Politics

It is often assumed that political economy involves an integration of politics and economics. It is less often conceded that the very idea of political economy rests on a prior separation of politics and economics.

Distinguishing politics from economics does not mean that they are com­pletely separate, isolated from each other, or indifferent to each other. It does not mean that politics and economics do not influence each other or “occur” within the same concrete structures. For example, allocation of goods and services may take place within market or political structures. And con­crete organizations, such as banks, firms, interest groups, and unions, may be political or economic according to the activities in which they are engaged and the analytic categories of the investigator (Maier, 1987). So when we say that economics and politics are separate, we mean only that they are analyt­ically distinct.¹

If economics and politics are distinct, it follows that a book on various theories of political economy must take account of these differences. The challenge is twofold. First, we must identify different conceptions of the economic and political. What are the major ideas associated with these two central concepts? Second, we must identify the theoretical relations between economics and politics. Sometimes, these theoretical relations are more or less in place. Other times, we attempt to build them ourselves. The relations

' Some have argued that the separation of economics and politics is itself the result of a protracted historical process.

The remainder of the chapter examines various conceptions of economics and politics. It will become clear that both economics and politics have multiple meanings. It is best to confront this diversity at the outset. The various approaches to political economy discussed in the book will be clearer if these differences are taken into account.

Conceptions of the political

Concepts of politics are not as analytically sharp as those of economics, a fact reflected in the numerous competing conceptions of politics. In Swift’s Gul­liver’s Travels the key character laments how, in his discussion with the king, he happened to say “there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government [and] it gave him (directly contrary to my Intention) a very mean Opinion of our Understandings” (Swift, 1726).

There are many competing ideas of what is political, none of which has gained ascendancy by demonstrating clear theoretical superiority. Politics has meant “who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell, 1936), “the struggle for power” (Morgenthau, [1948] 1960), “the art and science of government,” “the socialization of conflict” (Schattschneider, 1960), “patterns of power, rule, and authority” (Dahl, 1956), “the science of the state,” “the authori­tative allocation of values” (Easton, [1953] 1981), “pure conflict, as in us against them” (Schmitt, 1976), and “the conciliation of conflicting interests through public policy” (Crick, [1962] 1964). Power, authority, public life, government, the state, conflict, and conflict resolution are all bound up with our understanding of politics.

The preceding discussion points to some of the problems of conceptualizing the political. We will develop here three ideas of the political that make sense, have some coherence, and have potential for connections with economics.

Politics as government. One conception of politics makes it essentially equiv­alent to government. By government, we mean the formal political machinery of the country as a whole, its institutions, laws, public policies, and key actors. Sometimes government and the political are made equal by definition. Politics then refers to the activities, processes, and structures of government. What goes on within the U.S. Senate, the German Bundestag, and the British Parliament is by definition politics. What happens in society - that is, outside the scope of the government proper - is not political. Societal phenomena may have political implications, but they are not political per se.

Politics in this sense has a locus, a structural address. The central political institutions reside in the capital of the country. They are the ones that are authoritative in the sense of being able to decide for the country as a whole and being able (that is, having the capacity) to achieve compliance. If some­thing occurs within this arena, it is political; if it doesn’t, it is not.

The politics-as-government approach offers a definition of politics in terms of organization, rules, and agency. “Organization” refers to relatively con­crete structures (formal organization). These might include courts, legisla­tures, bureaucracies, and political parties. “Rules” refers to rights and obligations as well as permissible procedures and strategies to be employed in the political process. The basic rules of a government are set down in its constitution, written or unwritten. These rules cover the organization and distribution of political power as well as procedures regarding voting, leg­islative strategies, and the permissible range of influence behavior. The basic rules for the United States include both a functional and territorial division of powers, the former involving a “separation of powers” among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, the latter a splitting of powers between central and outlying political units (federalism).

The study of government in the United States has been closely tied to an emphasis on law. As Charles Hyneman put it in The Study of Politics, “The central point of attention in American political science... is that part of the affairs of the state which centers in government, and that kind or part of government which speaks through law” (1959:26-7). Similarly, Harry Eck­stein, though careful to put some distance between the state and politics, sees formal-legal studies as integral to the state (1979:2). Eckstein uses the term “formal-legal” because the study of government was closely tied to formal organization and to public law. Carl Friedrich’s Constitutional Gov­ernment and Democracy (1937) provides an example of the importance of numerous governmental characteristics, while Douglas Rae’s book, The Po­litical Consequences of Electoral Laws (1967), demonstrates the importance of differences in electoral rules.

