Politics

Why It Matters

Andrew Gamble

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509527328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

People so often focus on the negative aspects of politics, like greed and corruption, but without politics we would be lost. It frames everything we do, and it has the power to bring about real and positive change.

Politics, Andrew Gamble reminds us, defeated slavery and secured equal rights for women and minorities. Without savvy and principled politicians and citizens willing to engage in political action, there would still be civil war in Ireland and apartheid in South Africa. Closer to home, local politicians stand up for communities and endeavour to advance the prosperity and wellbeing of their constituents.

But it hasn't always been like this, and without good politicians we could throw it all away. Right now humanity is in a race against itself, adjusting to new technologies that are destabilizing democracy and creating massive inequalities. By thinking and acting politically, Gamble argues, we can harness the imagination and enthusiasm of people everywhere to tackle these challenges and shape a better world.

1
Why Bother with Politics?

The case against politics can seem compelling. Has not politics been responsible for the wars, civil wars, rebellions, and revolutions which have regularly devastated societies, liquidating and impoverishing vast numbers, and destroying the things which make human lives worth living? During the civil war in seventeenth-century England, which also engulfed Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan, which vividly depicted the consequences of political breakdown, and the return of human beings to a state of nature:

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man…. In such condition, there is no place for industry … no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.¹

Hobbes argued that war is the default condition of human existence. The utmost skill is needed to design and manage a state that keeps its political conflicts within strict limits and prevents social order from breaking down. He thought a kind of despotism – meaning the absolute rule of one person or group of persons – able to suppress conflict and therefore to suppress politics was a price worth paying for civil peace. One objection to Hobbes is that politics may be suppressed for the citizens but it still goes on in the court around the ruler. The political world in an authoritarian state is narrower than in a republic or a democracy but it is still there. So even in times of peace, even when a power has arisen to provide order, the political world goes on as it always has, dominated by force and fraud, greed and corruption. Nowhere is this more evident than in the absolute monarchies, theocracies, and dictatorships which have formed the great majority of the political systems under which human beings have lived for the past five thousand years. Despotic rule has been the norm in states, in civil associations, and in households for most of recorded human history. There have been enlightened despots, just despots, humane despots, reforming despots in all cultures, but they remained despots, and were often succeeded by rulers who were not enlightened, just, humane, or reforming. Under authoritarian rule the checks against arbitrary power, greed, and corruption are always weak.

Surely democracies are different? The great hope of the modern era has been that the closed world of autocracy and authoritarianism can be replaced by the open world of representative government, respecting minorities and human rights, guaranteeing free speech and free association, and making rulers accountable. The rights that democracies enshrine have been bitterly fought for, and when new democracies have been formed, as with the ending of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, there have often been outpourings of hope and enthusiasm and a belief that anything is possible. But the euphoria rarely lasts; indeed in the case of South Africa it scarcely outlived the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. Politics in democracies, new and old, although almost always better than the oppressive authoritarian rule it replaces, still often disappoints. To many citizens, democratic politics, if not oppressive, remains grubby, disreputable, boring, remote, alienating, and never seems to change much, or when it does only gradually and in small, incremental ways.

Occasionally in democracies there are moments when the sovereign people is called upon to make a decision that is critical for the future of the country. The 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK was widely regarded as such a moment. The country was deeply divided, and the majority to leave the European Union was narrow – 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Among the supporters of Leave – many of whom had not believed they would be victorious right up until the voting trend became clear on the night – there was euphoria. Many genuinely thought this was a decisive movement of national renewal, a new beginning. The supporters of Remain were distraught, because the result struck at an important part of their identity, their sense of being European as well as British citizens and part of a European community.

The aftermath of the vote has been underwhelming for both sides. The long and complex negotiations to extricate Britain from the EU and maintain some kind of consensus within the nation, within Parliament, and within the political parties has turned Brexit into a swamp of vagueness and indecision into which the whole nation has gradually been sinking deeper and deeper. Instead of a clean break, it seems an unending process which has sucked energy from everything else, and may end up leaving Britain’s relationship to the EU little changed, except in symbolic terms (blue passports instead of red ones). The country, however, may be substantially weaker and poorer than it would otherwise have been. If this turns out to be the case, all sides will feel aggrieved. Some are calling for a new referendum, but if the result of a new referendum were to be as close as the last one it would settle nothing and only deepen political divisions.

In authoritarian systems, getting involved in politics is always high risk, and most citizens, believing that there is nothing much that can be done, therefore keep their heads down. Getting involved in a democratic system, in comparison, is low risk, yet still most citizens choose not to. Partly that is because of the feeling that if you get involved in politics you get tainted by it. You have to become, despite yourself, self-seeking, ruthless, and mendacious, because that is what politics everywhere requires. If you try to play by other rules, you will fail. Many people as a result drop out of politics, and cease to participate in formal politics at all. Many do not vote. They feel disengaged and estranged from politics, and are no longer concerned enough to become well informed about political issues. To the extent that they notice politics at all, it is politics as spectacle, politics as reality TV, the trivia of who’s up, who’s down, the clash of egos, the scandals, and the perpetual crises and panics of media politics.

