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"Political"
Mar. 17th, 2014 04:36 pmIn Good King Charles golden days -- Charles I, that is -- there were members of the squirearchy who wanted no more than just to live comfortably on their estates as they always had, and made comments about "politics" which could come out of the mouth of a small-c conservative today. (Except they used terms like "faction" instead; the attitude is the same.)
In contrast, one of the markers of the Left -- in my youth and now -- is the claim that everything is political, and that people who claim not to be political are simply hypocrites.
Which is right?
Well, both, or neither. It all depends on what definition of "politics" you decide to use. (neither one is that of Aristotle.)
One definition -- the "natural" one for a small-c conservative to use -- implies that politics involves actions or organization with an intent to change or actively defend the status quo. Just wanting to get along as you always have is not "political". So you might not be political, but your (rural, proto-Tory) MPs would be in defending your way of life against the radicals/dissenters in Parliament, even if what they were defending was what you upheld; politics denoted an arena, not policies in themselves. And there is a certain sort of sense to this: otherwise distinctions cease to have any meaning, and every endeavor could be collapsed into politics.
Another definition -- the "natural" one for someone who is discontented with how things are -- is that anything is political which has implications at the level of how society is organized. Supporting the status quo is as much a political stance as supporting progressive or reactionary programmes. From this point of view, the only way something could be non-political would be if it had no effect on the body politic. And there is also a certain sense to this, since otherwise intention becomes too determinative of the political -- some actions or discourse could be of immense political importance but would have a special charm because they arose from someone without political consciousness -- often someone who viewed the socially constructed as natural.
As to who is right...
The "apolitical"[1] is an engineer's approach, the attitude of the Permanent Civil Service; it is the view that many (though not all) of the issues in the world are matters not of policy but of competence (or rational caution). As such it is usually small-c conservative, although it can easily be turned on its head and become radical under certain circumstances. (People who favour massive cutbacks to our industrial base to counter global warming might very well consider it "common sense" and a matter of logic rather than of policy, although implementing those policies would involve massive disruptions.)
But if your only aim is to cultivate your own garden, it gets difficult. (Voltaire was both a Radical and a Tory, like many satirists.) I think that the old view, common to classic Toryism and classic Liberalism, that there is a charmed private realm outside the public purview is pretty much dead in theory, although it remains a widespread belief and there are many practical points at which the public cedes place to the private. All you have to do is to look at the Twentieth Century extension of the criminal law and various branches of administrative law into the home to address persistent issues such as spousal abuse and child abuse to be aware that the boundaries are much fuzzier than they used to be.[2] The state limits its involvement in "private" lives not based on a magic boundary around the domestic/private, but because it is, in practice, exceptionally difficult to police, and because there are strong constituencies (i.e. pretty well everyone not actually in the security/spy industries) opposed to extending governmental surveillance into the home.
[1]Cf. Lehrer on Werner von Braun.
[2]In some cases the state has withdrawn from dealing with the private, voluntarily: "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", as Trudeau said when Minister of Justice. And indeed the state has ceased to police sexual "morality" in a small retreat. (This has, by the way, been a delayed reaction to the growth of the possibility of a genuinely private sphere for sexual activity: down to early modern times only the very well off had the resources for true privacy. In the middle ages, the reach of the authorities to regulate what we would consider "private" behaviour was very long indeed -- one need only look at the scope of a summoner's authority to confirm this -- but it went along with a much more limited idea of the private. It was, however, still true that many of the rules which governed relations between members of the same village did not apply to control actions between close relatives, or between master and servant.)
The privilege given to the domestic ambit was actually a replacement for something quite different. The older model didn't have a rights in balance model at all, with an exempt space for the domestic; it asserted special rights for the paterfamilias as a positive claim, combined with the view that a married couple had one legal personality (and that the husband's), based on a very specific reading of St. Paul. It was the single legal personality that gave the husband such extended power over the wife; it was the old authority of the Roman head of household that gave him (and her, by agency) extended power over children and servants. In this model, the public law did not stop at a magic barrier; it actively enforced the rights thus conferred. The rights in balance model, combined with a domestic exemption, was a creation of the reworking of the law in the 19th Century. And the old proto-Tories of the 17th Century did not claim a right to live on their estates undisturbed as a matter of privacy; they claimed it on the basis of divine order. However, the one claim carried over into the other seamlessly, over the course of a couple of centuries.
