First Reading Assessment

First Reading Assessment
What is politics?
Gaman-Olutvina et. al (2017)
Politics, in its broadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve and amend the general
rules under which they live.
Although politics is also an academic subject, it is then clearly the study if this activity. Politics is thus
inextricable linked to the phenomena of conflict and cooperation.
On the one hand, the existence of rival opinions, different wants, competing needs and opposing
interests guarantees disagreement about the rules under which people live.
On the other hand, people recognize that, in order to influence these rules or ensure that they are upheld,
they must work with others – hence Hannah Arendt’s definition of political power as ‘acting in concert’
This is why the heart of politics is often portrayed as a process of conflict resolution. In which rival
views or competing interests are reconciled with one another.
●(Page 2)
However, politics in this broad sense is better thought of as a search for conflict resolution than
as its achievement, as not all conflicts are or can be, resolve.
Nevertheless, the inescapable presence of diversity (we are not all alike) and scarcity (there
is never enough to go around) ensures that politics is an inevitable feature of the human
condition.
Any attempt of clarify the meaning of ‘politics’ must nevertheless address two major problems.
The first is the mass of association that the word has when used in everyday language; in other
words, politics is a ‘loaded’ term.
Whereas most people think of, say, economics, geography, history and biology simply as
academics subjects, few people come to politics without preconceptions.
Many, for instance, automatically assume that students and teachers of politics must in some
way be biased, finding it difficult to believe that the subject can be approached in an impartial
and dispassionate manner.
To make matters worse, politics is usually thought of as a ‘dirty’ word : it conjures up
images of trouble, disruption, and deceit, manipulation and lies on the other.
● (PAGE 3)
There is nothing new about such associations. As long ago as 1755, Samuel Johnson
dismissed politics as ‘nothing more than means of rising in the world’, while in the nineteenth
century the US historian Henry Adams summed up politics as “the systematic organization of
hatreds’.
The second and more intractable difficulty is that even respected authorities cannot agree what
the subject is about. Politics is defined is such different ways:
1. As the exercise of power,
2. The science of government,.
3. The making of collective decisions,
4. The allocation of scare resources,
5. The practice of deception and manipulation, and so on,
The virtue of the definition advance in this text – ‘the making, preserving and amending of general
social rules’ – is that is sufficiently broad to encompass most, if not all, of the competing definitions.
However, problems arise when the definition is unpacked, or when the meaning is refined.
For instance. Does “politics” refer to a particular way in which rules are made, preserve or amended
(that is, peacefully, by debate), or to all such processes?
Similarly, is politics practiced in all social contexts and institutions, or only in certain ones (that is,
government and public life)?
● (PAGE 4)
From this perspective, politics may be treated as an ‘essentially contested’ concept, in the sense that the
term has a number of acceptable or legitimate meanings.
On the other hand, these different views may simply consist of contrasting conceptions of the same, if
necessarily vague, concept.
Whether we are dealing with rival concepts or alternative conceptions it is helpful to distinguish
between two broad approaches to defining politics (Hay, 2002; Lefwich, 2004).
In the first politics is associated with an arena or location, in which case behavior becomes ‘political’
because of where it takes place.
In the second politics is viewed as a processor mechanism, in which case ‘political’ behavior is behavior
that exhibits distinctive characteristics or qualities, and so can take place in any, and perhaps all, social
context,
Each of these broad approaches has spawned alternative definitions of politics, and , as discussed later,
helped to different schools of political analysis.
Indeed, the debate about what is politics?’ is worth pursuing precisely because it exposes some of the
deepest intellectual and ideological disagreement in the academic study of the subject
Politics as an Arena Politics as a Process
Definitions of Politics The Art of Government Compromise and consensus
Public Affairs Power and distribution of
resources
Approaches to the Behaviouralism Feminism
Study of Politics
Rational-choice Marxism
Theory Post-positivist
approaches
Institutionalism

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First Reading Assessment

Definitions of Politics The Art of Government Compromise and consensus

Public Affairs Power and distribution of

Approaches to the Behaviouralism Feminism

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