The Nature of Politics

Abstract

If philosophy is the free and radical pursuit of the truth about important things there must be a limited number of things that qualify as “important.” Reflection shows, as Chapter 2 has asserted, that there are two such things: physics and politics. Political philosophy is thus a branch, a major branch, of philosophy. Deferring for a bit a fuller statement, we can say here that political philosophy is the free and radical pursuit by unassisted human reason of the truth about the nature of politics. However, just as the word “philosophy” has undergone a denaturing process for the past two centuries, so the word “politics” has come to mean almost nothing that will hold still to be studied. An illustration will help. If a member of One party in the legislature proposes some measure we can be certain that soon thereafter a member of the Other party will charge that the action of the One is “just politics.” But of course! Why else would the voters send either of them to the legislature: to sing and dance perhaps? If, in fact, the member of the Other party rightly uses the word “politics” as a term of dispraise, then we ought to send the whole lot of them in both parties packing and shut the legislature down because it would be, by its nature, a den of sin. We do not intend here to deny categorically the proposition that some of what goes on in that legislature is “just” politics, but we reach a difficulty. We cannot study political philosophy without knowing what politics is and it turns out that that is itself a problem that requires clarification and resolution. Happily, the clarification and resolution are pretty easy to make to the student with reasonable intelligence and a reasonably open mind. It just requires the breaking of a few bad habits. But wait! It may be that at the end of the road one returns to the view that politics, all of it, deserves a measure of disapproval. Intelligence and open-mindedness need to be augmented with patience and with a measure of resignation.