The Concept of Politics

The concept of the state presupposes knowledge of the category of the "political", the concept of the essence of politics. According to today's linguistic usage, the state is the political status of a people organized in a given territory. But in this way we have a first description, not a conceptual determination of the state which, moreover, would not be in its place here, where we are dealing with the category of the political. Here we can leave open the question of the essence of the state, whether it is a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a company or a community, an administration or a beehive. In the literal sense of the word, and in its historical forms, the State is a particularly present status of a people, and indeed the State which gives the norm in decisive cases, and therefore, in the face of many possible collective and individual states, the state in absolute. We will not add anything else for now. All the notes of this concept - status or people - acquire their meaning from the further note - the "political" - and become incomprehensible if the category of the politician is not understood. It is difficult to find a good definition of what is political. Mostly the word is used only in a negative sense, as opposed to several other concepts, in antithesis such as those of politics and economics, politics and morality, politics and law, and, within law, politics and civil law, etc. . With such negative and mostly polemical oppositions, one can certainly designate, depending on the concrete situations and circumstances, something sufficiently clear, but there is still no specific determination. In general, the concept of "political" is identified in some way with that of "state", or at least it refers to the state. The state thus appears as something political, and what is political as something related to the state: which is clearly a vicious circle. In the specific legal literature there are many similar circumlocutions to designate the category of the politician; but they are to be understood - insofar as they do not have a polemical-political sense - only as proceeding from the practical-political interest of the juridical and administrative decision of individual cases. They have this meaning: they aproblematically presuppose an already existing state, within whose framework they operate. Even the general conceptual determinations of what is meant to be designated by the word "political" that contain nothing but a reference or a reference to the "State", are conceivable and therefore also scientifically justified as the State is conceived as a clearly and univocally determined, which stands against non-state, and therefore also non-political groups and affairs, in so far as the state determines only what is political. This case occurs when the state, or, as in the eighteenth century, does not recognize any "society" as an antagonist, or at least, as in Germany during the nineteenth and up to the twentieth century, is, a stable and distinguishable power, to the above the company. Instead the identification of "state" and "political" becomes false and misleading to the same extent that state and society interpenetrate each other, and all state affairs up to that moment affect society, and vice versa all business up to that moment considered "purely" social they become state, as is necessarily the case in a democratically organized community. Then all the fields until then "neutral" - religion, culture, education, economy - cease to be "neutral", in the sense of being non-state, non-political.