Defining the political; is the political everything about power?

Introduction

The question asks first for a definition of the political and then for a judgment on whether the political is everything about power. The view taken here is that power is central to the political but not the whole of it, because politics also involves reasoned argument about common ends.

Meaning of the political

Politics is the activity through which a group whose members disagree arrives at decisions that bind all of them. Three things must be present. There must be disagreement to begin with, whether over what to aim at or only over how to get there; there must be a way of settling it by talk and persuasion rather than by bare force; and the disagreement must arise among people who see themselves as bound together in one group, for politics is always a collective affair. The word descends from the Greek polis, the city that was also the state, and Aristotle's remark that the human being is by nature a political animal means that taking part in a political community is where people realise their capacity for reason and virtue. No group can escape such decisions: it has to plan for what lies ahead, deal with neighbouring groups and divide what it holds, so politics belongs to the human condition and is not a hobby that some people choose to take up.

Two ways of drawing the boundary of the political compete. The broad one, which follows Max Weber's first description of politics as independent leadership in action, finds politics wherever some people are subject to the power of others, so that it is not confined to government or to politicians; on this view the election of a housing society's committee or a quarrel over who decides in a family is as political as a cabinet meeting. The narrow one, which Weber went on to adopt, keeps the word for leading or influencing a political association, which in modern conditions means the state; a question is political, on this view, when it concerns the control of state power, the ends that power is made to serve and what follows from its use. The state should not be mistaken for the government, which is only one of its parts: it also takes in the courts, elected assemblies, the armed forces and police, the civil service and local bodies. Theorising the political is the task of deciding where this boundary should run and what follows from drawing it in one place rather than another.

Is the political everything about power?

Arguments for. (1) Politics is, in a common understanding, about power and how it is distributed, and power is a relationship of domination and subordination in which one person can impose a will on others. (2) On Weber's broad idea, politics is present in any setting where some people are subject to the power of others, so a workplace, a campus or a household has its politics as surely as Parliament does. (3) The state, the central political association, is defined by the monopoly of legitimate force, and legitimacy is the way in which power is justified. (4) Marxists see the state as an instrument of a class, and feminists find power in gender relations; Foucault holds that all social relations are relations of power and that power runs through institutions that seem non-political. (5) Power shapes belief itself, as in manipulated consent.

Arguments against. (1) Politics is a collective activity of reconciling differences through discussion and persuasion; decisions reached only by violence or threat hardly count as political. Aristotle saw the political community as the place where human beings express their nature as reasoning and virtuous beings, which is a moral and not a merely power-related view. (2) The power argument usually pictures power as one will imposed on another, but coercion is only one form of power. Power is also exercised through persuasion, as when a trusted village elder or a family doctor changes minds without any threat, and through legitimation, by which rulers seek acceptance of their rule as right. Saying that politics is power settles little, therefore, unless we ask which form of power is at work, and the persuasive and justifying forms carry us back to argument and consent. (3) Authority rests on belief in rightfulness and not merely on power, and the concept of legitimation shows that people obey because they think it right. (4) If everything is power, the term loses its force, and it cannot separate political from other power relations. (5) The purpose of politics, an order that the members of a society can regard as good, would drop out of sight.

Evaluation. Power, rightly understood, is broad: it covers coercion, persuasion and even the shaping of the consent people give, so a power-centred account reaches further than it first appears. Even so, politics is also the attempt to work out, by reasons, a common solution to a common problem, and such an agreement is judged by the merit of its reasons and by the ends it serves (order, justice, welfare), not only by who prevailed. Power is therefore central to the political, but it is not the whole of it.

Conclusion

The political is the activity of reaching binding collective decisions among people who disagree; it is saturated with power but not reducible to it. A regime can hold on by force for some time, but precariously; power is most stable when people accept it as legitimate, and the justifications offered for it are what political theory examines. So the answer is: the political is largely, but not everything, about power.