No, but it is a real definition nonetheless. It is fifth because it is much less commonly used then the others, not because it has less validity. Most of us never analyze the politics that occur in our personal relationships anymore than we analyze the chemistry of our taste buds. We just deal with people and taste food.
Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to Psychonaut, not you. But to you I would say, it would be a mistake to forget that most politics comes down to the personal.
Jonathan
That’s the maximum level of decision-making a leaderless group is able to reach - decide to see a movie? That’s the best you got?
How about this: let’s see a group of people manage to *make *a movie without a leader (a director or producer), and work up from there.
How do you think Congress works? Or Parliament? There are a bunch of people who have different opinions. They discuss issues and form coalitions to advance their own agendas. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Gordon Brown all need to have the support of a majority of their fellow members to get anything done. They’re no different than the guy who was saying “Let’s go see Avatar.”
That’s the “nasty, brutish, short” guy, right? I dunno. I don’t think that human nature is quite so dangerous. Certainly, I think there would be a fair share of conniving in human nature, which is at the heart of politics.
From The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Boston:
Best concise definition of “politics” I’ve ever read. And how could any cooperative or collective human enterprise, governmental or otherwise, happen without it? Yes, we need politics.
Yes, this definition is in line with how I was using it.
But I wish there was a way to separate poltics from government. Of course people need leaders. Unfortunately, those leaders are usually in it for the wrong reason. Didn’t someone once say that the worst person to elect is the person who actually wants the job?
American politics today is more about making people think one ideology is better than the other, to perpetuate one group or the other staying in power, regardless if it is what is best for the country. As many non-Americans on this board have pointed out, The American concept of Left and Right is extremely narrow compared with other countries.
That is why I have thought of another way to run politics in this country. I figured this is as good a place as any to throw it out there, and let all of you rip it to shreds. Here is my plan:
Take names off the ballot. Put issues on the ballot. For national elections, put about 7 national issues on the ballot. Make them as general as possible, and as neutral as possible. Figure out which choice for each issue was more popular for each district. Take the names of all the people who voted with the majority on all 7 issues, and randomly choose one of them to represent the district. The political parties can campaign as the wish, for or against the issues, but take the personal mudslinging out. Individuals and corporations can put money in to campaign for or against an issue, but no-one is beholden to their money.
So, what do you think? Can we call the Constitutional convention?
Of course it is real; it is also terrible. It is not fake insofar as it isn’t completely made up. But if you actually want to say something about politics, ir is pretty useless.
That just raises the question of why it is less commonly used than any of the others. My guess is, because it’s pretty useless.
No problem. I was somewhat confused. I also do not know what you mean when you say that politics comes down to the personal. If you mean that the political agent is the individual and politics is about how his/her individual preferences get translated into reality, then yes, this is absolutely correct and is at the core of the dominant paradigm of modern political science.
It’s a terrible definition of politics. It is a mostly (though not completely) useless definition of how to stay in power. It says pretty much nothing about the scope of political phenomena.
Not at all, in fact it’s more useful than the way you are using it. Because politicians represent the political will of aggregate populations who are engaging in their own low-level politics on a daily basis.
Because people like you have emphasized the other definitions. 
It probably stems from the ‘Great Men’ style of history, where history is defined by a few big swinging dicks, and the actions of individual people on the ground is irrelevant to it.
And you use the word every day when you use the word, ‘polite’. Would you prefer if I came over to your house and behaved in a politic manner to your wife?
For me it’s that the political agent is not the sum total of political action.
Actually, it does say something about the scope of political phenomena. It describes the scope accurately. Whereas yours does not.
Yes, that’s Hobbes, but the quote is somewhat out of context. Hobbes is basically arguing that a “war of all against all” is the the consequence of humankind’s tendency to maximize self-interest absent any constraints. One of his big questions is how we got where we are from there, that is, how did we ever overcome this problem. His answer, in a nutshell, is that the solution to this problem is buckets of coercion. This is still quite controversial today, despite the fact that it has more than a little empirical support.
That’s still politics.
mswas, you are officially killing me here.
There are two strands getting mixed up. One is politics as governance (the nuts and bolts of how you rule people and keep your job) and the other as politics as phenomena of human organization.
How you govern and keep your job is a product of how humans organize themselves and make group decisions. This is “collective decision-making” in my definition. We have rules for collective decision-making. They’re called elections and legislative procedures. How you get elected, get stuff done, and do some crap having to do with force of character or whatever are consequents of our rules of collective decision-making. If the rules were different, the techniques would be different and the collective action would be different.
That is Politics. Handing out flyers by the subway entrance, backstabbing your cubicle neighbor at work, and paying people off to keep your job are all politics. They are political phenomena that people who think about Politics analyze and explain. You can’t have the strategy without the rules of the game. The details of these rules are very interesting and important. They drive how choices made by groups of people get translated into action.
Which is exactly my definition. Politics is how individual choice gets translated into group choice and then into action. It does not require “character” or any crap like that. That stuff may follow from a particular setup of rules, but it is not required in any general sense.
I am somewhat neglecting here the action side. This is an obviously important part of Politics: why doesn’t the “will of the people” actually get done? What can agents actually commit to? These are Political questions.
