You Are Politics
Lesson 1: Basic Principles and Course Roadmap
People often say things like:
“I have no interest in politics.”
“I stay out of politics.”
“Ugh, politics don’t interest me.”
“I avoid the office politics.”
“She’s just playing politics.”
All of these statements come from an incomplete understanding of what politics is (are?). People think of “politics” as being just elections and what happens in Parliament or Congress, “international politics” between nations, or the “games” some people in the office play to mess with other people.
All of those things are, indeed, “politics”, but they are only a small and often insignificant subset of Politics.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias spread this limited view of “politics.” The American Heritage Dictionary provides seven definitions for the term:
The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.
Political science.
The activities or affairs engaged in by a government, politician, or political party.
The methods or tactics involved in managing a state or government.
"The politics of the former regime were rejected by the new government leadership. If the politics of the conservative government now borders on the repressive, what can be expected when the economy falters?"
Political life.
"studied law with a view to going into politics; felt that politics was a worthwhile career."
Intrigue or maneuvering within a political unit or a group in order to gain control or power.
"Partisan politics is often an obstruction to good government. Office politics are often debilitating and counterproductive."
Political attitudes and positions.
"His politics on that issue is his own business. Your politics are clearly more liberal than mine."
Only number 6 hints at anything outside of government. Other dictionaries echo these variations.
“Ok,” you might ask, “then what does Politics mean?”
That, my friend, is a great question.
Politics Defined
Let’s build our definition in three steps, with the most basic definition, then add a couple of layers that will fill out our working definition. Then let’s see what some other thinkers have said about it.
Step 1: The Most Basic Definition
“Politics” is the relationships between living beings. Understood at this level, politics requires only one element: a relationship between two or more living beings. I say “living beings” instead of “people” because other species have relationships with humans, with other species, and within their own species.
Let’s illustrate. When your dog needs to urinate, he needs you to take him to a place that you have decided is a place he is allowed and encouraged to urinate. Your dog will get your attention in some way, communicate his need, and then react to your response to his communication. When you receive his communication you will decide on a response and communicate that response to him. This process will go on until your dog urinates and you both return to your separate lives.
This example not only demonstrates that politics can involve beings other than humans, it also illustrates a number of the principles and elements that we will discuss in understanding “politics.” One party has a need and the other party has the ability to fulfill that need. One party has set rules that the party can enforce against the other party - your designation of an appropriate urinating location. The party bound by the rule has the ability to obey that rule or not. The two parties communicate, make decisions, and take actions based on those decisions. These are all basic elements of “politics” that we will see everywhere that we study it.
Step 2: The Necessary Purpose of Politics
The example of you and your dog leads us to Step 2 of our process of defining “politics,” because politics is not just a state of having relationships, it is a process. You and your dog engaged in a process of satisfying his need to urinate. That sentence restated gives us our Step 2 Definition of Politics:
Politics is the process by which living beings satisfy needs and desires through their relationships with other living beings.
In Step 1, we saw why every one of us is involved in “politics”: because we all have relationships with other living beings. In Step 2 we see why every one of us must be involved with politics and cannot excuse ourselves or live without understanding it: because we all have needs that we cannot possibly satisfy without engaging in a process with other living beings. Every day, we engage in “politics” from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep - and if we sleep with another person, even in our sleep.
So “politics” is more than just the relationship between people, it is also the actions that they take.
Step 3: The Currency of Politics
When you go to the market, you pay for what you need with money. You use currency. In politics, you use a different currency: power. Yes, money is definitely power, but only indirectly. Follow me.
At its most basic, “power” is the ability to make things happen outside of oneself. When you push a boulder or throw a stone, you are using power. How far you can push that boulder is dependent on how much power you have. In this example, we are seeing the application of physical power or muscle power. In the example of the dog, your dog used a different kind of power to get his need met: moral power. He came to you and relied on your moral obligation to provide his basic needs. He was influenced by your power when he came to you rather than simply urinating on your floor.
