The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (210 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

As a general concept, the practice of the art or science of directing and administrating states or other political units. However, the definition of politics is highly, perhaps essentially, contested. There is considerable disagreement on which aspects of social life are to be considered ‘political’. At one extreme, many (notably, but not only, feminists) assert that ‘the personal is political’, meaning that the essential characteristics of political life can be found in any relationship, such as that between a man and a woman. Popular usage, however, suggests a much narrower domain for politics: it is often assumed that politics only occurs at the level of government and the state and must involve party competition. In the sense developed in Bernard Crick's
In Defence of Politics
, the phenomenon of politics is very limited in time and space to certain kinds of relatively liberal, pluralistic societies which allow relatively open debate.
To say that an area of activity, like sport, the arts or family life is not part of politics, or is ‘nothing to do with politics’, is to make a particular kind of political point about it, principally that it is not to be discussed on whatever is currently regarded as the political agenda. Keeping matters off the political agenda can, of course, be a very effective way of dealing with them in one's own interests.
The traditional definition of politics, ‘the art and science of government’, offers no constraint on its application since there has never been a consensus on which activities count as government. Is government confined to the state? Does it not also take place in church, guild, estate, and family?
There are two fundamental test questions we can apply to the concept of politics. First, do creatures other than human beings have politics? Second, can there be societies without politics? From classical times onward there have been some writers who thought that other creatures did have politics: in the mid-seventeenth century Purchas was referring to bees as the ‘political flying-insects’. Equally there have been attempts—before and since More coined the term—to posit ‘Utopian’ societies with no politics. The implication is usually (‘Utopia’ means nowhere) that such a society is conceivable, but not practically possible.
A modern mainstream view might be: politics applies only to human beings, or at least to those beings which can communicate symbolically and thus make statements, invoke principles, argue, and disagree. Politics occurs where people disagree about the distribution of reasons and have at least some procedures for the resolution of such disagreements. It is thus not present in the
state of nature
where people make war on each other in their own interests, shouting, as it were, ‘I will have that’ rather than ‘I have a right to that’. It is also absent in other cases, where there is a monolithic and complete agreement on the rights and duties in a society. Of course, it can be objected that this definition makes the presence or absence of politics dependent on a contingent feature of consciousness, the question of whether people accept the existing rules. If one accepts notions of ‘latent disagreement’, there is, again, no limit to the political domain.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Politics has been variously described as centrally concerned:

(1) with civil government, the state, and public affairs;
(2) with human conflict and its resolution; or
(3) with the sources and exercise of power. Correspondingly, definitions of economics have generally focused upon:

(1) systems of production and exchange;
(2) rational behaviour directed towards the maximization of utility through optimal allocation of scarce resources; or
(3) the accumulation and distribution of wealth.

However, agreed definitions of the social sciences are not to be had cheaply. Their ill-defined frontiers allow for periodic incursions and skirmishes. The border between politics and economics is peculiarly open, for the obvious reason that states dispose of substantial material resources while production and exchange can hardly take place without some framework of security. The main varieties of definition none the less deserve attention, since they help clarify the grounds on which challenges to the integrity of each discipline have generally been based.
Thus the two sets of definitions are analogous. The first pair has to do with institutions; the second with means or processes; the third solely with ends. Taking them in turn, it is clear that few students of politics would readily abandon the study of warfare to economists simply because states resorted to the widespread use of mercenaries. They regard the production of at least this one essential service of the provision of defence as unequivocally public. Conversely, economists spend a great deal of their time studying the competitive behaviour of free rational actors in markets. But many concede that firms are hierarchical organizations within which authority substitutes for voluntary exchange, that contracts can hardly be relied upon without a framework of law backed up by the state, and that extensive command economies have from time to time existed in which the role of the free market was negligible. Large firms have been known to use a variety of means, including their influence over states, to compete by raising the costs of their competitors rather than cutting their own. Mercantilist states routinely do the same. But while many economists deplore such market imperfections, few would wish to concede the study of even the most grossly imperfect markets to political scientists. In short, the mixed character of even those institutions which seem archetypically political or economic often turns out on closer examination to call for skills more often associated with the rival discipline.
The most plausible line of argument for those who wish to claim that politics is something more than the study of economics by the innumerate would seem to be to put their trust in irrationality as a defining human feature, whether it be through the Thomistic concept of a sphere of practical reason shot through with contingency because of the Fall, the Hobbesian notion of mankind as the only species able to lie, or the Hegelian idea of absolute free will. Naturally, this poses methodological problems. How may the irrational investigate itself rationally, and why indeed might it really wish to? See also
political economy
.
CJ 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

The methods and theories of psychology have been borrowed by politics on an increasing scale since the early twentieth century: in the academic interpretation of political behaviour; and in their utilization by practising politicians. The applicability of psychology in the interpretation and practice of politics nevertheless remains controversial.
The experience of fascist regimes defied explanations within the conventional wisdom which assumed that the self-perpetuating imprinting from one generation to another and the stabilizing aspects of the consequent wider culture determined basic personality structures consistent with the maintenance of political stability. Explanations of political change in terms of structural or functional socio-economic determinants also appeared deficient. In their stead the phenomenon of the
authoritarian
personality was isolated, and political psychologists set about the explanation both of the phenomenon and the support that it attracted in terms of the subject's family background, where the perceived absence of parental love has been hypothesized as the fountain of fantasized solutions to the problems of emotional deprivation that are manifested in expansive desires for dominance. The conditions which created mass obedience to fascist regimes were analysed in terms of individuals: (1) giving up the private ego-ideal, embedded in the will of the leader; (2) regressing to infantile responses, thus allowing great scope for the group ideal; and (3) becoming easy prey to the imperatives of a collective paranoia against stated enemies.
Academic political psychology expanded to take in more mundane actions and events. Here the development of psychoanalysis has proved enriching, although inclined to foster a continuing obsession with the more rare authoritarian personality syndrome. Explanation of adaptation by political psychologists has also taken in the analysis of electoral behaviour, mass public opinion, and political activity, notably through political parties. Writers, such as Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Almond , propounded the thesis that participation in the democratic process, as reflected in such analysis, was the principal determinant of adaptation. However, they differed over what determined participation, specifying causation variously to be the result of leadership styles or other élite political control processes or the first stage of
political socialization
, in particular through school. Those who found no clear causes, however, were driven back to the normal assumptions of personality imprinting and political stability, looking for non-systematic causes of participation and adaptation as exceptional events in a similar manner to the analysts of the authoritarian personality.
Political psychology has also increasingly focused on group decision-making in executive élites or policy communities, as key areas of political activity, and brought to bear theories of bargaining and negotiation, culled from social psychology, on collective dilemmas of conflict resolution or policy co-ordination. However, this has been challenged by the economic approach to politics which stresses rational choice as the basis of political action, and hence asserted decision-making to be contingent upon the outcome of relations between rationally competing actors. Interestingly even some neo-Marxist writers have shown a tendency to embrace rational choice approaches to politics in the context of wider socio-economic pressures. In the real world, both rational and non-rational motives apply.
The development of approaches in academic political psychology was reflected in those applied by practising politicians. The mass propaganda strategies of Hitler's regime, notably through the work of Goebbels, gave way to more routine usage by political actors of the mass media, particularly from the 1960s in order to increase democratic participation and/or win election. During the 1980s political marketing was exported from the United States to a number of other countries, notably the United Kingdom. Party programmes are treated as products and the electorate as consumers, who are assumed to be individually rationally self-interested, and if not, are encouraged to be so.
JBr