Pace libertarian fantasies, you cannot do without politics. Indeed, as I’ve put it, politics might be a necessary evil. One reason this is so is that what we call “politics” refers to the institutional manifestation (i.e., a set of practices and institutions) of an underlying realm of social reality, the “political.” The political is this part of social reality where the possibility of cooperation between individuals is established by the recognition of legitimate forms of authority and the identification of a common good. With such a definition, you definitely cannot do without the political. The political is a pre-institutional, constitutive part of social reality, and any human society is necessarily political in this sense.[1]
Now, it can be argued that the political nature of human societies does not require institutions and practices that we identify with what is called “politics.” The libertarian fantasies I refer to above, at least those that imagine a stateless, anarcho-capitalist society, pretend that political functions can be fulfilled by institutions other than those attached to politics. Market mechanisms are viewed as more legitimate and more effective substitutes, for instance, to protect individuals from aggression or theft. It is an understatement to say that only a few believe that this is a credible or attractive possibility. As I have already written about this here, I will set the libertarian contention aside in what follows below.
Thus suppose that, because of the necessarily political nature of human societies, we accept that politics, defined as a set of practices and institutions that distribute coercive power in society and fix collective decision procedures, must be tolerated. Three questions emerge regarding the scope, the manners, and the stakes of politics. The question of the scope reflects the fact that a given society may indeed limit the range of collective decisions that are made and delegate them to other institutions, e.g., market-based or community-based mechanisms. However, though the scope may vary from one society to the other (with, in a planned economy, politics encompassing the allocation of resources), it cannot be reduced below a certain threshold.
By the manners of politics, I’m referring to two different but complementary things. First, the formal procedures through which the political functions are fulfilled. This corresponds in essence to the kind of political regime that is effective. We don’t do politics the same way in a pluralist, constitutional, and representative democratic regime as in a one-party authoritarian one. The formal manners of politics are largely determined by the constitution of a country as it states how the different powers are exercised and how they are related. However, the manners of politics also refer to what can be called the political culture or the political morality of society. I’m thinking here, especially of the degree of civility with which politics is practiced, both within political institutions (e.g., the parliament) and in society at large. The informal manners are as important as the formal ones because they largely determine both the outcome and the stability of the political regime. This is something that is largely observed in many Western democracies nowadays. At the formal level, most Western democracies are healthy in the sense that the constitutional rules are respected, and powers essentially separated. The contemporary U.S. case illustrates however that this is not enough. A democracy where the main political actors ostensibly and repeatedly lie and insult their opponents, where part of the media and citizens completely disregard the truth, and where intimidation and lack of respect are widespread is fundamentally unstable and ineffective. Instead of pacifying society and fostering cooperation, politics becomes divisive and magnifies the conflicts that unavoidably emerge between persons with different interests and beliefs.
Finally, the stakes of politics determine what each member of the polity has to gain and lose from the game of politics. The stakes can be infinitely high when they involve one’s (or their relatives) life. They can be fairly low when they concern topics for which one doesn’t care and on which the collective decision will virtually have no effect on one’s life. In general, what Benjamin Constant identified as the “liberty of the moderns” is grounded in the commitment that the stakes of politics should remain as low as possible in the sense that, whatever the outcome of the political game, individuals must rest assured that they will retain their freedom, their property, and their integrity. Politics must obviously have some stakes – otherwise what I’ve called the political would not be constitutive of human societies – but ideally we would like to keep them as low as possible.
Now, it should be acknowledged that these three aspects of politics are tightly connected. There is an obvious relationship between the scope and the stakes. The broader the former, the higher the latter. In a fully planned economy where the allocation of resources is entirely fixed by political decisions, the lives of all the members of society in their most private aspects are at the mercy of politics. Since, as historical contingency but also (maybe) theoretical necessity indicate, planned economies tend to be combined with authoritarian politics, that means that the lives of the majority depend on the will of a small powerful minority. There is also a straightforward relationship between the stakes and the manners of politics. The higher the stakes, the more conflictual and divisive we can expect politics to be. This relationship is discussed by Bertrand de Jouvenel in a chapter of his book The Pure Theory of Politics precisely called “The Manners of Politics.”[2] Jouvenel distinguishes between “mild” and “bellicose” politics. An example of the former is given by 19th-century England:[3]
“The game of Politics in its parliamentary guise obtained a good reputation thanks to its manners in nineteenth-century England. Neither the players nor third parties stood to lose from the game. Whatever its fortunes, the governance of England altered very little and always in the direction of improvement. Citizens had no cause for alarm: they feared nothing from Government, whatever category they belonged to; neither did they look to government for any sudden change in their condition.”
Note the explicit link between the stakes and the manners. Because the political game didn’t affect people much, politics was practiced with civility. Whatever the results, people’s lives will mostly remain unaffected. There was no reason to be aggressive or afraid.
On the contrary, we can expect that politics will become more bellicose as the stakes are raised. When there is a lot to lose (and maybe to gain), personal and political ethics lose their strength and recede in front of the use of deceptiveness, manipulation, and intimidation. By the logic of transitivity, we are therefore led to conclude that civil political manners can be preserved by keeping the scope of politics as restricted as possible. This is the valid part of the libertarian argument to get rid of politics. The mistake is to think that this is the only way to safeguard civility in the political game.
It should also be noted that the relationship between the three aspects of politics is more complicated. For instance, part of the stakes of the political game is not determined by its scope but by the political and social morality that prevails in a given society. In many Western democracies, the divisive character of politics is related to beliefs and perceptions giving significant importance to social identities. In turn, this raises the stakes because now politics is not only about ruling individual lives but also determining if a culture or a religion will survive. The growing importance given to matters related to social and collective identities, instead of personal freedom and autonomy, may be interpreted as a new form of “collectivism,” sociocultural rather than economic.[4] It almost naturally feeds bellicose politics by organizing the political game as a very conflicting competition between groups of individuals. The adverse result is likely to be an increase in the scope of politics because more and more individuals are willing to use (or to delegate the use of) coercion to preserve their culture, their religion, and more broadly their social identity.
[1] As an analogy, the same applies to what Karl Polanyi was calling “economy” in the substantive sense, i.e., the realm of the social reality that is constituted by people’s needs and wants and the social relationships aiming at satisfying them.
[2] Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics, Illustrated edition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1963 [2000]). I’m here closely following the interpretation given Daniel J. Mahoney in his intellectual biography of Jouvenel, Daniel J. Mahoney, Bertrand De Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal And The Illusions Of Modernity (Wilmington, Del: ISI Books, 2005).
[3] Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics, p. 256.
[4] See for instance Vikash Yadav, Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism (Chicago London: University of Chicago Press, 2023).