ABSTRACT
Conflict provides the drama of politics, the pathos, the edge; difference provides the spice of life, the stakes of the game. Politics attempts, then, to adjudicate differences so that persons can live together after a fashion that at the least avoids warfare; hence politics is concerned to some extent with order. Politics may aim for shared reality, community, stability, order, permanence, continuity, and so forth; but these aims, indeed politics itself, necessarily operates in the face of human impermanence, separation, mortality, change, rootlessness, meaninglessness. Politics, as Aeschylus knew perhaps best of all the Greeks, grows out of tragedy, that sense of profound loss and limitation which so often descends upon human existence and human relations. For politics can never fully defy the tragedy of human existence; political community can never completely repair human separateness; and what semblance of order politics imposes can thus be only temporary.