The governmental approach does not rule out nongovernmental phenom­ena as having political relevance; it places government at the center and evaluates other phenomena as they impinge upon or are affected by govern­ment. Thus, the political role of the media, or the influence of interest groups or economic classes, while not directly part of government as defined here, may affect and be affected by governmental policies. The importance of such phenomena is recognized as part of society. They affect governmental politics but are not definitionally a part of the government.

The meaning of government can be clarified by distinguishing it from the state (see Carnoy, 1984, and see Daedalus, 1979, for surveys).

What does the state include that is not encompassed by government? The idea of the state is tied to a broader conception of laws and rules than is usually signified by the term government, including informal rules embodied in customs, ideas, and parapublic institutions, what Peter Katzenstein calls “policy networks” (1978:19). Policy networks are combinations of public and private power made up of parts of the state bureaucracy and private asso­ciations. Similarly, the Gramscian idea of hegemony reflects a concept of rule that relies on ruling ideas and social forces as well as government more narrowly defined (see Gramsci, 1971).

The attempt to equate politics and government raises two critical questions. Is everything that happens “within government” political or is politics only a portion of government? Are there phenomena outside government that are political? If government defines what is political, we have to address ourselves to the heterogeneity of what is entailed by this term. Much of what goes on in government is private in goal if not in arena or institutional means. It is concerned neither with public goods nor with means that are recognized as part of the public sector. A politician may use public office to advance his or her private career.

What does the governmental focus leave out that is normally considered political? It omits what, following Easton’s concept of the political system (1965), we can call “political inputs” such as the expression of interests and political demands by societal actors, their aggregation into broad programs, the communication of political information by the privately owned media, and the experience of political socialization by parents, schools, and churches. It also omits combinations of private and governmental forces from active consideration since these combinations reach outside the governmental sector. Finally, the governmental notion of politics omits ideas of politics tied to state structures conceived more broadly than government. Cox’s notion of a “historic bloc” encompassing governmental institutions, social forces, and ideology is exemplary (Cox, 1986). Clearly the focus on government excludes much that is often considered relevant. The justification for such exclusion is that, if the concept of government is to be useful, it must refer to something definite and precise. Expanding the concept of government causes much of what is otherwise thought of as societal to become part of government (such as schools, churches, families). A valuable distinction is weakened if not lost.

Politics as the public. One way of thinking about economics and politics is to link economics to what is private, politics with the public. Individual ends and activities resolve into two categories: those that are private (in motive and result) and those that imply others. We do not want to minimize the difficulty of making this distinction in practice or to suggest there are some actions that are insulated from the rest of society. Nevertheless, in liberal societies (by definition) there is a realm of the private that is treated as personal. Thus, religious worship, sexual activities within the household, the details of consumption (food and clothing preferences), and most aspects of child-rearing are private matters.

A sharp distinction between private and public is difficult to enforce. Certainly in the empirical world, boundaries shift. “Private” refers to affairs that are substantially limited to individuals or groups directly involved in exchange. The “public” is defined as the arena or activities that involve others in substantial ways. While no action is ever without social determi­nants, meanings, and implications, this does not necessarily make everything public. Neoclassical economists ground the distinction between private and public in what is and is not transmitted by the price system. Benefits and damages resulting from exchange not charged or paid for are external effects (externalities) and invite management by the state. John Dewey (1927) makes the same distinction in terms of the scope and persistence of consequences of transactions among individuals.

The idea of the public is broader than the neoclassical concept of exter­nalities and public goods, yet narrower (in its politically relevant version) than society as a whole. It is broader than externalities and public goods in that it includes collective identities and shared values relevant for political discourse. It is narrower in that there is a public arena not overtly political (public dress codes, appropriate behavior in public places such as waiting rooms and elevators, and so forth). It is more narrow in that not all aspects of politics, at least in some versions, are public. Crick reminds us that “Palace politics is private politics, almost a contradiction in terms. The unique char­acter of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity” ([1962] 1964:20). And social spheres such as the family, the church, and private associations are often seen as going outside the public realm.