In contrast, one of the markers of the Left -- in my youth and now -- is the claim that everything is political, and that people who claim not to be political are simply hypocrites.
Which is right?
Well, both, or neither. It all depends on what definition of "politics" you decide to use. (neither one is that of Aristotle.)
One definition -- the "natural" one for a small-c conservative to use -- implies that politics involves actions or organization with an intent to change or actively defend the status quo. Just wanting to get along as you always have is not "political". So you might not be political, but your (rural, proto-Tory) MPs would be in defending your way of life against the radicals/dissenters in Parliament, even if what they were defending was what you upheld; politics denoted an arena, not policies in themselves. And there is a certain sort of sense to this: otherwise distinctions cease to have any meaning, and every endeavor could be collapsed into politics.
Another definition -- the "natural" one for someone who is discontented with how things are -- is that anything is political which has implications at the level of how society is organized. Supporting the status quo is as much a political stance as supporting progressive or reactionary programmes. From this point of view, the only way something could be non-political would be if it had no effect on the body politic. And there is also a certain sense to this, since otherwise intention becomes too determinative of the political -- some actions or discourse could be of immense political importance but would have a special charm because they arose from someone without political consciousness -- often someone who viewed the socially constructed as natural.
As to who is right...
The "apolitical"[1] is an engineer's approach, the attitude of the Permanent Civil Service; it is the view that many (though not all) of the issues in the world are matters not of policy but of competence (or rational caution). As such it is usually small-c conservative, although it can easily be turned on its head and become radical under certain circumstances. (People who favour massive cutbacks to our industrial base to counter global warming might very well consider it "common sense" and a matter of logic rather than of policy, although implementing those policies would involve massive disruptions.)
But if your only aim is to cultivate your own garden, it gets difficult. (Voltaire was both a Radical and a Tory, like many satirists.) I think that the old view, common to classic Toryism and classic Liberalism, that there is a charmed private realm outside the public purview is pretty much dead in theory, although it remains a widespread belief and there are many practical points at which the public cedes place to the private. All you have to do is to look at the Twentieth Century extension of the criminal law and various branches of administrative law into the home to address persistent issues such as spousal abuse and child abuse to be aware that the boundaries are much fuzzier than they used to be.[2] The state limits its involvement in "private" lives not based on a magic boundary around the domestic/private, but because it is, in practice, exceptionally difficult to police, and because there are strong constituencies (i.e. pretty well everyone not actually in the security/spy industries) opposed to extending governmental surveillance into the home.
[1]Cf. Lehrer on Werner von Braun.
[2]In some cases the state has withdrawn from dealing with the private, voluntarily: "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", as Trudeau said when Minister of Justice. And indeed the state has ceased to police sexual "morality" in a small retreat. (This has, by the way, been a delayed reaction to the growth of the possibility of a genuinely private sphere for sexual activity: down to early modern times only the very well off had the resources for true privacy. In the middle ages, the reach of the authorities to regulate what we would consider "private" behaviour was very long indeed -- one need only look at the scope of a summoner's authority to confirm this -- but it went along with a much more limited idea of the private. It was, however, still true that many of the rules which governed relations between members of the same village did not apply to control actions between close relatives, or between master and servant.)
The privilege given to the domestic ambit was actually a replacement for something quite different. The older model didn't have a rights in balance model at all, with an exempt space for the domestic; it asserted special rights for the paterfamilias as a positive claim, combined with the view that a married couple had one legal personality (and that the husband's), based on a very specific reading of St. Paul. It was the single legal personality that gave the husband such extended power over the wife; it was the old authority of the Roman head of household that gave him (and her, by agency) extended power over children and servants. In this model, the public law did not stop at a magic barrier; it actively enforced the rights thus conferred. The rights in balance model, combined with a domestic exemption, was a creation of the reworking of the law in the 19th Century. And the old proto-Tories of the 17th Century did not claim a right to live on their estates undisturbed as a matter of privacy; they claimed it on the basis of divine order. However, the one claim carried over into the other seamlessly, over the course of a couple of centuries.
