The Acropolis of Athens
The Greek word polished gave the political word. In ancient Greece, the “politai” were the actors of the political life.
Political bond and social link Plato, in the two dialogs where he is concerned with gasoline of the policy, the Republic and the Policy, presents a design of the policy where the city right is an organized totality, subjected to the authority of a philosophical king, holder of the power because he is holder of the knowledge.
But Aristote reproaches this theory too much for privileging the unit of the city and for forgetting that it must be a multiplicity, in the same way which is needed several notes, and not only one, to write music.
Always current debate, since, for example, Bertrand Russell as well as Karl Popper believed to find in the company of castes imagined by Plato a prototype of the Soviet Russia. In the case of Plato and of the totalitarian projects, one sees that there can be the will of an absolute superposition between the political organization and that of the company: it is an invitation to be wondered about the articulation between social link and political bond.
To be able and policy
If Greece gave a good portion of the Western political vocabulary, it did not involve a total semantic homogenization of the various languages. Thus a French distinction absent is it presents in English: policy refers to the control of an action, while politics returns to the competition for the power of State. It makes it possible to avoid a confusion between the policy like organized action, where certain means are mobilized to achieve a strategic goal (in this direction, one will be able to speak about the marketing policy of a firm or the school policy of a government), and the policy like competition for the power and its exercise. In other words, one must distinguish the policy from economic and also from other social authorities. As the term of “policy” can it be held with the action organized to exert the power of State, or can one think as the power exists independently of specialized institutions, and that thus one would find if not of the specific political organizations at least forms of the power in the companies without State. In a case, one is likely to reduce the policy to a phenomenon related to a determined cultural surface, in the other to give to the concept a too vague character.
The absence of consensus on the nature of the power or the definition of the State is not simply the effect of the difficulty of seizing the phenomena, it reveals also conflict political attitudes. To consider that the policy is the implementation of violence organized to avoid that the men did not entredéchirent themselves, it is to affirm that the State constitutes a possible condition of the human existence; to see in him a higher emanation of the community life, it is to ensure social preeminence in fact and right on the policy. In the first case, the policy seems a less evil; in the second, like a good. One can support however that it is an evil, and not only because following the example of all the social services it is the place of negative passions, the ground of corruptions, but because it would pervert the human values.