The right of Andrew Gamble to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2019 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2732-8

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gamble, Andrew, author.
Title: Politics : why it matters / Andrew Gamble.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018033530 (print) | LCCN 2018049573 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527328 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509527281 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509527298 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JA71 (ebook) | LCC JA71 .G252 2019 (print) | DDC 320--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033530

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Preface

This book is a product of many years of thinking about politics, studying politics, teaching politics, and experiencing politics. Every generation is shaped by its political experiences and its political memories. One of my earliest political memories was in 1956 when Britain and France invaded Egypt to take back control of the Suez Canal. I had little understanding of what was happening, but it stuck in my memory principally because my father was angry enough to cancel his subscription to the Observer, so strongly did he disagree with their criticisms of the Government’s actions. Politics obviously mattered. My formative experiences continued with the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Profumo scandal and Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and Labour’s election victory in 1964, promising a New Britain, with the improbable slogan, ‘Let’s go with Labour and we’ll get things done.’ At university between 1965 and 1968 I was swept up in the excitement of the political and cultural earthquakes of those years. One of the slogans which appeared on the walls in Paris in May 1968 captured our mood: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ These experiences gave me my first involvement with politics and why it mattered. I began to study it in earnest and soon found there was a vast and fascinating hinterland of ideas and histories and arguments to explore, and that politics was a lot more complex than I had ever imagined. In writing this book, I have drawn in particular on two of my earlier publications: Politics and Fate (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) and The Limits of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), which was my inaugural lecture at Cambridge.

I would like to thank my editors at Polity, Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos, first for suggesting this project to me and then for giving such excellent support through the process of writing and submission, and also Justin Dyer for very thorough and helpful copy-editing, which has greatly improved the flow of the argument. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and especially Adam Roble for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft. This book is dedicated to Mick Moran, whose sudden death in April 2018 robbed us of one of the best political scientists of his generation, someone who understood better than any of us why politics mattered and wrote many fine books explaining why it did. Consider this passage, read out at his funeral, which comes from his classic text Politics and Governance in the UK:

Why study politics? Indeed why be concerned with political life at all? For most citizens … the answers to these questions are pretty obvious: there are no good reasons either to study politics or to take an active part in political life…. But if politics is a minority interest, even in a democracy, it is nevertheless a matter of the utmost importance – in a quite literal sense, a matter of life and death…. Politics is about trying to choose between competing views and interests … the failure to make these choices by peaceful means, and to carry them out effectively and peacefully has catastrophic results. Consider, for instance, the life of people unfortunate enough to live in poverty-stricken countries of Africa, like the Democratic Republic of Congo. What single thing would transform their life: a great medical advance, a great advance in biotechnology which would make farming more productive? Neither of these things; their lives would be transformed for the better by peace and the creation of a stable system of government, because since the then Belgian Congo achieved independence nearly sixty years ago it has been racked by civil wars. Understanding politics, if we want to make the world a better place for our fellow human beings, is more urgent even than understanding medicine, biology or physics. Politics shapes every detail of our lives, from the most dramatic to the most mundane.¹

This book is also for my six grandchildren, Joni, Nye, Louis, George, Ceinwen, and Ivy, who are at present blissfully unaware of politics and why it matters but one day will understand.

Andrew Gamble
Sheffield
August 2018

Introduction

Politics today has a poor reputation. This has not always been so. There have been times and cultures when it was considered one of the most noble, most elevating, and most necessary human activities. Aristotle thought that participating in the life of the polis, being an active citizen, speaking and acting in the public arena, were the highest goods to which human beings could aspire. It was how they showed what they were capable of. Cicero agreed. For him the highest human virtue lay in the possession and employment of knowledge in practical affairs.

