Paradigms for Political Action : A Draft for a Repertoire

Abstract

Whether politics is a separate sphere or an aspect of human action is a subject of academic controversy. I focus here on the political aspect of action, which is not exclusive of other aspects. There are no ‘naturally political’ issues nor is there anything completely devoid of a political aspect. I am now taking a step backwards to discuss the seemingly simple ‘political or not’ question, as compared to the ‘political in which sense’ question, which I have discussed elsewhere. In this article, I stay on the ideal–typical level, as I want to discuss alternative ways of marking the criteria for the political aspect, without discussing the views of other scholars in detail. I call the procedure for judging and naming this aspect political literacy, a way of making explicit the presence of the political aspect in some phenomena or questions. What is political at a certain time can, in other words, be judged as the result of a politicising reading of the phenomena in question. Here I shall construct a repertoire of certain ideal–typical criteria for marking the political aspects and making sense of actual disputes regarding the political. The repertoire includes the criteria of political action under such headings as expediency, partisanship, controversy and contingency. I regard the view of politics as belonging to a separate sphere as a zero option. All of the paradigms can be regarded as different facets of politics as a contingent activity.