Politics is Adjustment to Political Violence

Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker

2015-09-26

“Yet if the concept of ‘politics’ is to be explanatory it should show how power gets dispersed and rebalanced among contending groups. Politics is how people adjust to one another’s needs and potential for violence. In the circumstance where one party has all the power, though, the invocation of politics seems unhelpful. The politics of a slaughterhouse is not really politics, at least not to the pigs; it is just a division of the labor.”


Previous Entry Next Entry

« The Power of Knightmares Why We Keep Studying the Holocaust »