The Greek polis (from which our word ‘politics’ derives) and the Roman republic (respublica means literally public affairs) were ideals which have been revived at various times in western politics, notably by the Founding Fathers of the United States in their vision of a virtuous republic and also by the leaders of the French Revolution with their famous slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. Different versions of it appear in other cultural traditions, such as the Mandarin scholar-bureaucrats of China. The positive case for politics recognizes that ruling requires great skill and wisdom and that good government makes possible all the other things which human beings value. Creating and sustaining a civil and political order which maintains civility by keeping conflict between its citizens within limits and guarantees certain liberties is a remarkable achievement whenever and wherever it occurs. We often fail to appreciate what a prize it is.

Some of this still lingers in ideals of public service and public virtue, but it has had to contend with another tradition which focuses not on the prize, a civil and political order which keeps the peace, but on the process of politics. Allowing a degree of conflict between citizens makes politics noisy and messy. It is easy to see no more in politics than the self-interested pursuit of power, which makes politics as an activity seem disreputable, oppressive, and corrupt, something to be avoided and if possible suppressed. From this perspective, politics is regarded as consisting of knavery, double-dealing, and trickery, and little else. The British national anthem, ‘God Save the King’, written and composed in the eighteenth century, has a revealing second verse which is not sung very often nowadays. It confidently denounces the seditious Scots: ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks.’ Politics and knavish tricks go together in most people’s minds.

In the Republican party primaries in the United States in 2016, the ferocity with which candidates ostensibly from the same party sought to abuse and destroy one another confirmed a widely held view of politics. The pursuit of power and the unscrupulous means politicians will often embrace to win has always been part of the allure of politics to those who participate in the great game and helps explain the mixture of fascination and distaste towards politics in those who do not.

The distaste is real but so too is the fascination. Politics is an endless drama of character and circumstance, and this is what drives news agendas all over the world. People regularly say they are bored with politics and not interested in it, yet the news media are filled with little else. How do we explain this? In part it is because there are different kinds of politics.

The kind of politics most of the news media are concerned with has much less interest in the details and complexities of public policy than in the personalities, the scandals, the power struggles, the fiascos, the rise and fall of particular individuals. They concentrate on the trivia of politics, which they weave into compelling narratives and morality tales which focus disproportionately on the negative side of politics, leaving many citizens feeling that no-one can be trusted, no-one is competent, no-one is honest or public-spirited. Everyone is out for what they can get. As Groucho Marx put it in his satirical take on politicians: ‘These are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.’ Contemporary satirists have not been slow to spot the frequent absurdity of modern politics arising from the frenzy and paranoia which often surrounds it. One of the most popular UK television series of recent years, The Thick of It, portrays the modern political world as dominated by short-term crises brought about by the competitive pressure to secure favourable headlines to the exclusion of almost everything else.

If this was all there was to politics, there would not be much to understand and few would take the trouble to do so, still less to devote their lives to studying it and writing about it. Most people, even as they disparage politics and politicians, have a deeper intuition that there is more to politics than the occasionally bizarre and self-seeking behaviour of some politicians. This is one reason why politics deserves our attention. Politics is everywhere. It underpins the lives we lead. With all its shortcomings, it is only through politics, and different kinds of politics, that some of the pressing problems we face can be addressed.

This book is aimed at showing why that is so, and why the study of politics can be so enthralling and absorbing, as well as so important to how we live and to the future prospects of the varied societies and cultures human beings have created. To study politics you need to have hope in the potential of human beings and human societies and what they have accomplished and are capable of accomplishing, but also a sceptical awareness of the limits of human knowledge and human capacities, the frailty of human societies and of individual human beings, both their darker and their absurd sides. As Napoleon once remarked, and he had some experience in the matter, ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is only one step.’ Some politicians never rise above the ridiculous, and for those who reach the sublime the experience is fleeting. For the Japanese Samurai it lasted no longer than the cherry blossom in springtime. Shelley’s poem on Ozymandias notes the transience of the power of even the most dominant and despotic rulers.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, …
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

There are many contemporary despotic authoritarian rulers like Ozymandias. Some of them come to violent ends; others die peacefully in their beds. In the rough exchanges of democratic politics, democratic politicians are often compared to despots and authoritarian rulers. But we should always remember the difference.

Why It Matters