So in political terms, “power” is the ability to get what you need or desire from other people, it is your ability to influence your relationships. Depending on the context in which we are analyzing “politics”, you can be either an individual or a group. In a family, each individual is a political actor; in your local community, that family is a political actor; in your state or province, the local community is a political actor - but so also are you and so is your family.
Now we know that individuals, groups and institutions can be political actors. Political actors use power to influence each other in the attempt to fulfill needs and desires. These actors possess power; we can refer to them as “power centers.” And this brings us to our highest level, abstract definition of politics:
Politics is the interactions between power centers in a social context for the purpose of acquiring benefits from each other.
Using this definition, we can look at any social context and understand the politics taking place. We can identify the different power centers, the types and amounts of power each center holds, the relationships between the power centers, and their exercises of power on each other. Then we can take it further: by identifying who is doing what to whom and for what, we can deduce what these power centers want. Once we know what they want, we can predict what they will do in the future.
What Have Other Thinkers Said?
Because most of the prominent articulators of political theory were focused on the issues of society in general, they tend to define politics in terms of the state. From the earliest known writing of political study, Aristotle defined the concept as “the master science that deals with the good life and the best state." Notice that Aristotle weaves an ethical strand into his definition. Most classical European political thinkers include this ethical element in their definitions.
For example, Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher of the Catholic Church from the 1200s who was so influential they made him a saint fifty years after his death, defined “politics” as “the art of governing the state for the common good." The idea of “the common good” as the goal of the political entity goes back to Plato in the Western tradition.
The English “Enlightenment” era thinker John Locke made the conception of politics more tangible. To Locke, politics was "the establishment of a civil society to preserve people’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property."
Other thinkers have focused on the interplay between groups in society in their definitions. Karl Marx defined politics “as the struggle of classes to achieve their economic interests," while the political scientist Harold Lasswell, stated it succinctly as “who gets what, when, how.” We could be said to be “Lasswellian” thinkers with our definition.
Now we have moved away from a conception of politics as governing a state for the common good and toward a view of politics as a struggle between factions within the state for their own interests. Let’s call it the “struggle theory of politics.”
Other thinkers have given more attention to the role of power in politics. To these thinkers, power is the objective, not a currency. The most famous European power thinker was Niccolo Macchiavelli, who wrote in the early 1500s that "Politics is the art of maintaining power." The German social scholar of the late 1800s Max Weber amplified on the idea: "Politics is the struggle for power - the struggle to share power or to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state." For Weber, politics is the struggle, but the aim here is power.
Still other thinkers have deemed politics to be a state of war. Mao Tse-Tung, the Chinese revolutionary leader from the early 1900s who became China’s supreme leader stated it plainly: "Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed." The same idea was expressed by the French thinker Michel Foucault also in the twentieth century: "Politics is the continuation of war by other means."
The last theorist we will look at is Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin, the Russian revolutionary of the early Twentieth Century who followed the tradition of Machiavellianism by defining politics as “the art of seizing, consolidating, and holding power." Lenin also gave another definition of politics that expresses an idea we will explore deeply in this course:
“Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics."
Politics and Economics
Lenin captures the close interplay between politics and economics. Both involve the distribution of risks and rewards, costs and benefits, in a social context. They affect each other, and both determine who lives and who does not, who thrives and who merely survives. We will discuss both in this course. In fact, the next lesson will be You Are Economics and take a look at the definition and basics of economics.
Once we have defined the basics of politics and economics, I want to return to some of the concepts in this lesson. We will dive into the different definitions of politics and the concepts they express. What is “the common good?” What is “self-interest”? What are the “classes” that Marx referenced? What is the relationship between war and politics? Finally, what is “the government”?
Once we have considered what all these basic ideas mean, we will start identifying them in different social contexts at different points in history that allow us to see how a political process plays out from beginning to end. Finally, we will perform some basic political analysis of current events.