Politics

pp. 36-60

in: Alexander Astrov, On world politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

Politics is a kind of human activity. Few, if any, would seriously quarrel with this. To understand any human activity, Oakeshott once told his students, is "to discern the character of the activity itself and not merely to classify its products"; that is, to establish the place of a given activity "on the map of human activity in general" (HL 15). Here agreement is less likely, especially so once it comes to the possibility of world politics.