Maybe they represent the political will of an aggregate. This is one of the more interesting (to me) areas of political science called social choice theory. As it turns out, even our best rules for aggregating social preferences to make collective decisions are very imperfect in some extraordinary ways.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about here.
I think you are ignoring the context of the word here pretty brutally.
Who is the political agent for you? For me, it could be anyone. Usually just an ordinary voter. In my own theoretical and empirical work, I study the political behavior of people living in tiny villages.
I am very fortunate that the people who pay me to theorize about politics do not agree with you. I would hate to be out a job.
Agreed, and one can extrapolate what one is discussing by context, no need to say that one definition is wrong.
And that’s accurately described as politics. But so are the rules that make me the Father and my daughter subordinate until she turns 18.
And so are the choices made about when to give a toddler a time-out.
That is how I am using it as well. It is the methods by which we have developed our rules of collective action. And a collective is any grouping as small as two people.
Well I don’t think I would say that something is actually will if it’s not acted upon. As you know, I am big dreamer. I have lots of dreams and fantasies that never become a reality. I have come to realize that if I do not act on them then I did not have sufficient will to make them a reality. This realization has helped me a great deal because I used to have a lot of angst over not accomplishing things I talked about. But if I have the will to do something and see the opportunity to implement that will, then I do it.
Yes, definitely. I lack the numeracy to really look into that stuff meaningfully, but I’d say that it is kind of obvious that a lot of the ways we express such things are quite wrong.
I guess I don’t really understand what you’re arguing about. I am just using the term very granularly.
I think you’re assuming that the word is only useful in a particular context.
[
What I meant here was that the political agent as in the representative was not the sole actor. That the actions of individuals matter. For instance, I order my Chinese take-out from Amy’s just now. That was a political action and transfers some of my capital to the restaurant’s capital.
I didn’t say it was wrong. What I said is that it is not analytically useful and somewhat unconventional. I did not make any claims as to whether it is right or wrong. I am actually less interested in those kinds of questions.
Perhaps. A lot of people might consider this more sociological (organization and structure of the family, etc), but I am not too worried about defining strict boundaries like that.
Now I agree with you. But this does not follow at all from what you actually said above. 
It’s actually not obvious at all. So not obvious that Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Prize for universalizing some findings about preference aggregation rules. Arrow’s Theorem It is a purely mathematical finding, but its importance cannot be overstated. The wiki link explains it reasonably well. Just substitute Bush, Gore, and Nader for x,y, and z.
When the OP wants to do away with politics, I do not think he means politeness. I am going to stretch things here a bit for lack of a better example, but bear with me. Nouns in some languages can be masculine, neuter, or feminine. Often this can be irritating, illogical, and confusing. If I said in the context of learning German that I wanted to get rid of sex, you would know I was talking about nouns and not fucking.
[quote]
What I meant here was that the political agent as in the representative was not the sole actor. That the actions of individuals matter.
[quote]
I agree. They occasionally matter quite a lot.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I’d argue that what you did was an individual economic choice. People have made arguments that all consumption choices are inherently political or some such, but I personally don’t agree and do not find these arguments interesting or compelling.
It depends on how you use it. The fact is that many people, including some in this thread, never bother to analyze group interactions in their own lives. But any really useful political theory has just as much application in understanding how a workplace, friendship group, family, or social club work as a government. But many people don’t ever want to think of what they do when the interact with others as politics. Politics has become linked to government as if that is the only place it applies. I believe for most of us understanding politics as it applies to our personal lives will provide more utility than understanding why Republicans filibuster more than Democrats.
That and while you can talk about aggregate groups, in the end we all respond to people more than ideals or groups. People vote more for a person than a position. Voting for a platform may be a more logical way to choose sides, but in the end most people are more swayed by the person.
I quite agree with all of this. Here is a trivial example, for shits and grins. I have a bunch of friends over pretty regularly, so we frequently have to decide which of the legion of take-out places to call. I’ll spare you the theory, but it is enough to say that six people cannot necessarily aggregate their preferences over a dozen delivery places in any resolute way. So instead of picking a place, everyone gets a veto. By the time everyone offers a veto, we have narrowed down agreeable take-out for everyone. This method is kind of sensitive to who goes first, so ideally you would pick randomly. It usually takes about thirty seconds for six people to decide where to eat.
This preference aggregation rule can be defined formally and has some drawbacks, but for us, it works great. I have all sorts of other little rules like this that really grease the wheels. My wife and I hardly argue about crap like this ever.
I also agree. But I think this reflects the fact that people are not stupid. They know that candidates cannot actually credibly commit to deliver the things they say they will, so they just vote with their guts. It is by no means crazy or irrational or any of the other things people might call it.
Maeglin I’ve used that method for ordering pizza from Grandpa’s.
Let’s get rid of mathematicians. They are the real problem. I have all these wonderful plans that will allow everyone to live forever in peace and joy. Whenever I explain them to other people, they always say, “That idea doesn’t even make any sense. You haven’t even got the arithmetic right. Here, let me show you why your idea doesn’t work. It’s easy to calculate why it fails.”
That’s why we need to get rid of mathematics. Let’s start by getting rid of mathematicians. We don’t need any picky busy-bodies pointing out mistakes in our arithmetic. If we could just ignore mathematics we could live in an eternal utopia.
Next, let’s get rid of thought.