By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
What justifies using "politics" (and its cognates) in the broad sense in which I commonly use it?
Niebuhr evidently addresses a similar question when he says, "all subordination of life to leadership in the various activities of the community is in a sense government,' though pluralistic and democratic communities have understood how to create independent centers of authority without relating them to state authority (Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: 108).
The justification, then, for using "politics" in my broad sense is that the term "government," with which "politics" always has to do, is itself properly used in a correspondingly broad sense -- to mean, as Niebuhr puts it, the subordination of life to leadership in any of the various activities of the community. Thus, far from being simply synonymous with "the state/ government" also has the broad sense that justifies using "politics" as I often use it.
12 August 2003
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