Elucidate the meanings inherent in the term ‘political’ with appropriate illustrations. (2024, 20 Marks)
‘Political’ descends from the Greek polis; for Aristotle man was by nature a political animal because only within the city could he live the good life. Used everywhere in the discipline, the term shifts sense with context. It has gathered layered meanings — a place, an activity of power, a way of settling conflict, a public realm and a contested boundary — each showing what the others miss.
The political as arena
The institutional meaning locates politics in and around government: constitutions, legislatures, executives, courts, parties, elections — the premise of the traditional legal-institutional approach.
- Illustration: on this view a khap panchayat ordering a couple to separate is merely “social”. Yet when the Supreme Court in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) held that such assemblies cannot override adults’ choice of spouse under Articles 19 and 21, it acknowledged coercive power operating outside the arena — the definition’s blind spot.
The political as power and allocation
Harold D. Lasswell‘s Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) made politics the study of influence; David Easton (The Political System, 1953) defined it as the authoritative allocation of values for a society. Politics now exists wherever power distributes scarce goods — firms, unions, families. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto, 1848), political power is the organised power of one class to oppress another; feminists read patriarchy likewise.
- Illustration: MGNREGA social audits (Section 17 of the 2005 Act), where the gram sabha publicly checks muster rolls, turn a wage scheme into an open contest over who gets what.
- The cost is over-inclusion: if everything is political, the term stops discriminating.
The political as conciliation
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (1962), narrowed it: politics is the activity by which differing interests within a unit of rule are conciliated by giving each a share of power proportionate to its importance to the whole. It is an achievement; tyranny abolishes it.
- Illustration: the linguistic reorganisation of states (1956) accommodated regional demands within one Union instead of suppressing them.
The political as intensity and as action
- Carl Schmitt (The Concept of the Political, 1932) reduced it to the friend–enemy distinction: any antithesis — religious, economic, ethnic — becomes political once intense enough to group people into friends and enemies. The road to Partition in 1947, where religious difference hardened into a demand for separate states, fits his model.
- Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958) inverted him: the political is action among equals in a public realm, where citizens appear, speak and begin something new; power is acting in concert, the opposite of violence. M. K. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930), a small beginning that sparked mass civil disobedience, is Arendtian politics.
The political as public affairs
The public meaning sets politics against private life. Aristotle separated the polis, where free and equal citizens deliberate on the common good, from the oikos, the household of natural hierarchy and necessity. Liberalism kept the line: state public, family and conscience private.
- Illustration: K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) made privacy a fundamental right, fencing a personal sphere against the state.
The political as a contested boundary
- Carol Hanisch‘s essay “The Personal Is Political” (written 1969, published 1970) and Kate Millett‘s Sexual Politics (1970) argued that the public–private line is itself a political settlement. Illustration: the anti-arrack movement, begun by women in literacy classes in Dubagunta village, Nellore (1992), turned drink-fuelled domestic violence into a statewide issue and forced a ban on arrack. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 then made abuse at home a public wrong.
- Chantal Mouffe (On the Political, 2005) separates “the political” — the ineradicable dimension of antagonism — from “politics”, the practices and institutions that order coexistence amid it. Democracy must turn enemies into adversaries (agonism). Illustration: the 2020–21 farmers’ agitation, sustained through negotiation and ending in the repeal of the three farm laws (November 2021).
The political in everyday speech
Colloquially, ‘political’ is often pejorative — partisan, calculating, untruthful. George Orwell‘s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) shows political speech built to serve intent — designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Language is itself a tool of power.
Conclusion
No agreed definition has emerged in 2,500 years; the term is what W. B. Gallie (1956) called an essentially contested concept. These meanings are layers, not rivals: the arena shows where authority sits, power what is at stake, conciliation and action how a free people ought to handle it. Schmitt and the feminists add the sharpest lesson — the line drawn around ‘the political’ is never neutral, because it decides which dominations count as questions of justice.