Max Weber
“The purpose of an economic enterprise is to get goods; the purpose of a political company is to get the power”.
Compared at other institutions, like the family or the economy, the sphere or the political authority a particular place in the social life occupies. The problem remains posed to know if one must speak about the policy like specific social place, which mention the term of “sphere” or that of “authority” (used in the Marxist tradition), which result in speaking about the policy, economic or ideological (and by analogy of the monk or the legal one, without the distinction entering, for example, the religion and the monk are always operational sociologiquement). However, one can also consider it in terms of function: if the policy controls the private interests of the classes and social groups by legal provisions with universal validity, it is not localizable in a social place, even if it has privileged sites.
Historical sociology in any case invites to distinguish the policy from three other types of phenomena and institutions, which one already took into account before but which can be examined specifically in their articulation with or the policy: economy, the war and the religion.
The policy like economic enterprise
The purpose of an economic enterprise is to get goods; the purpose of a political company is to get the power. This distinction is due to Max Weber. For the German sociologist, one deals in both cases with companies, insofar as they are continuous systems of actions directed towards a goal. The term “undertaken” is close to the term “institution”, which also indicates permanence to him and returns to the concept of stability, one of the specific features of the State (as the etymology testifies some to this word). But, whereas the permanence of the economic enterprise allows the effectiveness in the production, the political company aims at getting for those which form it the power within political groupings. The economist Karl Polanyi (the Great Transformation) distinguishes two directions with the word “economy”: with the formal direction, the economy is the maximation of the effectiveness; with the material direction, it is a means of getting goods in order to satisfy with the needs. Thus, the policy as a formal activity concerns an economic analysis, but its object - power - is distinguished clearly from that of the material economy.
The analysis of the policy like economic enterprise, with the formal direction, constitutes one of the aspects of the most rigorous political science in its methods; thus can one compare the elections to a market: the political parties would dispute the voters as firms selling of the products dispute customers. In a system with two parties ideologically opposite, it is the conquest of the median voter who constitutes the most difficult task: in the same way that, for competitor trade which are addressed to customers located along the same road, there exists an ideal site for each one of them compared to the other which makes it possible to attract the maximum of customers. This model, suggested in 1929 by Hollinger, was presented more recently by many authors (Albert Hirschman and Raymond Boudon), who find in the economic analysis the concepts and the mathematical models to work out a political theory. The analogy between the market and the pluralist election becomes even more relevant if one follows the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who affirms that the purpose of the elections are, in the democratic systems, not the representation of the citizens, but selection of those which must train a staff of direction.
The policy, the shape of war
The analogy usually established between the political competition and a combat, in particular between the electoral campaigns and the operations of the armies in shift, appears even more formal than that between politics and economics: described readily in terms of strategy or tactic, the political combat does not aim however to the physical destruction of an enemy. Certain types of political ideology affirm, on the contrary, the need for transforming the policy into violent confrontation, considered then not an accident, but as the realization of the gasoline of the policy. Thus Lénine and its continuators, in particular Mao Zedong, they support the inescapable character of the civil war while referring to the analyzes of Marx according to whom antagonisms between social classes generate a larval civil war then open: the policy, which is confrontation between forces, finds its summit in the insurrection armed (Lénine) or in the conquest with the power in a prolonged war (Mao Zedong). In the same way, those (like the de Gaulle general) for which the policy is primarily a conflict between nations whose existence depends on that of the State holding a force and controlling a territory estimate that the army is in the middle of the nation and that the destiny of this one depends on it.
Violence legitimates State
The State, in the definition of Max Weber, is the institution which holds the monopoly of legitimate violence on a given territory. In another register, that of sociology, this definition joined the political theology of Luther: the State puts an end to the private wars, with violence between private individuals, on which the wars of revenge (vendetta, or feud according to the English term used by the anthropologists), and asserts, successfully, the exclusive use of the force. That does not mean that there does not exist violence which escapes control from the State, but that only it is seen recognized the right to use about it. Because the base - charismatic, traditional or legal - State induces obedience with its orders. But of other institutions or individuals (fathers, doctors) seek to be made obey.
Powers and resistances
The theoretical current represented by Michel Foucault considers that sovereignty étatico-policy concerns a broader phenomenon: it is a specific form of the power. In the modern societies, in opposition to the ancient or medieval world, the power can be characterized by five features: the power is not a substance, something which one would hold or which one would lose, but he is exerted starting from innumerable points (family, hospital) and in the set of uneven relations (between children and parents, patients and doctors); the relations of being able exist neither outside nor above the other relations (economic, to know, sexual reports); the relations of being able exist in the groups and the institutions which are at the base of the company (families, companies), and these cleavages can, in certain cases, to connect itself by constituting a massive opposition between the dominant ones and dominated, which affects all the uneven reports; the relations of being able are not subjective, but intentional in this direction which they result from programs, of complex strategies which can function like themselves; the power generates a resistance or, rather, a multiplicity of resistances, which are not the simple by-effect of the domination and whose strategic coding can make possible a revolution. This model of the power, which is connected more with the guerilla than with the traditional war, is basically different from the legitimate use of violence: the political action is an action on the action, it integrates in a calculation the action of the other, but cannot envisage it nor to reduce it completely; in this direction, the policy is not a destruction but a production. This kind of analysis could be claimed of Nietzsche, who compared the policy (of which the model would be to seek in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent) with an art, i.e. to the imposition of a form to a matter.
Crowned and power
One can support the multiplicity of the places to be able in the modern societies, but the history of the Occident was structured by conflict dualism between the Church and the State, without never the two institutions amalgamating completely, fusion which characterizes a theocracy. If the State has the legitimate monopoly of physical violence, the Church has the monopoly of the handling of the goods of crowned, which are psychic goods: the fear of the deprivation of certain spiritual goods can be an instrument of the power, Churches can collect taxes, and certain believers can think that God holds the monopoly of legitimate violence. Conversely, the concentration of the force by the political power, especially with the appearance of the atomic weapon and its apocalyptic power, can be worth a form of sacrality to him and confer a charisma to its holders.
But the mixture between political power and religious power cannot be regarded as a universal mechanism. The political anthropology of traditional India, such as it is developed by Louis Dumont, reveals that in the vision of the world of the Hindus the socially relevant hierarchy is not that which separates dominant and dominated, those which hold the power and those who are subjected to him, but that which divides the castes according to their degree of purity. The mechanisms of the power, the fight for its conquest, in this case, particular case are devalued compared to the field by spiritual (the dharma, in Sanskrit).
The relationship between the sovereigns and the gods, the kings and the priests and, more generally, the place of crowned and its definition in a company cannot thus be analyzed like universal mechanisms. It is certain that the universality of the political phenomena is an illusion if one assimilates political and official, since the State exists only in certain companies, even if it affirmed oneself everywhere in the modern world. But one must also wonder about the universality of the policy laid down in terms of being able. The power admits a series of different definitions: in terms inspired of mechanics, one can characterize it like a power struggle uneven relatively stabilized; in strategic terms, it is an action on the action. However, the massive and open competition for the power cannot be regarded as a universal method of the companies. Also political science must it be based on the political anthropology, which gives an account of the relative validity of the categories of the policy. However, even if the policy relates to truly only certain companies, to think the policy is a requirement to think modernity.