In The Politics, Aristotle defended public life in the polls as essential to the expression of man’s higher social nature. In ancient Rome, the res publica represented “bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist be­tween people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate as­sociation” (Sennett, 1978; original edition 1973:3). In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey identifies the public as both the raw material of politics and an essential component of the state. And In Defense of Politics ([1962] 1964), Crick sees the public character of actions as a core characteristic of the political.

When we connect politics with the notion of public life, we bring to the forefront a set of questions and problems surrounding what is the central quality that makes activity and human interaction public. In responding to these questions and problems two lines of argument need to be clearly dis­tinguished. Indeed, the notion of the public has been interpreted in two radically different directions.

The first, although historically the more recent, defines public by reference to self-interest. The public encompasses either pursuit of self-interests that coincide (a commonly held interest) or responses to ways in which the in­dividual’s pursuit of self-interest impinges on the welfare of others. The connected concepts of public goods and externalities are the key terms within this interpretation of public life. Its main distinguishing feature is rejection of any notion of public that either transcends private self-seeking or responds to human needs irreducible to private ends.

This contemporary notion of the public contrasts sharply with the more traditional notion linked to concepts of public interest and public good. These concepts carry with them the idea that the public has an existence, meaning, and purpose irreducible to the pursuit of individual self-interest and the ordering of private preferences. (For an account of this second notion see Arendt, 1958.) Those who advocate the first of our two notions of the public tend to view the second as metaphysical, if not mystical. It is their belief that the only grounded social reality is the individual and his or her pref­erences. Those who take our second notion of public more seriously argue that social institutions have their own reality. They do not arise in response to individual wants (although they often concern themselves with such wants). Rather, they encompass private agents and make explicit their underlying social connectedness understood as the grounding for their very existence as individuals. This second view presupposes a social capacity that is prior to the articulation of private ends.

When we consider political economy as involving the study of the relation of public to private (or of a part of that relation), it makes all the difference which notion of public we have in mind. If we focus on the first conception, we are led to examine the ways in which individual interests relate to one another, coincide, or negatively affect one another. If we employ the second of the two, then the study of the relationship between public and private means the study of the ways in which collective life undergirds, informs, animates, and gives meaning to private self-seeking, and of the limits of self­interest.

To illustrate these two different conceptions of the public, we explore the use of this concept by John Dewey and Hannah Arendt. Dewey elaborated his ideas about the public in The Public and Its Problems (1927). Arendt developed her arguments in The Human Condition (1958).

In The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey attempts to link the public with the state and to show how the latter, insofar as it is a liberal, democratic state, is grounded in and limited by the scope of what is public. His first task is to identify the core meaning of public. Dewey begins his search for the public from a particular determining ground, a world of individuals and their transactions. To the extent that their transactions are limited to them­selves, that is, to the extent that they do not involve consequences for others, he speaks of their activities as private. The germ of the public is found in those transactions that involve others:

We take then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others. Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public. (1927:12)

Dewey’s idea of the public seems closely related to the neoclassical concept of externality. Couldn’t we just as easily say that the public refers to the set of people whose preferences are affected (positively or negatively) by the consequences of market exchanges? To be sure, a family resemblance does exist, but so do important differences. Dewey is willing to talk about interests as well as preferences. Thus a public interest may be affected even while public preferences are not. For example, people may be dying because of dirty air or a depletion of ozone in the atmosphere but may be unaware of the connection. Their interests in clean air and ozone have not become pref­erences.

A second difference lies in Dewey’s readiness to include the sick, insane, infirm, and young in the public. Dewey asks why people in these groups are peculiarly “wards of the state” (1927:62). They are because in their trans­actions with others, “... the relationship is likely to be one-sided, and the interests of one party [will] suffer” (1927:62). The reasoning here is quite general. It involves the inequality of status (and, Dewey might have added, of power and resources) of parties to the transaction. Once this principle is introduced, numerous so-called private transactions assume a public content: minimum wages, relations between workers and capitalists, care of the young and the old, access to health and educational facilities, and so on. Dewey in fact raises all these issues and makes a case for placing them within the public domain in a way that is consistent with his general idea of the public. Whether this effort works is not our concern here. The point is that Dewey’s public is considerably broader than externalities.

Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the public differs sharply from that just summarized. Her interpretation brings our attention to dimensions of the problem often lost sight of in more recent discussions that focus on limitations of private want satisfaction. Her approach is in some ways more traditional and gives evidence of its classical origins. We think it important to retrieve the alternative she suggests and to consider it, however briefly, together with those more in line with contemporary ways of thinking.

The term “public,” according to Arendt, refers to two distinct but closely connected phenomena. The first has to do with the importance of what she refers to as “appearing in public.”

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the con­comitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men. (1958:50)

The necessity for a public realm stems from the dependence that our “feeling for reality” has on such a realm. In other words, Arendt’s notion of the public connects to a prior judgment regarding the way in which we experience, perceive, and construct the reality of our lives individually and collectively. The dependence of our sense of reality on the public presupposes that our reality is already intersubjective. Notions of the public considered up to this point do not carry this presupposition. In neoclassical economics our sub­jective reality does not depend on our connection to a larger whole. Indeed, within the neoclassical way of thinking, the world outside is understood as an opportunity set and relates instrumentally to already defined preferences. The idea of “appearing in public” carries a meaning lying outside the in­strumental conception of public. On the contrary, Arendt’s idea of public has a constitutive connotation. To the extent that we treat personality as, in important part, a social construct, “appearing in public” takes on special importance, as part of our effort to connect with the social whole or to confirm that connection with the whole without which we risk loss of our sense of identity.

This observation leads naturally to Arendt’s second dimension of the pub­lic, the public as the “common world.”

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who stand around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. (1958:52)

Arendt emphasizes that this common world is a human construct; indeed, it is constructed in order to provide a world of things to instantiate our common life. What is striking about this idea is the notion of a common world that binds us together. The public not only helps to satisfy our private wants, it binds us into a larger whole. In order to do this, it must have its own objectivity, it must be made up of appropriate sorts of things.

Arendt’s notion of the public can have different relations with politics. We can, of course, identify the public with the political. This makes politics the appearance in public needed to secure our sense of reality and connectedness, both of which depend on our having a life in common. But public and political need not be synonymous. The need for a public in Arendt’s sense can en­compass politics and more than politics. Forms of mass communication are public insofar as they provide (some of) us with an opportunity to appear. Yet this appearance may not be a political act (for example, a concert need not be considered a political act although under appropriate circumstances it may be that).

So long, however, as politics takes a part of the space of the public in Arendt’s sense, it will have ends not considered within the utilitarian calculus (see Benhabib, 1989). These ends involve our sense of common life, the reality we gain from participating in a common life, and our need to partic­ipate in construction of the social artifacts of our life together. If politics includes this dimension, it has a significant constitutive function for the individual lost sight of when we assume that individuals have fully formed preference orderings prior to both politics and public life.

Politics as authoritative allocation of values. According to this conception, politics and economics are similar in that both are methods of allocation. The economic and the political processes are alternative ways of making allocations regarding scarce resources. Politics refers not to the formal struc­ture of government but to a distinctive way of making decisions about pro­ducing and distributing resources. Unlike economics, which emphasizes juridically voluntary exchange, the system of political allocation involves au­thority.

Quite possibly, this difference in mode of allocation may reflect differences in the types of goods being pursued (for instance, excludable versus nonex­cludable) as well as the normative criteria governing interaction (such as self­interest versus collective interest, individual gain versus equity). David Eas­ton ([1953] 1981) suggests that the central question of political science is how values are authoritatively allocated for society. He vigorously defends this focus against competing conceptions of politics based on the state, power, and conflict resolution. It is not that the authoritative allocation of values is unrelated to these things but that focusing on these other things hits the core of what is political only by accident, by virtue of their correlation with authority patterns. The state is closely involved in authoritative allocations in the sense that these allocations often take place within the state, through state institutions, and are often activated and executed by state agents. But the congruence is limited: Authority patterns occur outside the state too, and much of what goes on inside the state is not authoritative. For Easton, the strongest argument for this focus is that political science is not interested so much in a particular institution as it is in the activity “that expresses itself through a variety of institutions” (1981:113). Easton’s argument implies a decoupling of politics as abstract process from the institutions normally as­sociated with this process (government).

