ECPR Press The Political

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The PoliticalBy Stefano BartoliniRowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.Copyright © 2018 Stefano BartoliniAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78660-690-7ContentsPreface, ix, Acknowledgements, xv, 1 Trajectories of the political, 1, 2 Nuclear political action, 29, 3 Conditions for political action: Confinement and monopolisation, 61, 4 Fields of political action, 91, 5 What is 'politics'?, 117, Afterword, 145, Index, 147, About the Author, 153, CHAPTER 1Trajectories of the politicalThe domain of human action that we conventionally define as 'politics' is plagued with events and shattered by personalities. Moreover, it is an inherently dangerous domain, as through it men can injure and rob, not to mention ruin themselves. The realm of the political engenders no teleological optimisms or invisible hands, and the vigour of wills breeds no harmonious combination or good outcome. Hands are visible in politics and are often armed. Unsurprisingly, the discussion of the concept of 'politics' has always evidenced a striking diversity of perspectives and approaches, and a definite lack of a common vocabulary or of a dominant view. Therefore, although the reflection is hardly new, the questions of what is political, what is specific about it and what should be the knowledge task of the political scientist have proven particularly difficult to address. Even a short review of previous investigations and responses would keep us busy for a long time, and there is no scope in this book to analyse this large body of thought in critical depth.Understanding of the political evolves, of course, and in this introductory chapter I briefly focus on its main trajectories to pave the way for my own elaboration. First, predominantly 'vertical' or 'horizontal' conceptualisations have alternated in the history of visions of 'politics'. In the phases of horizontal predominance, politics spreads through all the interstices of the human experience, inextricably links to other dimensions of such experience and becomes ubiquitous and hard to grasp in its essential features. In the periods in which a vertical vision prevails, politics tends to be studied via characterisations that transcend its phenomenology, with definitions focusing on its essentialist nature and specific character.Second, the vertical and horizontal conceptions of politics that have historically alternated have both been affected by a process of segmentation of the domains of human action in which politics has been progressively separated from other spheres of action, and the discipline of politics has been separated from the neighbouring disciplines of law, sociology, economics, theology, philosophy and so on.Third, twentieth-century conceptions of politics continue to reflect the vertical and horizontal dimensions while engaging with a politics dismembered of its connections with other disciplines. Politics is connected with ethics in ancient Greek thinking, with God in the Christian ecclesia, with law in the formation of modern absolutist states and with society in the age of great social conflicts. It increasingly connects with economics in the age of its domestication.HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL CONCEPTIONSWe recognise the starting point of any conception of politics in the Greek term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], politicos, presumably, but not certainly, having the same pre-Indo-European root as the term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], polemos, war. The famous Aristotelian definition of man as a 'political animal' (zoon politikon) was a definition of 'man', not of 'politics'. 'Politics' as such was undefined. In the Greek experience, a man's participation in the polis was not a part of his life but its essence. A 'non-political' man was a defective animal who had lost the plenitude of his fusion with and within the polis. The political intertwined so much with the human experience that it was undefinable as a separate sphere