ABSTRACT
Informality has been a central concern for political enquiry since classical antiquity. Plato, Aristotle and many others were interested in education, military training and the arts not just in and of themselves, but because, however perfect a city-state's constitution might be, they could remain intact only if the conduct of the citizens was righteous. In classical Islamic political philosophy, the link between the quintessential informal quality of morality and political behaviour is a longstanding concern, best epitomized by Ibn Khaldoun's ‘asabiyya. From Machiavelli to Marx, Foucault to Agamben, the awareness of the importance of individual agency beyond the bounds and bonds of formal institutions — whether under the guise of ‘morality’, ‘subjectivation’ or ‘decision’ — has never left the horizon of political enquiry. During times of rapid and profound change, when new legal-political orders may be forged, the formal ‘rules of the game’ become less important than the informal sphere of motivations and decisions. In this sense, to focus on the relationship between formal and informal involves nothing less than inquiring into the relationship between constitutive and constituted power. Understanding this relationship is particularly crucial as it is the inversion of the ‘normal’ balance between formal and informal that marks out the transition from ‘ordinary’ politics to the exceptional.
