1876. "Politics" in the broad sense . . .

SCANNED PDF. 

"Politics" in the broad sense, I like to say, is the process or activity of securing justice not only in the state and government but also throughout the whole social and cultural order-and this by creating, maintaining, or transforming the basic structures of such order so that each person is equally free with every other to be the active subject of her or his own self-creation, instead of being merely the passive object of the self-creations of others (cf. The Point of Christology: 95, 160). A curious implication of this broad definition is that politics itself, in the more common, narrow sense having to do with the process or activity of governing through the state, turns out to have a "political" aspect in the broad meaning of the term. 

Beer, for one, recognizes this in a way by distinguishing two aspects of "sovereignty," and, specifically, "popular sovereignty": (1) its "constituent" aspect, where the people are the common source of the authority, and thus of the constitution, of all government; and (2) its "governmental" aspect, where the people are the common control of the governing activities of government and the officials thereof under its constitution (To Make a Nation: 14, 397). Given Beer's distinction, I could put my point in defining "politics" broadly by saying that it is intended to call attention to the "constituent" sovereignty of human beings in a correspondingly broad sense of the term, as having to do with authorizing and constituting not only state and government but social and cultural order generally. 

20 December 2003