Politics and The Concept of The Political: The Political Imagination

Review
Politics and the concept of the political:

The political imagination
James Wiley
Routledge, London, 2016, 310 pp. ISBN-10: 1138185825
ISBN-13: 978-1138185821
Contemporary Political Theory (2018) 17, S197–S200. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-

017-0166-3; published online 7 November 2017
The introduction of the idea of the political into English language philosophy and
theory probably occurred in the 1980s/1990s through the translation of European
texts written in languages where a distinction is made between, for example, die
Politik and das Politische, la politique and le politique, and la politica and il
politico. The first term of each pair can be straightforwardly translated into English
as politics, but the second required the invention of an equivalent, the political, and
thus the conversion of an adjective into a noun, although arguably the more familiar
and possibly less annoying word polity might have done the job (Vollrath, 1987).
Two key – and at the same time very different – texts that mediated the translation
were Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1996) and Claude Lefort’s The
Political Forms of Modern Society (1986). The theories and arguments of those
texts were taken up by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek, by
thinkers of deconstruction following the work of Philippe Lacoue–Labarthe and
Jean Luc Nancy, and by academics working in the broad field of continental
thought and critical theory, more generally.
There are two aspects of the idea of the political which pulled early adopters of
the term to it, and equally pushed rejecters from it. Firstly, the political was
understood as the basis of a method or criteria which could determine the
specificity of politics, as distinct from economics, law, psychology, sociology and
similar scientific frameworks that would explain away politics in terms of
something else. Secondly, the political was understood as something like the
condition of politics in a constitutive rather than transcendental sense, and thus as
distinct from politics as it is ordinarily understood, and especially when that
ordinariness is explained by non-political scientific frameworks. There is probably
a more subjective and conjunctural reason for the pull of the political as well,
which is to do with a sense that the then dominant and canonical paradigms of
political thought in English speaking universities, such as the work of Rawls,
Habermas, the misleadingly named analytical and rational choice approaches, and
Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, S4, S197–S200
www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
liberalism in general, were too methodologically, normatively and empirically

