Politics and the Concept of the Political

Reviews / Votes

ESSENTIAL by Choice

This book is an ambitious attempt to correct political theory that aims to "overcome" politics by subordinating it to something else, like moral theory. Instead, Wiley suggests that the accounts of "the political" offered by a number of theorists, including Weber, Wolin, and Mouffe, show how to articulate a "politics-centered" political theory. These theorists together present multiple conceptions of "the political" based in either the state, the polis, or society, and each account allows for a non-subordinate relationship between politics and ethics or philosophy. (Wiley identifies these relationships as "asymmetrical," but does not get much mileage out of the term.) By "putting politics back in" to political theory, Wiley generates a number of wide-ranging practical implications, from countering International Relations theorists' myopic focus on the state to cataloging 19th-century populism's move from an economic to a political perspective on the economy. Theorists and political scientists alike may quibble with these kind of arguments in the book-and there are many of them-but overall, Wiley presents an important model of how to connect political theory to the rest of the discipline. Put another way, the book may not have much to offer social scientists uninterested in high-level theorizing, but is essential reading for political theorists. - Summing Up: Essential. Graduate Students and Faculty' - R. J. Meagher, Randolph-Macon College, CHOICE

'This book establishes a much-needed line of communication between broadly postmodern theories of politics and the new political realism.' - Enzo Rossi, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands