If “politics” means all interactions on public or common matters, here are six\u00a0varieties\u00a0of it.\u00a0They overlap, yet\u00a0no category is coterminous with any\u00a0of the others:<\/p>\n
1. Adversarial politics: The parties hold incompatible interests or goals, but\u00a0some resolution must be reached. We can divide this category into three\u00a0subtypes:<\/p>\n
1a. Negotiation: the parties reach a satisfactory conclusion\u00a0that partly meets each one’s interests.<\/em><\/p>\n
1b. Authoritative\u00a0decisions, which may be made by a\u00a0ruler or ruling body, by an outside mediator, or by the group as a whole using an authoritative process,\u00a0such as majority rule.<\/em><\/p>\n
1c. Doing without agreement by protecting individual liberty and letting the aggregate\u00a0outcome be a function of private decisions.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
2. Unitary politics: The parties either have or are able to create a genuine consensus of interests. As Jane Mansbridge argues in Beyond Adversary Democracy<\/em>, this can happen if their interests happen to\u00a0coincide from the beginning, if they persuade one another to agree (see variety 3, below), or if they all take the interest of the group as paramount.<\/p>\n
3. Deliberative politics: The parties exchange\u00a0reasons and attempt to persuade others to change their authentic goals and interests. Deliberative politics differs from Negotiation (1a) in that deliberators\u00a0hope to make\u00a0interests coincide rather than treat them\u00a0as fixed and try to maximize everyone’s satisfaction. It differs from Unitary politics (2) because it may not generate anything close to a consensus and may, indeed, be rather contentious.<\/p>\n
4. Co-creative politics (“public work” in Harry Boyte’s phrase): The parties\u00a0create or build something together, whether the object is open-source software, a physical playground, or\u00a0the norms\u00a0and traditions of a community. Public work differs from Deliberative politics (3) because it may not be very discursive; and if the participants do talk, they may not need\u00a0to address conflicting interests and values. They may share goals and only discuss means and techniques.<\/p>\n
5. Relational politics: interactions among people who make decisions or take collective actions knowing something about one another\u2019s ideas, preferences, and interests. Each participant has at least the potential to influence and be influenced by each of the others; thus relational politics is interactive. It need not be face-to-face if available technologies (letters in 1776, the Internet today) allow sufficient interaction at a distance. Nor does relational politics depend on or produce unity; people can have close political interactions with their opponents and critics. The defining feature of relational politics is mutual knowledge and influence.<\/p>\n
6. Impersonal politics: yields decisions and actions without<\/i> the participants having to know one another. Examples of impersonal politics include populations that vote by secret ballot, consumers who determine prices by the aggregate of their purchasing decisions, and rulers who issue laws, orders, or edicts that apply to unknown individuals. Each of these is an act of leverage<\/em> in the Archimedean sense. As actors in impersonal politics, we can move distant objects, even if our impact is minuscule or outweighed by others\u2019.<\/p>\n
My own view is that we need all of these varieties. Relational politics, in particular, is by no means ideal or sufficient. The phrase \u201coffice politics\u201d has a negative ring because so many interactions in a workplace where colleagues know one another are manipulative, unfair, exclusive, or just tedious. The extreme case is torture, which is as relational an interaction as we can conceive. David Luban observes:<\/p>\n
The torturer inflicts pain one-on-one, deliberately, up close and personal, in order to break the spirit of the victim\u2013in other words, to tyrannize and dominate the victim. The relationship between them becomes a perverse parody of friendship and intimacy: intimacy transformed into its inverse image, where the torturer focuses on the victim\u2019s body with the intensity of a lover, except that every bit of that focus is bent to causing pain and tyrannizing the victim\u2019s spirit. (David Luban,\u201cLiberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,\u201d<\/a> Virginia Law Review, vol. 91 (Oct. 2005), p. 1430)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Office politics and (much more so) torture are marked by inequality, yet even under conditions of rough equality, relational politics can be inefficient or unproductive.<\/p>\n
Yet I would argue that relational politics fills an important need in a society dominated by impersonal and adversarial institutions. It is best when it is also deliberative (3) and co-creative (4). That combination\u00a0deserves active support. Further, since\u00a0powerful institutions have no incentives to promote such\u00a0politics and may have reasons to subvert, coopt, or repress it, someone must fight on behalf of productive relational politics. That requires some use of adversarial and impersonal tools (votes, lawsuits, mass\u00a0communications) in the defense\u00a0of relational interactions. How to accomplish that seems to me one of the hardest problems for anyone concerned about civic renewal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If “politics” means all interactions on public or common matters, here are six\u00a0varieties\u00a0of it.\u00a0They overlap, yet\u00a0no category is coterminous with any\u00a0of the others: 1. Adversarial politics: The parties hold incompatible interests or goals, but\u00a0some resolution must be reached. We can divide this category into three\u00a0subtypes: 1a. Negotiation: the parties reach a satisfactory conclusion\u00a0that partly meets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-deliberation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14549"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14556,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14549\/revisions\/14556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}