WEEK 3: POLITICS

1. Let’s go back to the frictions between the individual and community: Politics pertains to the organization and regulation of communities of distinct individuals;
2. Or, politics pertains to the means employed to organize and regulate collective human existence;
3. Politics determines the realms of human affairs: 1) the public realm (sphere); 2) the private realm (sphere);
4. Example: Religious freedom; Economic freedom;
5. Politics structures our lives; Political theory structures politics: conceptual and normative scopes and limits;
6. Because of the genuine lack of exactitude, political theory cannot demarcate every single human endeavor; yet it demarcates the appropriate boundaries of these endeavors;
7. How can we define a political event?
8. The major questions of politics: a) (leadership) Who should wield power? b) (institutional) How should power be distributed? c) (justice) How can power be exercised fairly? d) (liberty and civil rights) What should the limits of power be?
9. Completing points 6 and 7, politics is about power and political theory is our effort to understand the nature of power;
10. According to Bertrand Russell (Power: A new Social Analysis) power is the capacity to produce intended effects;
11. The power of: wealth; eloquence; authority; prestige; tradition; coercion;
12. The limits of power;
13. Good politics, good laws and good arms; Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527): a ruler should be feared by its subjects;
14. Violence and power;
15. Rulers and the exclusivity of power;Coercion, power and government (anarchism and its opponents);
Proudhon (1809-1865) implemented it in the idea of creation of the communes;
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876);
Emma Goldman (1869-1940): anarchism is the philosophy of a new social order of the unrestricted man-made law; we can still have a peaceful life without a government (compare it with Hobbes);
16. According to Robert Dahl, since it deny the legitimacy of law and force, anarchism is more a moral doctrine than a political doctrine—ethic of responsibility (take responsibility of one’s actions: use of force) and ethic of ultimate ends (ignore bad outcomes out of good intentions);
17. Politics is not force and violence; rather it is their control;
18. Power influences but does not force; yet power influences according to a premeditated design;
19. The order/freedom dichotomy: Plato resolves it through the rule of a philosopher king;
20. Power as a zero-sum-game: Hobbes, Weber;
21. Power as a way to serve mutual interests;
22. If we adjust ourselves to interests/requirements of others, power had occurred;
23. Politics are a means of managing conflicts;
24. E. E. Schattschneider: politics as self-defining activity (a considerable amount of power is exercised to define politics): power helps defining issues, control agenda, and choose battles;
25. Conflict and cooperation: politics musters cooperation and manages conflicts; the art of compromise;
26. Politics is about power and power is about influence: not every sort of influence is power and not all exercises of power are political: such are only those that affect public life;
27. The political nature of the private life;
28. POLITICS IS PERVASIVE

THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE PRIVATE SPHERE
1. Politics is about how the power employed to order collective life is accumulated, exercised, and distributed;
2. Yet much private activity affects the public sphere;
3. Thus, rather than categorical, the political activity is relative: the more it addresses public issues, the more political it is;
4. Power as exercised in public forums and power exercised in close door politics;
5. Power as form and power as content;
6. Forms of the exercise of power: public’s compliance and submission to laws; the rule of the king; violence (tyranny); the rule of representatives;
7. Politics and private interests: the pursue of private interests by political means;
8. The contemporary pejorative connotation of politics and its reasons;
9. Politics as conducted by distinct individuals: a public that ceases to be a community of individuals ceases to be a public;
10. Thus, an event is more political if it is more open to the influence of the public and its outcomes affect more the public
11. Bernard Crick: the attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics: totalitarianism;
12. Yet Crick acknowledges that nothing can be exempted from politics entirely;Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): because politics can be found everywhere, it becomes necessary to make distinctions between different levels or degrees of political activity.