Some of those who become disengaged from formal representative politics put their energies into other kinds of political involvement, community activities, and networks of various kinds. But there are a large number who disengage completely. Many young people are like this. They don’t see the point of being involved. If pressed for a reason, they often say that voting doesn’t change anything. The parties are all the same, and pursue the same policies when they are in government. As an old anarchist slogan said: ‘Don’t vote; it only encourages them.’ On top of that the details of legislation or policy implementation are complex and boring. For the last two hundred years the high priests of cultural modernity have proclaimed that true self-fulfilment is to be found in the pursuit of private pleasures rather than in the performance of public service.

With the explosion of consumerism and the attraction of ideas of personal autonomy in contemporary commercial societies, everyone strives to be the architect of his or her own life. Politics is a bore and a distraction. The problem with socialism, Oscar Wilde remarked, is that it requires too many evenings. The political philosopher Richard Rorty wrote of the impossible choice for every individual between deciding when to take part in the struggle to extend social justice and when to work on their own projects. At the beginning of the modern era Voltaire depicted this dilemma in his novel Candide. The hero, Candide, who has a trusting, hopeful nature, is buffeted by the cruelties, selfishness, vanities, follies, and absurdities of the world, and at the end retires ruefully from the struggle to cultivate his garden. It is a path many have trodden since.

One of the strongest desires in our contemporary culture is this urge to escape from politics. There is a persistent dream of a politics-free world. Many of the greatest political thinkers in the western tradition, including Plato, Marx, and Hayek, have entertained this dream, even if they agreed on little else. To turn on the television news or access a news website is to be bombarded by a set of intractable political conflicts and policy dilemmas which often seem to have no solutions. Media presenters and bloggers routinely denounce the failure of international institutions and governments to take any decisions or initiate any actions when the world is burning (often literally) around them. A sense of fatalism, which is defined most simply as the idea that nothing will ever change and nothing will be that different, seems a rational response. Better cultivate our own garden like Candide rather than worry what is happening in countries far away of which we know little. Why bother with politics?

Can We Escape Politics?

But we can turn the question around. Why does politics as it is currently practised make us want to disengage from it, rather than to become involved and to try to understand it better? We have a pressing reason to do so if we are to limit the damage politics can do and also to unleash the potential it has to make the world a better place. Despite our desire to do so we cannot escape politics. By no means everything is political. It is only a small part of what human life is about. But it still frames everything we do. It is an ineradicable part of living together. There is politics within every human association, including families, wherever there are decisions to be made over how authority is to be justified or how resources are to be allocated, roles defined, rules formulated, and identities affirmed. Politics arises whenever there is disagreement and conflict over any of these questions.

The attraction of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe is that, marooned as he was on his desert island with only himself for company, he could in principle make whatever decisions he liked. There were no political constraints because there was no-one else whose agreement he had to obtain. The only constraint on the choices he could make were material – he was limited by what he could find on the island and what he managed to rescue from his wrecked ship – and psychological – his memories of how things were ordered in the society he had left, and his determination to live on the desert island as though he was still living in a human community alongside others. As soon as Man Friday enters the story, however, so too does politics, because the relationship between them has to be defined. Is it a relationship of equals in which all decisions are taken jointly, or is it a master/slave relationship in which one is subordinate to the will and decisions of the other, and carries out his commands?

Robinson Crusoe demonstrates that politics only disappears from our world under very special conditions, and quickly reappears when those conditions no longer hold. All associations and communities have their politics, but it is in the associations we call states that politics is most evident. It arises because human beings have to cooperate in order to survive, but human beings have radically different circumstances and knowledge, which means that they perceive their interests differently, form different identities, and adopt different beliefs and values. In order to cooperate, some means must be found to agree rules which can establish an order and therefore a degree of certainty and trust between the members of the association.

The power to allocate resources and determine rules in more complex associations was generally only stable if it was backed by force, and if the territorial boundaries of the association and who had a right to be considered a member were clearly defined. Who wields that power and how it is wielded are the well-springs of politics in every state, and central questions for the study of politics. It leads on to further questions. Once a common power, a state, has been established in a given territory, how is it to relate to other common powers? How such sovereign common powers recognize and interact with one another becomes another key arena for politics. Crucial also are questions of identity and belonging, who the members of the state actually are and who has the right to join or be included, and who therefore has a right to participate in the politics of the state.

When Politics Goes Wrong

A second reason why we should bother with politics is that in those states where politics goes wrong, everything goes wrong. The evidence of what happens when a state collapses, when there is civil war or a natural disaster, is chilling. There is abundant evidence all around us at the present time. Take Syria. The Syrian civil war began in March 2011. As of this writing (2018) it has lasted seven long years. It was triggered by a popular uprising, part of the Arab Spring, against the authoritarian rule of Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath party. When the demands for peaceful change and reform were rejected by the regime, a familiar cycle developed of increasing protest and increasing repression, leading to the protesters taking up arms to overthrow their government. The war has been waged with brutality on both sides, and many outside groups have been drawn into the conflict, both jihadist groups like Daesh, who for a time occupied a great swathe of northern Syria and Iraq and proclaimed a new Caliphate, and foreign powers – the United States, Franc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Why Bother with Politics?
• 2 What is at Stake in Politics?
• 3 What is the Point of Studying Politics?
• 4 Can Politics Make a Better World?
• Further Reading
• End User License Agreement