ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the conceptual core of the political dimension of modernity regarding politics. It discusses the political system, with its state and societal sides, and political domination in great detail. The agents of the political dimension proper are analysed and representation as well as personalisation/personification reanalysed in possession now of a more complex cluster of categories. The further importance of the political system in authoritarian collectivism is stressed. The interrelations of liberalism, republicanism and socialism are discussed and the forms of rule – autocracy, oligarchy and democracy – are introduced. Crisis, reproduction and change are also resumed and deepened resorting to this more complex arsenal of categories. The vast tradition of political philosophy, political sociology and political science, from Aristotle to Marx and Weber, up to Gramsci, Schumpeter, Poulantzas, Easton, Dahl, Mann and several others authors is mobilised in the development of the argument.
