ABSTRACT
Politics as a significant component of human history, and political theory as a major perspective on it make sense only within an assumptive view of human action that has room for intentions and meanings. The positivist assumptions tended to reduce politics to mere power and manipulation, a cynical view that can be self-confirming. This chapter looks at the concept of human needs, where clean semantics are hampered by the accretions of long and loose employment in psychology. In contrast with objective need is subjective wish, desire, or want, all of which are motivational terms that find their home in a metapsychological framework of meaningful human action. The actor may be pushed by drives or pulled by wishes and wants; naively he or she does not know about needs, although individual or cultural conceptions of need may have a part in the formation and in the justification of wants.
