What is politics?
I am to offer a series of articles which examine the nature of classical and contemporary politics and political theory. These articles will engage with the key question, I feel, is not just the most relevant for our times, but time of immemorial - what is politics?
Politics is the subject and discourse of how we manage the polis – the city state. The functionality of how we behave within the confines of a state mechanism that is there to protect, for us to serve and be served, and most essentially - politics is the art of how the state functions through the pursuit of and use of power. How does the state use power to serve us as a citizen and how do we serve the demands of the state to build a good life.
But politics, political discourse, and the meaning of politics has shifted since the advent of critical theory and a reinterpretation of the euphemism “progressive” - politics within a critical theorized contemporary landscape. Politics has been realigned from a classical social contract - from the relationship between individual, state, and sovereign, via a division of powers; to a form of politics crystalized through our relations with cultural groups; class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender – culture.
Political assumptions and what we see as politics have manifestly changed. How do we see ourselves; how do we seek solutions to our inevitable problems and irrationalities? The ballot box is still a powerful tool which symbolizes a desire for a form of classical liberal social relation between the individual and the state to coexist, yet through echo chambers of mass communication, the demise of the collective via the rise of neoliberalism as a tool for progressive choice, the citizen state dynamic of a political relationship, is being challenged like never before. Choice, personal, rights. The boiling down of classical liberalism’s contract theory emboldening an overarching series of human values, has seen the advent of post modernism’s only certainty – lived experience. Political discourse, a pursuit of and maintenance of the positive energy of power for a mass, a one nation, a collective, a contracted individuality to a greater good, a collective and civic duty, has been negated by the contemporary pursuit of a political relationship between group and state.
So, where does politics sit now? How is it defined now, and indeed, who constructs the definition? A consensus has been developed, post social revolutions in the 1960’s and cultural revolutions of the post millennium, to see politics as a choice, a personal and cultural right to engage with and express out an individuals autonomy - an expression of self determination and rejection of Enlightenment certainty; there are no absolute truths, but interpretations, cultures and a rejection, and also challenge of normative values, and as Foucault would most overtly challenge, our assumptions. This is the politics of internalization of choice, of the rejection of classical, small c conservatism and classical economics, for the neoliberalism of both economics and our cultural relationship to the state, our institutions and beyond anything else – our self.
Politics has been personalised, and has been redefined away from a relationship with the city state but an expression of self, within the confines of our identity.
Therefore, politics through Gramsci, the Frankfurt school, and critical theory – all will be reviewed has been redefined. Now it has become a maximization of a cultural self, and this has power charged a new, in Marxist terms, I argue, the bourgeoisie of liberal economics and cultural theorist – an interpretation of politics which places our autonomy over and above that of other citizens through economic freedoms and empowerment through intersectionality. Politics is now a metaphor for self-determinism, self-maximization, within cultural hegemony; politics is the self, identity, and self-empowerment.
Through this series of posts, I will examine critical theory, and the cultural recasting of the political landscape, in the context of the irrationalities of our lives and the consequences of our actions. By this, I argue that the answers and the clarity of contemporary repositioning of politics cannot and do not address the realities of lives, our misfortunes, our inadequacies, and our lies; Machiavelli does, and certainly Hobbes does, and future entries will examine these political giants.
Politics, I will examine, and I argue, is the realignment of power, the manipulation of power and the forging of a form of inequality of our imperfect selves; government is messy, grubby, Realpolitik of our innate desires and caveats. We are essentially imperfect; our imperfections manifest in our behavior to conquer and to pursue power at the expense of others; this can be seen on the micro and macro level, the home, the board room and the battlefield, and it is, and always be prevalent – from Thucydides, to the above mentioned Machiavelli, to Hobbes, there is an uncertainty and ambiguity to our destiny; we cannot, we should not offer solutions, and liberal democracy, the politics of the Enlightenment, does not, and this is with the understanding of the wisdom of fools – nothing is above certainty, politics cannot offer certainty, if it does, as Hannah Arendt argues, that,
“the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without the acknowledgement that totalitarianism became this century’s curse only because it is so terrifyingly took care of its problems.” 1
Politics cannot offer certainty. If it does so, Arendt argues, it leads to the totalitarian gun and bayonet, to the detriment of political discourse. Politics is messy, it is inglorious, it can or cannot be noble; often ambiguous and difficult, it can never offer the clarity of sunlight or brave new dawns. In this case, it reflects our own ambitions, strengths, and our desires, and just like us it cannot offer the beauty of utopian certainty. We see politics through the prism of our ignoble natures and the savagery that has accompanied us from the Preneoplasia, English Civil war, and to our globalized daily violence that is beamed onto our devices.
What is certain through politics though is uncertainty. The reinterpretation through critical theory of echo chambers of certainty, of reframing the nature of politics to reject ambiguity and offer solutions in relation to our innate irrationality, constructs a certainty, which I argue is not politics – it cannot be politics. Politics is the rationality of the unknown, of the murky waters of deceit, of the liar and the thief, of Mandeville’s fabled hive of bees that are not offering individual perfection but flaws that add up to a whole; of lies, of power and corruption, at times inspiration and indeed the civic pride.
Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, a glorious satire on the make–up of a beehive as metaphor for a society, sees politics in all its grubby beauty. The utopia of dreaming idealists and idealogues, is made way for the brutal beauty of the beehive and a clarity of what we are; vile ingredients of a most “well ordered society.” 3
So the poem’s satire on the various professions and callings, and on almost every degree and station of people, was not made to injure and point to particular persons, but only to show the vileness of the ingredients that compose the wholesome mixture of a well-ordered society; in order to extol the wonderful power of political wisdom that enables such a beautiful machine to be raised from the most contemptible branches. Politics is the art of offering hope in our chaotic lives through the pursuit, and the art of engaging with power – and how the state, government, institutions grapple with our innate depths of contradictions.
There are truths – but there are no certainties, and politics, I argue, is the grappling with this paradox. Therefore, I will engage over the coming weeks, with political actors, philosophers and of course politicians, who attempt to frame the nature of politics and I will demonstrate through the series of posts, politics, is us, we are in Aristotle’s word the zoa politika, an animal that feeds of the state, “neither beast nor god” and we are flawed.
Jerome Kohn, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust. Totalitarianism - the inversion of politics. Library of Congress.
2. The Fable of the Bees; Mandeville, Bernard], 1670-1733. London, T. Ostell; 1806.
3. Ibid