Editorial
Kari Palonen: Two Concepts of Politics: Conceptual History and Present Controversies
In contemporary debates we may distinguish a number of individual conceptions of politics, which, however, can be understood as versions of combinations of two and only two concepts of politics. I will call the two the sphere-concept and the activity-concept. Although they on most occasions are closely intertwined, they refer to two distinct concepts, both of which are regularly evoked but seldom clearly distinguished from each other either in the daily or in the academic debate on politics as a concept. The sphere-concept arose from the need to demarcate politics from other fields or sectors, 'the political system' currently serving as the main metaphor. The conceptualization of the activity of politics refers to its qualification as a contingent, controversial and temporal phenomenon from different perspectives, which are here discussed as rhetorical topoi for the activity of politics. In this article I want to discuss the strange character of speaking about politics, to elucidate the opposition between the two concepts of politics by illustrating their internal history, range of variation and then discuss the indirect style of the contemporary debates on the concepts of politics.
Keywords: conceptual history; contested concepts; intertextuality; politics; politics-as-activity; politics-as-sphere; spatial and temporal metaphors.
Márton Szabó: Politics Versus the Political: Interpreting 'das Politische' in Carl Schmitt In the rich and highly debated oeuvre of Carl Schmitt The Concept of the Political is one of the least ideological pieces, although his friend-enemy distinction has caused several misunderstandings. Nonetheless, The Concept of the Political, by the creation of the notion of 'the Political' primarily seeks a theoretical answer to the question of what is the essence of late-modern politics and how it can be interpreted and defined. This essay infers that the interpretation has three parts: the concept of categorization and distinction, the intensity criterion, the state of exception and the borderline definition. The essay reconstructs Schmitt's original question and shows that his discussion of the concept of the political is, above all, the appearance and clarification of a new interpretation of politics.
Keywords: Discourse; Carl Schmitt; political theory; politics; the political.
Andreas Beck Holm: Marx on Politics: On the Search for a Missing Concept Even though Marxism is an extremely important contribution to modern political theory, Marx himself never formulated a clear theoretical concept of politics. The absence of such a theory has been interpreted by some as an indication of politics being a matter of secondary importance in an essentially economic theory. Others have seen this absence as a fundamental problem for Marxist thought. Inspired by Althusserian Marxism, this article offers an alternative to both points of view. A clear understanding of politics is indeed of great importance to Marxist theory, but in this context the absence of a concept reflects Marx' view of politics as practice. A clear concept of politics not only presupposes a practical political project, it has no validity outside such a project. It must, therefore, be understood as a borderline concept. Unfolding the radical consequences of this change of view, the article retraces the development and formulation of the political project informing Marx' theoretical understanding of politics. The importance of his approach for political theory is demonstrated by the comparison of the logic of the borderline concept of politics to the views of Machiavelli, Rawls, and Schmitt.
Keywords: Althusser; communism; hegemony; ideology; Marx; philosophy; politics; practice.
Volker Heins: Seduction, Alienation, Racketeering: The Death of Politics in Frankfurt School Thinking The purpose of this article is to explicate concepts of politics that were introduced - if somewhat implicitly - by different Frankfurt School theorists. Authors writing within this influential tradition have identified a number of structural threats to the very possibility of genuine, transformative political action in modern capitalist society. The article discusses these threats under three headings: seduction by media and consumerism, the draining away of political power from the state in favor of rackets, and political alienation afflicting individuals and communities excluded from circles of power. These three concepts can be read as transmutations of classical political ideas. Seduction subverts liberal ideas of 'freedom', racketeering is a degenerate way of forming 'associations', and political alienation is a caricature of the contractualist notion of surrendering power to the sovereign state. In conclusion, an attempt is made to evaluate the extent to which those concepts may or may not help us to better understand the place and function of the political in modern societies.
Keywords: Alienation; concept of politics; critical theory; Frankfurt School; rackets; seduction.
Micael Björk: Policing Agonistic Pluralism: Classical and Contemporary Thoughts on the Viability of the Polity As holders of the final responsibility for maintaining a dynamic border between friend-and-enemy groupings, the police force watches over adversaries who share a belief in the possibility of making decisions in spite of divergent interests. This is an important responsibility for the police, although insufficiently studied conceptually. In this article such work is commenced by means of contemporary policing theory and classical perspectives on the inescapability of a democratic indeterminacy. Using concepts from Chantal Mouffe's reading of Carl Schmitt, supplemented by Karl Mannheim's and Max Weber's view of modern politics as a pluralization of life-chances, it is argued that open societies must rely on a constitutive exchange between the use of legal-bureaucratic force and professional ethics in police work to support a plurality of political diagnoses in civil society.
Keywords: Agonistic pluralism; friend-and-enemy groupings; law and order; policing; professional ethics.
Noel Parker: Religion and Politics: Voltaire's and Rousseau's Enlightenment Strategies The article analyzes in the work of two leading 18th-century thinkers' two dominant strategies to decide the relationship between religion and politics in modern thought as it has been derived from the 18th-century Enlightenment: exclusion and/or inclusion subject to the requirements of politics. It begins by setting out how the underlying problem was experienced from the Enlightenment's historical moment, taking stock as it does so of how their take on it compares with our own. It then juxtaposes the two thinkers: one who sought to exclude religion from politics, Voltaire; and one, Rousseau, who was willing to include it. Voltaire's radical exclusion maps to a certain organization of the concepts of truth/knowledge/belief, all separated from power and government. Rousseau departed from the Enlightenment view of truth and knowledge, and focussed instead upon the personal and social function of belief, including as a key to membership of the political community. This led him to construct a socially useful version of religion to set within the political arena. In each case, I also argue that the difficulties of realizing the given resolution have become greater with time, and that, were it to be realized, each would give rise to a fatally limited conception of politics. Notwithstanding the continuing temptation to adopt solutions along Enlightenment lines, it finally appears from these paradigm cases that neither the exclusion nor the functional inclusion of religion are promising ways to tackle the problem of its relationship to politics.
Keywords: Belief; enlightenment; politics; religion; Rousseau; secularism; Voltaire.
Frederik Thuesen Pedersen: Global Solidarity as Global Constitutionalism: An Interview with Hauke Brunkhorst Solidarity on the level of world society may appear as an intractable ideal. Nevertheless, the globalization of law and human rights can be perceived as an emerging form of global constitutionalism contributing to the integration of world society. This interview with one of Germany's leading sociologists, Hauke Brunkhorst, revolves around this evolution. Brunkhorst argues that solidarity is internal to democratic self-determination. Insofar as citizens are increasingly subject to global laws they constitute a global people in embryonic form. This is evident through the gradual constitution of a transnational public sphere and global protest movements invoking the 'language of human rights'. Still, the legal integration of world society is ridden by democratic deficiencies, and to some extent politics after 9/11 has questioned the move toward a global constitutionalism. The interview is inspired by Brunkhorst's recent book, Solidarity.
Keywords: Civil society; global democracy; human rights; legal globalization; public sphere; social integration; systems theory.