Politics: A Very Short Introduction

Book Info

Title: Politics: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Kenneth Minogue

Series: Very Short Introductions

Start Date: Nov. 11, 2025

Finish Date: Nov. 23, 2025

Notes

To Read: In Defence of Politics (Bernard Crick)

Why Despots Don't Belong in Politics

• Despot- (noun) a person, especially a ruler, who has unlimited power over other people, and often uses it unfairly and cruelly
• Despotism- (noun) a system of order created by conquest, resting on fear, and issuing in caprice
• ...politics is so central to our civilization that its meaning changes with every change of culture and circumstance
• The essence of despotism is that there is no appeal, either in practice or in law, against the unchecked power of the master. The sole object of the subjects must be to please
• Rapacity- (noun) the quality of having or showing a strong wish to take things for yourself, usually using unfair methods or force
• ...politics is in part a theatre of illusion...
• The private world is that of the family, and of individual conscience as each individual makes his or her own choice of beliefs and interests. Such a private life would not be possible without the overarching public world of the state, which sustains a structure of law appropriate to a self-determining association. Politics only survives so long as this overarching structure of public law recognizes its own limits
• It is said that the price of freedom is vigilance, and an important form of vigilance is attention to political rhetoric, which often reveals how things are going
• Whoever seeks a kind of immortality in history goes into politics

The Classical Greeks: How to be a Citizen

• ...but on one thing the later classical Greeks were adamant: oriental despotism was not politics
• Their Greeks basic proposition was that man is a rational animal, and that the meaning of human life is found in the exercise of rationality
• The law and policies of a Greek city emerged, then, not from the palce of a despot, but from discussion among notionally equal citizens in the agora, the market-place which also generally served as the arena of politics
• The citizens who participated in the debates belonged in their private lives to households (oikia) which were the basic productive units of this ancient world...The household was the sphere in which the Greeks enjoyed family life and largely supplied their material needs...
• Constitutions function into two essential ways: they circumscribe they power of the office-holders, and as a result they create a predictable (thought not rigid and fixed) world in whcih the citizens may conduct their lives

The Romans: The Real Meaning of Patriotism

• ...but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sough to encompass nothing less than the globe itself
• Rome is the supreme example of politics as an activity conducted by men holding offices which clearly limit the exercise of power
• Polybius explained the success of Rome by the fact that one could not really describe her constitution as monarchical, or aristocratic, or democratic, for it contained elements of all three.
• Rome's fame largely rested on a moral strength evident to all who had dealings with her. Bribery of officials was a capital crime, and Romans could be relied on to stand by their oaths
• ...but in time success and wealth began to corrupt the Romans, who then fell under the sway of despotic forms of order which they had previously found repugnant. Virtue and freedom declined together.

Christianity and the Rise of the Individual

• During the Middle Ages, civic order emerged in western Europe out of brutality and violence, and for the first time religion played an independent role
• In these troubled time, the only security came from protection by a class of professional warriors. And protection came at a price.
• Three of the elements out of which the civilization of the high Middle Ages was constructed:
• Vital love of freedom inherited from the barbarians
• Civil order had to be constructed by agreement with a set of magnates whose control over their own tenants gave them an independent position of their own
• Kings intrigued, nobles fought wars, and it was the intermixture of policy and accident that determined which among the variety of langauges and cultures in Europe came to be identified with nations
• ...rights and liberties were first elaborated by, and commonly in the interests of, the nobility and the richer inhabitants of the towns, and then only very slowly filtered down, over the generations, to lower levels of society
• The role of religion: ...one could only become a Christian by deliberately acquiring a set of beliefs. In addition, Christianity was a religion of the book, something which set a premium on education and literacy
• Greek and Roman religion and philosophy were, it will be remembered, highly elitist...Christianity often reversed this judgment: it was the humble people who were closest to the spirit of love which God was thought to require
• The real significance Christianity had for political life lay in its transformation of human values. Christianity affirmed the equal value in the sight of God of each human soul.

Constructing the Modern State

• The politics of the modern state emerged out of two conflicting movements: kingdoms tended to fragment in some ways, and to become unified in others
• The common response to civil war is an enthusiasm for absolute government. It takes two or more to fight wars, and it seemed to make sense to concentrate all power in a sovereign ruler, conformity to whose laws would guarantee peace
• The new politics revolved around a court, and the court itself soon lost is medieval mobility and settled in one or more grand palaces which set the style for luxury and taste. A new kind of creature emerged: the courtier, whose aim was advancement and whose skill was to please
• This 'art of the state' (as the new politics has been called) came in time to turn the traditional concern with justice into mere facade and to shift the focus to the cynical advice on how to keep power which had always been a part, but usually a subordinate part, of traditional accounts of the skill of ruling
• In republican terms, and in the opinion of many of the prudent middle classes, monarchy seemed wasteful, warlike and exploitative, an affront to humanity. Indeed, the monarch seemed barely different from a tyrant
• The theory of sovereignty highlights one of the central problems of politics. It is universally agreed that freedom consists in living under law. But law must be made. What then is the position of the lawmaker?
• But even in the best regulated of worlds, it has to be recognized that political power is necessary but dangerous stuff. No precautions can guarantee complete safety

