Observe how no one has ever referred to such a thing as ‘The Politics’.
No one ever says, “The politics says that climate change is happening.”
No, we always say, “The science says that climate change is happening.”
Why?
Well, politicians are either 1) unitary, our overlords: sovereign, government, the ruling class, or 2) partial, the 24-hour-political-party people. And either way, we don’t like it: either something is being imposed on us from above, or it is being urged on us from one side or the other.
Let me lay this out in textbook manner:
Politics, in modern times, depends on partiality.
Yet partiality is not authoritative.
In those two lines we have the source of all our laments about modern politics. That old bore Habermas always talked about “legitimation crisis”. What does it mean? It means, if I put it in Shakespearian terms (about antique politics), that the king is a usurper. Read Richard II or Henry IV Part I to understand.
But the thought is incomplete. Politics or government has always suffered from that sort of periodic legitimation crisis: usurpation and how to refine it. That is antique politics. But a distinctively modern politics is 24-hour-political-party politics: which means what Machiavelli and John Stuart Mill thought was not a negative thing (as everyone in the entire history of the world had thought – ‘Let’s avoid civil discord at all costs’) but, possibly, a positive thing: antagonism between rival factions being fertile for vitality, as Machiavelli saw, and perhaps fundamentally institutionally necessary, as Mill saw...<<<Read More>>>...
