What is politics? No question sounds as naïve and as profound as this. In the present context, with ubiquitous TV and digital technologies, almost everyone thinks they know the answers. However, there are some time-tested views expressed on the question. One view is that politics in any society pertains to ‘who gets what, when, and how’. That is, politics is about the distribution of resources, honors, privileges, offices, and all that goes with them. The second view of politics is that politics is an ‘authoritative allocation of values’ in a society. That is, how the ruling values are allocated across a spectrum of social sections is politics. The third view is that politics is a struggle over society’s resources: that is essentially about distributive justice. And the fourth, and the latest arrival on the scene, is that the ‘personal is political’: this view argues against the dichotomy of the publicness of politics and the privateness of family or everyday life. In other words, the slogan "the personal is political" stretches across the divide between public life and private life.
The related question is also whether there can be an end to politics at any future time. The question is, will ‘administration of things’ ever replace ‘government of people’? In this brief note, I would like to hold the view that politics is much deeper than the distribution of honors, offices, and privileges. Politics is more than the authoritative allocation of values in a political system. Politics is also more than the struggles over the distribution of societal resources, and finally, politics might be personal, but it is always more than personal.
I want to put forth two points regarding the above: a) Politics is about the very conceptions of what one values as a good life, worthy of living; b) politics does not end with achieving even the most egalitarian society. Politics over contestations of forms of what we take to be the good life, individually and collectively, continues to be present even in the best of worlds.
Third, and related, is that in developing countries, where acute poverty and social and economic underdevelopment persist, the politics continues to be as discussed in the first three definitions: about who gets what, when, and how; as authoritative allocation of values; and as struggles over the distribution of societal economic resources. But this is not all.
In contemporary circumstances, with technology making everything global, with the shrinking of time and place, our conceptions of politics are also likely to be affected by what a particular society’s internal issues rather are open to all the influences that come to affect us. This is the case, so even as poverty, malnutrition, inequality, and the necessity to secure livelihoods and raise the living conditions of large sections of people are still urgent questions. Despite the unquestioned urgency of these issues, politics continues to be more encompassing and inclusive of a variety of questions, which deny any determination in the last instance. The questions of what one values as a good life, individually and socially, and the contestations over such conceptions of what people consider as valuable in life, form the essence of politics today. Arguably, this is the broadest definition that one can provide.
Is such a definition free of any political ideology? Political ideologies exist to answer the question of a good life precisely in different ways. Conservatives argue for what they value. Socialists and different shades of them put forward their best views on a good life; liberals, of course, always hold that what any individual thinks is a good life is what she is intended to. Thus, the question of what constitutes a good life is the very stuff of ideologies on offer. But the answer is also beyond a program of action on offer by any political ideology. The questions of politics go beyond ideologies and political parties that carry and champion them. Since the outward representatives of the ideologies are political parties, the definition of politics has come to be bound up with party politics. This is true as far as it is liberal democratic multi- party politics. In single-party states, ‘politics’ is often what happens outside the party; inside the party, it is only the dictates of the Fuhrer.
What, therefore, is politics for? Will they come to an end in some future society? The answers to these questions can be, of course, both easy and difficult to surmise. First, the politics of developing countries will largely be likely to be around distributive justice. Second, that does not mean that the authoritative allocation of society’s values will be any less important. Third, politics now is likely to be beyond distributive justice and is likely to become politics of the personal, thereby breaching the barricades built traditionally over these issues. Thus, politics is more than party politics, more than class struggles, and more than personal politics, though politics might include all this. The end of politics today, or should be, at any rate, in an ever-democratizing society, is regarding the determination of the very conception of what we individually and collectively think is a life worthy of living and that we value. Inasmuch as this is the case, it is difficult to foresee an end to politics even in the most egalitarian of societies. Not now, and not in the future. Since there is no end to politics, let us discuss the ends and aims of politics.