Where does this approach lead? It does not have to lead to the search for authority in every nook and cranny of society - in the factories, schools, family, and armed services. The societal component of the definition keeps our focus on authoritative allocations for society as a whole. In one sense, this leads us back to government, since government is the only societywide political structure. But government does not equal politics. It is a structure within which politics can take place. The activities and institutions of gov­ernment are not by definition politics. Some governments, as Crick (1964) points out, allow very little politics. Some strive to reduce politics to a min­imum - for example, by ruling through coercion or managed consensus.

In addition, there is much outside governmental boundaries that is polit­ical. These interactions, to the extent that they are regularized and related to authoritative allocations in particular ways, are included in the concept of “the political system.” For example, in pluralist systems the activities of interest groups and political parties would be considered political, in that they are concerned either with the holding of authoritative positions or with the organization and activities of shaping authoritative public policy. Simi­larly, the acquisition of political images and information (of the nation, the president, the central political institutions), although more remote than the activities of pressure groups and parties, is often considered political.

The focus on authority implies an important normative question that needs to be asked if the scope of the political is not to be indeterminate: What is the proper reach of the authority system? If the boundary between economics and politics is to be determined by the region in which voluntary exchange shades into authoritative relations, we need to know something about those activities best suited for market exchange and those best suited for authority systems. One answer is that authority should be reserved for those activities where voluntary exchange breaks down or where the structure of interests among actors does not spontaneously yield mutually beneficial and self­enforcing results. Another answer is that authority is called for to institute and enforce rights or to achieve goals such as equality, universal health care, and justice, ends that are not assured by the market. A third answer is that the wielding of authority is not a normative issue, not a question of “the proper sphere of government.” Instead, it has to do with political enforcement of particular (special) wills against others, such as capitalist against worker, Catholic against Protestant, and so on. Politics deals with situations in which there is simultaneously conflict and pressure for collective decisions. Some will gain and some will lose. Thus, politics cannot be about collective mutual gains and authority cannot be about what everyone approves. The focus on legitimacy is a diversion that distracts us from the cleavages overridden by state policies.

Relations among three approaches to politics

Before attempting to reconcile the three approaches discussed in the preced­ing section, we should point out that there is a case for viewing them sepa­rately. Each approach can be viewed as essentially different and can, when elaborated, take us in a different direction. The politics-as-government ap­proach relies on a particular institution, politics as affairs of the public relies on the specification of a noninstitutional realm outside of private exchange, and the authority focus depends on a certain way of making decisions and of securing compliance. Each conception has its “home domain,” its core concepts, its notions of what is centrally political, and its often implicit rules about what is outside the political arena. Yet few would deny that all three approaches say something about politics. What are the relationships among the three approaches? What similarities and points of convergence are sug­gested?

Let us begin to answer these questions by focusing on the second approach, politics as public. The public refers to either the regulation of unintended consequences of private actions and market failure or to the sense of common interest, mission, identity, or conception of what it means to be a citizen of a community.

While the idea of the public provides an approach to politics, it does not stand alone. In one sense, it identifies the raw material out of which politics takes place. The activities of government are concerned with taking binding decisions for society as a whole. As such, government takes as its point of departure those matters that significantly involve “others.” It does not try to legislate individual affairs ad seriatim. In this light, the public and gov­ernment are not two unrelated approaches. Indeed, they need each other to complete their meanings. Without a public to serve as foundation, govern­ment is cut adrift. How can it devise policies to settle societal conflicts or to pursue harmonious social goals without a grounding in public society? “Pol­iticking,” the struggle for governmental office, and modern equivalents of court intrigue would still occur, but politics pure and simple would not.

Conversely, without a governmental structure the public is only an inar­ticulate mass of commonly affected interests, more or less privately held. The public in this sense is simply an aggregate, a set of persons neither cognizant of shared experience nor alert to its political potential. When these separate circumstances are collectively understood, and when individuals play a role in forging this collective understanding, the situation becomes political. When this occurs, collectively mobilized interests are brought to bear as pressures upon government, working through governmental channels, po­litical parties, the bureaucracy, legislatures, and courts.

At the intersection between government and society, the public is a crucial lever. From the vantage point of government, it is the raw material, the subject matter of politics. From the public’s vantage point, government is both the arena for its expression and the instrument to achieve its aims, which may include, significantly, the desire for a particular sphere of society (child care, medical insurance) to be declared pubhc.

