ABSTRACT
In political science, the most popular definitions of politics are Laswell’s ‘who gets what, when and how’ (Laswell 1936, cf. Laswell 1948: 7), and his student Easton’s ‘the authoritative distribution of values over a society’. Definitions are, like models, simplified representations of the real world –which makes them only quite useful, and also necessarily flawed. Laswell and Easton’s definitions, for instance, presume too much – in particular the prior existence of a ‘society’ and of authority; the phase of reflection on the need for, and form of, social cooperation as in e.g. classic contract theories, which precedes the formation of state or society, is thereby excluded from politics, as is any form of decision-making for a ‘bunch of folks’ (to use George W. Bush’ definition of groups of individuals) in circumstances where words like tribe, community or planet would be more appropriate than ‘society’. There is also, at least in Easton’s case, a riskof circularity: if authority depends for just the least bit on performance, i.e. on results, it cannot really precede decisionmaking; so no decision on who gets what can be called truly authoritative or political, except in hindsight. More important is the fact that Laswell and Easton conflate two more
or less distinct human practices (cf. Warren 1999: 203). One of these is perhaps better described as ‘government’, ‘governance’ or ‘policy-making’, and relates to decision-making on how, rather than whether, a ‘bunch of folks’ should get whatever it gets. If we reflect for a moment on the nature of the arguments for cooperation that were discussed in the preceding chapters, we may come to realize that they seem to presume exactly this conception of politics as government: all were geared towards finding common ground somehow and somewhere, whether in absolute ethical principles or in an overlapping consensus, a policy telos, a popular conviction or enlightened self-interest. For political philosophers in these traditions, the fundamental question of politics seems to be how to justify cooperation, and, once this question is answered, all that remains are technically rather than normatively controversial issues of procedures and structures.
