Is politics about persuasion or about conflict? Thinkers have split for centuries
Hannah Arendt read Aristotle as holding that political life meant settling matters by words and persuasion rather than violence. Carl Schmitt saw the essence of politics as telling friend from foe. Between those poles sits nearly every theory of what politics is, and scholars still cannot agree where its boundaries lie.
The word leads back to the Greek polis, city. Aristotle's treatise Politika, affairs of the cities, reached Early Modern English in the mid-fifteenth century under the spelling Polettiques. The singular politic is attested from 1430, via Middle French and a Latinised form of the Greek politikos, from polites, citizen.
One long-running divide separates moralists from realists. Moralists link politics tightly to ethics, and at the extreme to utopian thinking; Bernard Crick, for example, treated politics as the way free societies govern themselves. Realists see it chiefly as the exercise of power. Agonists go further: Elmer Schattschneider placed conflict at the root of all politics. The Irish political scientist Michael Laver offered a middle path, describing politics as a characteristic mixture of conflict and cooperation.
Another dispute concerns scope. Adrian Leftwich distinguished a limited view, confining politics mainly to government, from an extensive one that finds it throughout human relationships. Feminist thinkers pushed the extensive view, insisting that settings long treated as outside politics deserve to be seen as political too. Politics also operates at every scale, from clans and companies to local councils, states and international bodies, and uses tools ranging from persuasion and negotiation to lawmaking and war.
For most of human existence people lived in bands and tribes with no central authority, and many still lived in non-state societies up to the twelfth century. Early dynastic Sumer and Egypt were the first civilisations to fix borders instead of vague frontiers. Why states arose remains contested. Voluntary theories emphasise shared interests growing out of agriculture and population pressure, and the hydraulic hypothesis argues that states formed to organise large irrigation works, though some scholars reject any single explanation. Political thought itself runs back to Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Confucius and Chanakya's Arthashastra.
Source: Politics