The public does not simply use government as an instrument to its own ends. It is also constituted by government. In some countries the government charters and licenses interest groups, thus granting them public status and the acknowledged right to affect public policy. The public becomes politically articulate in part through government action.

In France, part of what is meant by the “strong state tradition” concerns the capacity of the state to constitute (that is, to organize, recognize, control) private associations. In pluralist theory, it is groups and group interests that are the driving forces, “freely combining, dissolving, and recombining in accordance with their interest lines” (Bentley, 1908:359). By contrast, in France all private associations are required to register with the Ministry of Interior; the Ministry grants them legal status, and it may dissolve certain associations if they are deemed a threat to the state (Wilsford, 1989:132). This pattern is characteristic of many countries that fall into what Stepan calls the “organic-statist” tradition (1978:26-45).

How does the focus on authority relate to government and the public? This focus takes us close to what we often mean by politics - commands binding on society as a whole and enforceable by a sovereign (in other words, an institution beyond which there is no legal appeal). However, unless we are to treat authoritative decisions as definitionally identical to politics, we cannot help feeling uncomfortable with authority as the exclusive focus. Its connections to government and public are not clear.

This difficulty is not at all surprising. Indeed, Easton argued for the focus on authoritative allocations of values precisely because of its imperfect cor­respondence with governmental institutions and activities. These incongru­ities reach in two directions: Not everything government does is authoritative, and not everything that is authoritative is governmental. As examples of the former, we can think of private gain in public settings, the utilization of public office in the pursuit of private goals, and the maneuvering for private advantage apart from the policy implications of such. Oddly, the term “po­litical” has evolved to become one of the ordinary meanings to describe such activities. We use the word “politicking” to describe those activities, reserv­ing the word “politics” for other activities.

One omission concerns the scope of authoritative actions. Can any issue, activity, or interest be the object of binding decisions for society? By itself, the focus on authoritative decisions tells us nothing about what kinds of activities are within the jurisdiction of the authority system. Perhaps this is as it should be. With the scope of authority open-ended, the substance of the political is unspecified and the distinctive focus of politics shifts to the process level. In one country the production and distribution of food goods are authoritative matters. In another, medical care is provided by a govern­mental bureaucracy. In a third, the emission of industrial waste is subject to authoritative regulations. In a fourth country, all three may be dealt with by private exchange, or perhaps in the case of industrial wastes, simply ne­glected.

We need not, however, consider the substantive content of authoritative decisions totally arbitrary. Without specifying which activities qualify for authoritative decision making, we can define some limits in terms of the relationship between society and government. The focus on authority makes most sense when integrated into a scheme where both public and government

Nonpolitical Authority Relations

Figure 1. Relationships among conceptions of politics

are present. The public anchors the idea bf authority to a particular set of social conditions. It ties nonarbitrary authoritative policies to a certain sphere and by so doing provides some normative constraint on what authority struc­tures can do.

If the scope of authority is limited to what is in some sense public, the institutions through which authoritative decisions take place are governmen­tal. Of course there are informal political organizations too, and these are often involved in making decisions binding on society. But by and large, in the modern system of the nation-state, the institutional locus of politics is government. We suggest this focus as a starting point for political analysis even if some political “locations” are minimized by doing so.

Our summary definition of politics is as follows: Politics refers to the activities and institutions that relate to the making of authoritative public decisions for society as a whole. This definition sees the focal point of politics in the overlapping of three conceptually distinct areas. We represent this overlap in a diagram, Figure 1.

In the figure there are three circles, each representing one of our approaches (or constituents) to politics. There is a public sphere that is not political, such as codes governing dress, speech, and behavior in public places. Much of this is highly informal, enforced through norms and informal understand­ings. There is a governmental sphere that is neither public nor authoritative, at least in some sense. Part of what occurs in government concerns the motivations, ambitions, and career goals of politicians, even though the pur­suit of those goals takes place within a public space. Finally, authority re­lations may be found in the family, church, factory, and school. Authority by itself need not be political. Often enough, these three spheres overlap. The shaded section (ABC) points to the overlap between government, the public, and authority. Our definition points us toward this overlap.