2
Political, Derrida and the Political, Foucault and the Political, and so on. In contrast to
the authors thus treated, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Rawls, and often the tradition of
western political thought as a whole are criticized for lacking a sense of the political:
erstwhile political theories are either dismissed outright or else are absorbed as moral or
economic theory, the great failure of which is variously said to be an inability to grasp the
nature of human freedom, identity, or community. Such arguments are so common that it
is not too much to say that a great deal of contemporary political theory, particularly that
directly or indirectly inspired by Heidegger, cannot really be understood without some
grasp of the logic and strategic uses of the notion of the political.
That it is even helpful to speak here of a particular approach to political theory
may, however, already seem to be a bit of a stretch. Surely such disparate figures as
those I have mentioned have little more than a few verbal ticks in common, among them
as it happens a preference for the weighty phrase the political? It is helpful in
considering such doubts to attend to the connotations of what might well seem like mere
modish semantics. Obviously, these will differ depending on the language in which one
writes, but the general effect is to heighten the level of abstraction. This is particularly
true in English, where the political replaces the more common noun, politics. While
politics is plural in form, the political is singular. The former can refer to a wide variety
of things: various policies, modes of governance, relations between citizens, conflicts of
interests, legitimate exercises of (the threat of) violence, guarantees of rights that are
exercised by parties that are not themselves political, and so on. The latter has a singular
referent--a fact that may indicate an unnecessary oversimplification of a variegated field.
views or even a considered plan on her part [see the comments quoted by Ursula Ludz in Arendt, Was ist
Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ursula Ludz (München: Piper, 2003), 213, n. 12].
Convention