ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a vision of political life as an evolutionary process and outlines a three-dimensional analytical grid for interpreting the paradoxes that such a process entails. Empirical political theory is predicated on the misguided assumption that political behavior is easily distinguishable from other types of social behavior. Political life is defined as the particular function of a specific societal system interacting with other systems. E. Morin's understanding of society as a self-organizing system with a political nucleus also bears a resemblance to Alain Touraine's view of society as the product of its own labor and of social relations structured by political decisions. Morin's emphasis on the noogenetic aspects of politics appear to be more original. History is primarily concerned with singular events, even if it has moved slowly towards the investigation of the political, economic, demographic, and even climatological patterns underlying historical contingencies.
