in the personal capacity. The type of political leader in democratized regimes is also analyzed in terms of judgment, using, for example, tact, craft, or approximate judgment as the key to politics.

Policy refers to a conception of politics emphasizing the continuity between single measures. This allows some authors to distinguish between politics or to denounce all opportunism. The core of a policy lies in the balancing of teleological expediency and normative demands. For example, in the twentieth century, the reason of state has been singularized into the best possible policy line.

Different stages of the political process—including deliberation, commitment, or contestation—also offer alternative topoi for conceptualizing politics. The parliamentary style of politics accentuates the rhetorical moment of deliberating between alternatives. According to Max Weber, a deliberating parliamentarian can judge the effect of the words, and Albert O. Hirschman sees, in the manifestation of a voice, the core of politics. The deliberation on issues is combined with the persuasion of the adversaries, and for Arendt, the politician appears as analogous to the performing artist for whom “virtuosity of performance is decisive” (153).

For William Kay Wallace, politics is commitment, “a means of realizing the aims and plans of an individual or general will” (15). Hans Morgenthau sees, in a Nietzschean manner, the aims of politics based on “a desire to maintain the range of one’s own person with regard to others, to increase it or to demonstrate it” (192). Carl Schmitt’s authoritative distinction between the friend and the enemy radicalizes the commitment through a decision.

The topo’s of contestation is directed toward the opening moment of the situation. Max Weber insists, in his famous 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf, on the link between politics and struggle against adversaries. Before World War I (1914–1918), German expressionists presented contesting demands of politicization of various phenomena. The contestation of the existing order lies in the core of politics for many movements since the 1960s.

Another cluster of topoi of politics operates with time and contingency. The realpolitik and the Bismarckian “art of the possible” try to minimize the possible and absolutize the reality. Several interpretations of politics soon opposed these as “art of the impossible.” For Max Weber, the concepts of chance and objective possibility illustrate how an acting politician’s judgment of the possibilities is more crucial than the factual reality. Oakeshott’s famous slogan on politics as sailing on a ”boundless and bottomless sea” similarly reevaluates the opportunities.

The topos of the situation now combines the judgment of the possible with the use of rising occasions. Seizing the unique situation is decisive for politics. According to Henry Fairlie, the regular and recurrent occasions in a parliamentary democracy offer a party leader the possibility to wait for the right time and then “to seize real opportunities when they present themselves” (68). For Walter Benjamin, the play with deadlines and meetings is the distinctive mark of a politician, and he sees, more generally, in this unique situation a dramatic priority of the present as the proper time of politics.

The metaphors of play and game also offer together another key topos of politics. Eugène Pierre understands how, for the politician, the game is an end in itself, and Philip Cambray analyzes politics in terms of strategic games. For Oakeshott, the playful component is “nowhere more present than in the various levels of political activity” (111). Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of the dialectical Reason) regards politics in the subversive terms of déjouer, the derailing of adverse policies and outplaying of the adversaries.

Politics In The Contemporary Language

Contemporary politics and politicians do not always have positive reputations. Nonetheless, any phenomenon can be politicized in the sense of rendering it contingent, controversial, or contested. Since the late 1960s, numerous waves of politicization have emerged. Simpler forms of speaking of politics as a separate sphere are now obsolete, when the point is to read and to specify the political aspect in any phenomenon from different perspectives. Also, the activity concept may be challenged by its application to the phenomena of everyday life, where the question is less of an explicit opposition between agents and their projects than of a clever use of situations and occasions.

A construction of a repertoire of topoi for both the sphere and activity concept of politics may help clarify present and past controversies on the concept of politics. It directs attention to the formal aspects of the concept, to the history of its conceptualization, and to the possibilities of the mutual combination of the topoi for different purposes. It also serves as a tool of a pluralistic and historically oriented mode of political literacy.

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