How to Analyse a Modern Society

• The image of the state as a body conveyed that it was a unified corporate structure, in which each element must play its part in an overall harmony. Individuals and groups within the state were meaningless except as the creatures of their society
• In the early modern period, then, state and soceity came explicitly to be distinguished...By the seventeenth century most social contract theorizing distinguished the beginnings of society on the one hand from the construction of the state on the other.
• Society, then, was born out of the state
• By the end of the eighteenth century, then, Europeans had learned to understand themselves as subjects and citizens in the state, as members of classes, institutions, religions, or status groups in society, and as producers and consumers in the economy. They were also beginning to learn that they were the bearers of culture.
• The concept of alienation is one influential diagnosis of what ails us, and a great deal of modern politics is the doomed attempt to put Humpty Dumpty together again

Relations between States: How to Balance Power

• Since defeat in war could mean extinction as a people, and since there were always some states that were, or might become, expansionist, warriors were everywhere needed for protection
• By marriage and diplomacy, but above all by war, a state could grow to be a power
• There are positive reasons why power tends to snowball, or why to those that hath it shall be given. Movements grow because everyone seeks to join up with power and success--known as the bandwagon effect
• A great power, as many statesmen have said, has no friends, merely interests, and interests change

The Experience of Politics: 1. How to be an Activist

• Politicians train for the real world by endless talk about past landmarks and present possibilities, and they do so in a special language of their own
• The power of an office is merely the skill by which a ruler can use his authority to get the right things done
• The first act in persuasion is for the persuader to convince his audience of his fellow-feeling with their broad aims, and only then can he commend his own policy as something fitting in with those aims
• What this account of persuasion suggests is that the politician must be a special type of person, one capable of keeping his deepest convictions to himself

The Experience of Politics: 2. Parties and Doctrines

• In every liberal democratic state, then, there will generally be two dominant parties, with several others on the margins of political power, not to mention a host of political sects which sometimes compete at elections
• Originating as a metaphor based on the seating of factions in the French revolutionary assembly, left and right came to stand for revolution and reaction, two concepts which Burke and other exponents of politics would regard as equally unpolitical

The Experience of Politics: 3. Justice, Freedom, and Democracy

• Politics is the art of navigating the ship of state
• In navigational terms, justice is a star to steer by, and when you steer by a star you don't aim to arrive there
• We already know what justice is, and our societies already are, in certain basic ways, just...Justice is, in other words, not merely something ahead of us and useful in navigating; it is also something behind us which tells us both what we are and where we have come from

Studying Politics Scientifically

• Political science requires that we forget about individual differences and construe politics, over time, as a process, analogous to what happens in nature
• The idea of a system, that is, a set of mechanical components having a fixed relation to each other, is central to conceiving of politics scientifically
• Politics as the political scientist sees it is, then, systems thickened with data, and the aim is to find causal connections between them
• But political science often escapes this limitation life/nature by ignoring the strict requirements of science as a discipline. Much of its material is historical and descriptive, as indeed it must be if we are to recognize that any understanding of the government of modern states cannot be separated from the culture of the people who live in them

Idealogy Challenges Politics

• In Scotland, a number of thinkers such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson saw the history of humanity as a progression of stages of evolution: people have evolved from nomads to a pastoral society which had given way to agriculture and culminated in the commercial society to modern times. Each step was taken to be a higher form of civilization, guided by what Adam Smith called the 'invisible hand'.
• Political doctrines give reasons; they talk to each other...For Marx, politics is merely the froth cast up by deeper processes. We thus need to distinguish Marxism and similar revelations, on the one hand, from political doctrines, which have a quite distinct logic, on the other hand. We may call these doctrines, which promise an earthly liberation, ideologies...
• Ideology refers, as it were, to the negative and positive poles of a dogmatic conviction
• Ideology is commonly signalled by the presence of a tripartite structure of theory
• The first stage reveals to us that the past is the history of the oppression of some abstract class of person
• The duty of the present is thus to mobilize the oppressed class in the struggle against the oppressive systems
• And the aim of this struggle is to attain a fully just society, a process generally called liberation
• Ideology challenges politics in the name of an ideal in which all desires are satisfied, but it first simplifies the issue by ruling out of court all but a remarkably limited schedule of approved desires, usually called 'needs'.

Can Politics Survive the Twenty-first Century?

• ...if the activity of politics were to die, the institution of the state would go with it.
• ....politics has been the business of the powerful: citizens, nobles, property-owners, patriarchs - all had power and status
• Political moralism, however, takes the independence of citizens not as a guarantee of freedom but as a barrier to the project of moralizing the world. Independent individuals disposing of their own property as they please are identified with selfishness and taken to be the cause of poverty. A socially just world is thought to require a rational distribution of the goods which pour so abundantly forth in a modern society
• ....politics in the modern world has generally been the activity of dealing with the business of a civil association, the state, which provided the formal framework within which individuals could produce and consume, associate socially with each other, worship or not worship, and express themselves in art
• Politics becomes, in a famous formula in political science, 'the authoritative allocation of values'. In other words, it is the business of society to tell us what we should admire and condemn

Applying to Worldbuilding

How do you define citizenship? What activities do citizens participant in? How open is the idea of citizenship?

What drives modern society: politics, culture, economy, community? Is there one aspect that powers the others?

What is power? Who has access to it? Who would like access to it? Who is actively striving to reshape the flow of power?