Bringing Politics Back In

Abstract

Although the social sciences circle about the political, and scholars in the humanities keep gesturing at it, the thing itself remains obscure. It is the silent center of endless academic debate, always already known, yet never quite revealed. A common move is to redescribe it in other terms, such as the ones from military strategy that inform “realist” IR theory, or the moral and legal principles that underpin cosmopolitan ideals. To think of the political in sociological, economic, cultural, geographic, historical, or even scientific terms involves a similarly alienating move, which obscures the original object of study and hides the alienating procedure. If we want to understand politics, we have to address it directly, but that is hard to do when we have largely deprived ourselves of the means of thinking politically. How can we think about this thing that is so central, that pulls us in and envelops us, and yet has this mysterious character that repels understanding? Is politics, like the Kantian noumenon , unknowable in principle? Or, is that apparent unknowability a false problem? Are we bound, as Kant might have imagined, to think politically in a particular way if we are to operate in the world? The conventional view is that we are bound, because politics is a response to the problem of government. That leads us directly to the state. Although we should certainly go there, we should not linger too long. The state gives us an appealing but misleading conception of politics. It is more helpful …