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What Is Politics?

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What Is Politics? What is Politics? Note: This collection of definitions and quotations is drawn from the Columbia Encyclopedia and other reference works available on-line at www.bartlebys.com. Interspersed are printed selections from H.L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations. It was prepared for students taking PS101 What is Politics?, the introductory course to the Political Science major at Colorado College, and is available tree of charge to all majors. David Hendrickson, Chair of Department Table of Contents What is Politics? Social Contract Peace Liberalism Church and State War and Peace Conservatism Sovereignty Morality Socialism Revolution Justice Quotations on the preceding Power Government Fascism Constitution, Principles of Government Truth Historian Totalitarianism Political Science Knowledge Communism Natural Rights Quotations on the preceding Natural Law Law Capitalism International Law Mercantilism Federal Government Feudalism Imperialism Enlightenment International Relations Nationalism Balance of Power Democracy What is Politics? Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service. ATT'RIBUTION: Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), U.S. president. Have Faith in Massachusetts, ch. 12, Houghton, Mifflin (1919). Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. ATTRIBUTION: Mao Zedong (1893-1976), Chinese founder of the People's Republic of China. Lecture, May 1938. "On Protracted War," Selected Works, vol. 2 (1965). Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. ATTRIBUTION: John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), U.S. economist. Letter, March 2,1962, to President Kennedy. Ambassador's Journal (1969). Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin. ATTRIBUTION: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), Russian revolutionary leader. Report to Seventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party, March 7,1918 (1920), published in Selected Works, vol. 7 (1937). The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy. ATTRIBUTION: Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century), U.S. editor, writer. Family and Politics, ch. 1 (1983). Politics is still the man's game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then but only occasionally one is present at some secret conference or other. But it's not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being pcrmittcd to work. But that is all. ATTRIBUTION: Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), U.S. novelist. My Story, ch. 48 (1931). Politics has been called the "art of the possible," and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality. ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German author, critic. first complete publication as Deutschland und die Deutschen in "Die Neue Rundschau," Stockholm, Heft 1, Oct. 1945. Germany and the Germans, p. 58, trans. by Helen T. Lowe Porter, Library of Congress (1963). Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions. ATTRIBUTION: George F. Will (b. 1941), U.S. political columnist. Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, ch. 2 (1984). Politics is just like show business, you have a hell of an opening, coast for a while and then have a hell of a close. ATTRIBUTION: Ronald Reagan (b. 1911), U.S. Republican politician, president. quoted in There He Goes Again, eds. Mark Green and Gail MacColl (1983). Said in 1966 to aide Stuart Spencer. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. ATTRIBUTION: Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hungarian-born British author. Extract from Rubashov's diary, in "The Second Hearing," ch. 1, Darkness at Noon (1940). Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.. ATTRIBUTION: Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), U.S. historian. The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 1 (1907). Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. ATTIRIBUTION: Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), U.S. general, Republican politician, president. Broadcast speech, January 28, 1954. Politics inflame the passions in a way that few beloveds can match. ATTRIBUTION: Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist City Aphorisms, Fourteenth Selection, New York (1994). Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong. ATTRIBUTION: Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French novelist, dramatist, philosopher, political activist. Methuen (1963). Dirty Hands, act 5, sc. 2, Gallimard (1948). Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. ATTRIBUTION: Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian communications theorist. Quoted in Maclean's (Toronto, June 1971). The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation…. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice. ATTRIBUTION: W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907-1973), AngloAmerican poet. "Tyranny," A Certain World (1970). In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly. ATTRIBUTION: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), British poet, critic. repro In Collected Works, vol. 14, ed. Kathleen Coburn (1990). Table Talk, "5 Oct 1830," Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (1835). Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a "revolutionary" review, or read a "revolutionary" speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correcty, monotonously, dishearteningly "revolutionary." What a stupid word! What a stale fuss! ATTRIBUTION: Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), British author, painter. "Revolution and Progress," ch. 5, The Art of Being Ruled (1926). In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons. ATIRIBUTION: Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), U.S. author, critic. "Solutions," Vietnam (1967). Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off. ATTRIBUTION: Chris Patten (b. 1944), British Conservative politician. Independent (London, April 19, 1989). Patten was secretary of state for the environment at the time. In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. ATTRIBUTION: Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), U.S. statesman. The Federalist, no. 1 (1787-1788). Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content. ATTRIBUTION: Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Fifth Selection, New York (1988). In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want. ATTRIBUTION: Cecil Parkinson (b. 1932), British Conservative politician. Televised interview, November 19, 1990, ITV. The politics of the exile are fever, revenge, daydream, theater of the aging convalescent. You wait in the wings and rehearse. You wait and wait. ATTRIBUTION: Marge Piercy (b. 1936), U.S. poet, novelist, and political activist. "The Organizer's Bogeyman," lines 20-24 (1969). Written during the Vietnam War, on expulsion from an activist organization governed by radical political ideology. Piercy was prominent among the opponents of American involvement in that war. In politics, victory is never total. ATTRIBUTION: Donald Freed, U.S. screenwriter, and Arnold M Stone. Robert Altman. Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), Secret Honor (1984). Fictional play based on Richard Nixon. In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman. ATTRIBUTION: Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), British Conservative politician, prime minister. People (New York, Sept. 15, 1975). In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably. ATTRIBUTION: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist. Conversation with Friedrich von Miller (December 29, 1825). If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics. ATTRIBUTION: Edna Ferber (1887-1968), U.S. author. Sabra Cravat, in Cimarron, ch. 23 (1929). Groucho Marx QUOTATION: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. ATTRIBUTION: Recalled on his death 19 Aug 77 Theodore H White QUOTATION: Politics in America is the binding secular religion. ATIRIBUTION: Time 29 Dec 86 Jimmy Breslin QUOTATION: Politics, where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage. A ATTRIBUTION: Table Money Ticknor & Fields 86 Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
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