Politics - 3 - [Draft]**

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Continued from here.

§ 5 The Politics of Bank Robbers and Drunken Slobs — Social Influencing, Private and Public

To remind you of my definition of politics, let me rephrase it:

Politics is the exertion of influence of humans on one another—by force, stratagem or persuasion—with the purpose of establishing in a community of two or more persons the validity of certain rules and options for action, ensuring the admissibility, endorsement, toleration or enforcement of certain decisions, customs, habits, convictions and interests, including established and novel rights.

My broad definition of politics may seem to betray a number of shortcomings, suffering in particular from an inordinate generality. If any form in which a human being may exert an influence on another person or a group or a whole community is to be looked at as an instance of politics, then being a drunken slob accosting guests at a garden party makes that person a political activist.

While I am prepared to admit a certain prima facie unwieldiness of my definition in cases like this, I insist that putting such episodes in perspective will confirm that my concept of politics is still basically correct and useful. 

A Drunkard's Politics of Drunken Slobs and Bank Robbers

A drunken slob may be looked at as testing social norms, and his attempts at transgression may have severe repercussions for him as a consequence of the rejection of his effort to define what is socially valid in ways that trigger moral and aesthetic revulsion. By approaching the partners of fellow guests indecently or picking a semi-violent quarrel with innocent bystanders, he puts a different version of social acceptability to the test and finds himself ostracised by the community. In fact, I have known an employee of a prestigious private bank who lost his envied job the morning after having drunkenly incommoded female attendees at a conference.

Likewise, as noted before, a bank robbery is actually a political act. Again, we are dealing with a form of influence-taking that meets strong rejection by the public. For this reason, robbing banks ends up as a kind of political act—imposing one's ambitions on the community—that is strictly deligitimised. 

Regulating Politics, Freedom, and Civil Society

One of the most potent reasons why we tend to formalise (certain dimensions of) politics relates to the fact that power and the ability to wield coercion are an important part of effective politics, and need to be regulated, monitored so as to prevent them from being used in uncontrolled and arbitrary fashion by anyone who cares to take a stab at it. 

Ultimately, in a free society, we regulate politics in order to make its private exercise more effective and widespread. By regulation we ensure that private politics will not be abused and that it finds channels (laws and courts, articles of association, customs and moral standards etc.) which ensure a fruitful flow of private energies dedicated to social influencing.

Freedom creates two entirely new, historically unique playing fields for the political man. A political order (formal politics) organised to render possible political participation by every citizen — precisely the situation that politics sought to make impossible in the centuries preceding liberty. And civil society, which I define as a dimension of vast latitudes for personally autonomous action circumscribed by rules and limits designed to enhance as much as possible the range of concerns of life that individuals may carve out, shape and devise without direct direction or permission by the authorities.   

Thus, next to the infrastructure of formal democratic politics, civil society becomes another extensive realm in which the individual can choose to influence society with his own resources, asserting his own agendas, and relying on the vast scope that public protection of his private capabilities grants.  

Can I challenge the king? Can I challenge the church? Can I call into question my superiors? Can I demand that the powers-that-be, in building a new road, be considerate of my little property? Without freedom, the answer to each question is no. With liberty, the answer to each question is yes. 

Under conditions of freedom there is hardly an issue that may not become the subject of attempts of the individual citizen to take influence on its interpretation and resolution. Because in that way a lot of informal politics and micro-politics takes place as a matter-of-course every hour in a free society, we seek and have managed to institute over time rather effective lines of demarcation, a smooth division of labour, and a sensible balance between 

• privately and individually induced acts of social influencing in civil society, and 

• acts of institutionalised and public politics.

Am I allowed to teach my children that Darwin was a liar and the world was created 6 000 years ago? Or do I have to send my children to a school where they are taught that in saying so I am a liar? Should I be allowed to compete with licensed cab drivers using cheaper and more flexible modes of transportation? Or should the community seek to keep the taxi business under tighter social control, ensuring fairness, orderliness and high standards? A free society is rife with disagreement as to how far private social influencing may go, under what conditions it may be resorted to, and where, why and how the prerogatives of public social influencing take precedence.  

People are political by nature. This is so because we are all seekers of social influencing. Liberty sets free man's drive to shape his environment politically—until politics permeates society as it has never before. But where does the political drive in human beings come from?

It is time to turn to the anthropological foundations of human politics.

Continued here.