Politics is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society. Politics is usually concerned with resolving issues within a society via a government. Politicians are individuals engaged in the activity of politics. The branch of social science that studies politics and government is referred to as political science.
A variety of methods are deployed in politics, which include promoting one's own political views among people, negotiation with other political subjects, making laws, and exercising internal and external force, including warfare against adversaries...... Politics is exercised on a wide range of social levels, from clans and tribes of traditional societies, through modern local governments, companies and institutions up to sovereign states, to the international level.
In modern states, people often form political parties to represent their ideas. Members of a party often agree to take the same position on many issues and agree to support the same changes to law and the same leaders. An election is usually a competition between different parties.
A political system is a framework which defines acceptable political methods within a society. The history of political thought can be traced back to early antiquity, with seminal works such as Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Confucius's political manuscripts and Chanakya's Arthashastra.
Politics may be used positively in the context of a "political solution" which is compromising and non-violent,. or descriptively as "the art or science of government", but the word often also carries a negative connotation..
Etymology The English word politics has its roots in the Greek word polis (or poleis) which means "city". Aristotle's classic work, Politiká used the Ancient Greek term (). In the mid-15th century, Aristotle's composition was rendered in Early Modern English as ,"The book of " (Bhuler 1961/1941:154).Buhler, C. F., ed. 1961 . The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. London: Early English Text Society, Original Series No. 211 . which became Politics in Modern English.
The singular politic first attested in English in 1430, coming from Middle French —itself derived from ,. a Latinization of the Greek () from () and ().
Approaches Extensive and limited Adrian Leftwich has differentiated views of politics based on how extensive or limited their perception of what accounts as 'political' is.. The extensive view sees politics as present across the sphere of human social relations, while the limited view restricts it to certain contexts. For example, in a more restrictive way, politics may be viewed as primarily about governance,. while a feminist perspective could argue that sites which have been viewed traditionally as non-political, should indeed be viewed as political as well.. This latter position is encapsulated in the slogan "the personal is political", which disputes the distinction between private and public issues. Politics may also be defined by the use of power, as has been argued by Robert A. Dahl..
Moralism and realism Some perspectives on politics view it empirically as an exercise of power, while others see it as a social function with a normative basis.. This distinction has sometimes been called the difference between political moralism and political realism.. For moralists, politics is closely linked to ethics, and is at its extreme in utopian thinking. For example, according to Hannah Arendt, the view of Aristotle was that, "to be political…meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through violence";. while according to Bernard Crick, "politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics, and other forms of rule are something else.". In contrast, for realists, who some include figures such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Harold Lasswell, the true nature of politics reflects human desire for rule and the aggrandizement of self interests rather than moralism.
Conflict and co-operation Agonism argues that politics essentially comes down to conflict between conflicting interests. Political scientist Elmer Schattschneider argued that "at the root of all politics is the universal language of conflict", while for Carl Schmitt the essence of politics is the distinction of 'friend' from 'foe'. This is in direct contrast to the more co-operative views of politics by Aristotle and Crick. However, a more mixed view between these extremes is provided by Irish political scientist Michael Laver, who noted that:Politics is about the characteristic blend of conflict and co-operation that can be found so often in human interactions. Pure conflict is war. Pure co-operation is true love. Politics is a mixture of both..
History
Prehistoric Early human forms of social organization—bands and tribes—lacked centralized political structures. These are sometimes referred to as stateless societies.
Early states In ancient history, civilizations did not have definite boundaries as states have today, and their borders could be more accurately described as frontiers. Early dynastic Sumer, and early dynastic Egypt were the first civilizations to define their borders. Moreover, up to the 12th century, many people lived in non-state societies. These range from relatively egalitarian bands and tribes to complex and highly stratified chiefdoms.
State formation
There are a number of different theories and hypotheses regarding early state formation that seek generalizations to explain why the state developed in some places but not others. Other scholars believe that generalizations are unhelpful and that each case of early state formation should be treated on its own.
Voluntary theories contend that diverse groups of people came together to form states as a result of some shared rational interest.. The theories largely focus on the development of agriculture, and the population and organizational pressure that followed and resulted in state formation. One of the most prominent theories of early and primary state formation is the hydraulic hypothesis, which contends that the state was a result of the need to build and maintain large-scale irrigation projects.
Conflict theories of state formation regard conflict and dominance of some population over another population as key to the formation of states. In contrast with voluntary theories, these arguments believe that people do not voluntarily agree to create a state to maximize benefits, but that states form due to some form of oppression by one group over others. Some theories in turn argue that warfare was critical for state formation.
Ancient history The first states of sorts were those of early dynastic Sumer and early dynastic Egypt, which arose from the Uruk period and Predynastic Egypt respectively around approximately 3000 BC.. Early dynastic Egypt was based around the Nile River in the north-east of Africa, the kingdom's boundaries being based around the Nile and stretching to areas where oases existed.. Early dynastic Sumer was located in southern Mesopotamia, with its borders extending from the Persian Gulf to parts of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
Egyptians, Romans, and the Greeks were the first people known to have explicitly formulated a political philosophy of the state, and to have rationally analyzed political institutions. Prior to this, states were described and justified in terms of religious myths..
Several important political innovations of classical antiquity came from the Greek city-states (polis) and the Roman Republic. The Greek city-states before the 4th century granted citizenship rights to their free population; in Athens these rights were combined with a directly democratic form of government that was to have a long afterlife in political thought and history.
Modern states
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is considered by political scientists to be the beginning of the modern international system,..Jackson, R. H. 2005. "The Evolution of World Society" in The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, edited by P. Owens. J. Baylis and S. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 53. . in which external powers should avoid interfering in another country's domestic affairs.. The principle of non-interference in other countries' domestic affairs was laid out in the mid-18th century by Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. States became the primary institutional agents in an interstate system of relations. The Peace of Westphalia is said to have ended attempts to impose supranational authority on European states. The "Westphalian" doctrine of states as independent agents was bolstered by the rise in 19th century thought of nationalism, under which legitimate states were assumed to correspond to nations—groups of people united by language and culture.
In Europe, during the 18th century, the classic non-national states were the multinational empires: the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of France, Kingdom of Hungary,Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; ) chapter II "The popular protonationalism", pp. 80–81 French edition (Gallimard, 1992). According to Hobsbawm, the main source for this subject is Ferdinand Brunot (ed.), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, 1927–1943, 13 volumes, in particular volume IX. He also refers to Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Judith Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Révolution française et les patois: l'enquête de l'abbé Grégoire, Paris, 1975. For the problem of the transformation of a minority official language into a widespread national language during and after the French Revolution, see Renée Balibar, L'Institution du français: essai sur le co-linguisme des Carolingiens à la République, Paris, 1985 (also Le co-linguisme, PUF, Que sais-je?, 1994, but out of print) The Institution of the French language: essay on colinguism from the Carolingian to the Republic. Finally, Hobsbawm refers to Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte, Le Français national: politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution, Paris, 1974. the Russian Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire. Such empires also existed in Asia, Africa, and the Americas; in the Muslim world, immediately after the death of Muhammad in 632, Caliphates were established, which developed into multi-ethnic transnational empires. The multinational empire was an absolute monarchy ruled by a king, emperor or sultan. The population belonged to many ethnic groups, and they spoke many languages. The empire was dominated by one ethnic group, and their language was usually the language of public administration. The ruling dynasty was usually, but not always, from that group. Some of the smaller European states were not so ethnically diverse, but were also dynastic states, ruled by a royal house. A few of the smaller states survived, such as the independent principalities of Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, and the republic of San Marino.