restrictive and distorting, as well as uninteresting and predictable. Thus, in many
ways, the adoption of the political converged with exciting and interesting
structuralist and post-structuralist approaches at the margins of the curriculum and
research agendas of political thought. It also gave the work of recognised but
marginal thinkers such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin a bit of
salience.
One of the distinctive and original achievements of James Wiley’s book is that it
flips the problematic of the political in two ways. Firstly, by examining the work of
eight canonical thinkers of the political, Wiley weakens the political/politics
distinction by contextualising their different but inter-related concepts of the
political within the ideas of politics – of what it is and what it should be – that each
proposes and advances. This is largely a consequence of the fact that each thinker
of the political develops the concept against what each takes to be the prevailing
and generally wrong state of affairs regarding the practice of politics at the time of
writing. In a sense, the point of the concept of the political is to explain how politics
has become alienated, as it were, and to return politics to itself. Largely, that is a
matter of the dominance of something else – law, metaphysics, economy, society –
over politics (and a weakness of thinkers of the political is their inability to
recognise that as a political process). In addition to contextualising each thinker’s
work in it its own historical terms, Wiley also provides a contemporary context in
the form of the problem of political realism, understood in the anti-perfectionist
sense of writers like Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss (and not the idealist
sense of approaches like critical realism). Secondly, Wiley shows in each case that,
far from being constitutive (and thus originary and authentic), the concept of the
political is derived, and its derivation, even if from accounts of a prior historical
origin, where, with some exceptions, prior means pre-modern, is motivated by an
ideological commitment to a transformation of what is understood as the
contemporary practice of politics.
The authors Wiley examines are grouped in three parts. The first groups Weber,
Schmitt and Ricoeur under ‘The State’, the second groups Arendt and Wolin under
‘The Polis’, and the last discusses Lefort and Laclau and Mouffe in the same
chapter under the category of ‘Society’, with an additional summary concluding
chapter on ‘Theories of the Political, Political Theory and Politics’. The book is
fronted by a general introduction on ‘The Status of Politics and the Political’. The
selection covers the key names associated with the political and the discussions of
their work brings in related authors and an impressive grasp of the major
interpretive and explanatory research. The discussions also conclude with attempts
to show how both the ideas and the political contexts of the authors relate to recent
theoretical and political discussions in international relations, political activism and
socialism, to mention just three. Wiley also takes quite a broad ecumenical
approach, unrestricted by the conventions of the narrow schools that have grown up
S198 Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, S4, S197–S200
Review
around each author. It is thus refreshing to see the likes of Bernard Crick and David
Easton brought into the discussion because it helps to show that the debate
surrounding the political is not some obscure eccentric fad. On the contrary, it links
up with issues that have been present in the mainstream for some time.
The decision to begin with a discussion of Weber focussing mainly on the
Vocation essay and his lectures and writings about World War I is a good one as it
is useful to be reminded of/discover for the first time Weber’s ideas about politics.
Like the rest of the theorists of ‘The State’ Weber advanced a very heroic version
of the political, with struggles for power present almost everywhere, including
morality. Hence, Weber’s attraction to currently unfashionable ideas of ‘manly
conduct’ and a ‘human code of honour’ and ‘breed’. As Wiley points out, Weber’s
realism mystifies the state, a trait which is shared with that other butch realist, Carl
Schmitt who, it turns out, never gets beyond a romantic political theology. The
inclusion of a discussion of the often-overlooked work of Paul Ricoeur with respect
to ‘The State’ helps to emphasise the fact that a common characteristic of its
‘realist’ theorisation is a dependency on ideas about theology, violence and ethics,
although perhaps more could have been made of the significance of his ‘Political
Paradox’ essay in the context of the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
If anything is common to the thought of Arendt and Wolin it is perhaps their
wild, contradictory imagination, over and above their divergent republican and
democratic trajectories. Both elevate the creative dimension of the political which,
although bearing comparisons with the heroic (and in Arendt’s case, the
aristocratic), focuses action on the new as ‘now’. That is, both are unapologetic,
if tragic, moderns. Moreover, both sought to ground the political at street level, and
both failed to find a convincing verification of that endeavour. Arendt’s work is
extensive and the literature that it has inspired, including both J.G.A. Pocock and
Richard Sennett, even more extensive, and Wiley has diligently engaged with it. By
contrast, the account of Wolin is a bit thin and the emphasis on the ‘populist’ aspect
of his thought possibility misleading, as it does not do justice to the grassroots
mobilising that he advocated in the early stages of his career, to the ‘fugitive
democracy’ he advocated towards the end of his life, or to his influence on other US
political thinkers.
If there is one strategic mistake in the book, it is probably the attempt to discuss
both Lefort and Laclau and Mouffe in the same short chapter, which does not cover
the richness of these thinkers. The account of Lefort seems over reliant on Laclau
and Mouffe’s rather functionalist version of it, which they transform by applying it
to different (and worsening, in relation to Lefort’s original democratic formulation)
political and economic contexts. The contextual account of Lefort remains thin, and
it would have been good to have addressed his influence on such diametrically
opposed thinkers as Rosanvallon and Abensour. Similarly, Laclau’s engagement
(or fight) with Žižek over the relation between democracy and populism is missed,
and the development of Laclau’s thought on an ideal of ‘the people’ as the
Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, S4, S197–S200 S199
Review
democratic essence is side-lined in favour of a not entirely convincing discussion of

what socialism should be. However, those criticisms aside, Wiley has provided
solid and useful accounts of a set of important thinkers, which will help make their
work relevant to those who self-identify as ‘realists’. Last but not least, it is also
supported by an impressive and useful bibliography.
References
Lefort, C. (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Schmitt, C. (1996[1932]) The Concept of the Political. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vollrath, E. (1987) The rational and the political: An essay in the semantics of politics. Philosophy &
Social Criticism 13: 17–29.
Jeremy Valentine
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh EH21 6UU, UK
[email protected]
S200 Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 17, S4, S197–S200

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Review

Politics and the concept of the political:

Contemporary Political Theory (2018) 17, S197–S200. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-

liberalism in general, were too methodologically, normatively and empirically

democratic essence is side-lined in favour of a not entirely convincing discussion of

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