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The Locus of Politics Political theory has traditionally directed its attention exclusively to ‘the state,’ that is, to the (1) officially constituted government and institutions of (2) the whole society, as a united, self-governing collectivity. Classical theory was more flexible in this regard, and broader in its approach to the political, but modern theory has made the state its central problem and its primary solution. The consensus is so pervading that it is possible to treat it as part of a Kuhnian paradigm .1 Kuhn (1970) of course denied paradigm status even to social sciences, so there is necessary caution in applying it to a field of normative inquiry like political theory; yet paradigm is now widely used to describe the way in which ideas tend to cohere into systems that define the ‘reality’ of those who use them, and to shut out facts that are conceptually inappropriate to that reality. Whether one calls it social construction, higher-order discourse, epistème, or perspectivism, there is widespread, although certainly not universal, agreement that theories are parametrically constrained by the larger conceptual structures within which they are located (compare variously Berger and Luckmann 1967, Foucault 1970, Gunnell 1998, Nehamas 1985).2 What liberal political theory rigorously ignores is a section of the political spectrum I designate as political society. Political society is found in that wide band of political behavior that lies below the state and its supporting institutions and associations (including civil society), and reaches directly down into what is called private life.3 Political society is where individual persons, members of the different social categories and groups that make up the social fabric, engage in competitive interaction over the distribution of social values to Chapter Two Political Society A Blind Spot in the Liberal Field of Vision 41 themselves and to each other. This sort of one-on-one interaction is not official , not acknowledged, sometimes not even noticed because it seems part of the ‘natural’ world, into which the members of a society are all schooled by the traditions within which they have lived their lives. But even if it is not official, this behavior is deeply political in the classic Easton sense (1953) that it allocates values for a society and does it authoritatively.4 A woman or a man does not have to be told that a law bars them from a particular job, from a particular neighborhood, from a school, or a sports team; it is sufficient for them to know that if they try to participate, they will be harassed or made unwelcome. That the wrong is unofficial, even illegal, does not make it the less powerful, less authoritative . I do not mean, of course, to suggest that liberals have not noticed this kind of behavior; indeed it is exactly the kind of behavior against which they struggle. But their theory is severely hampered because they do not bring concrete political society into their axiomatic base, do not see it in its full colors . Their theories are therefore structurally weakened.5 Such a claim will raise sharp protest. Has not Rorty (1989) argued that cruelty is the basic political sin? Does not Gutmann (1980) argue that only system-wide equality can counter such asymmetrical political realities? Does not Young (1990) make domination and injustice the entire focus of her analysis of contemporary political relationships? Is there not a new interest in injustice (White 1991) among political theorists, replacing what many feel to be the artificialities of contractually established constitutional systems (Rawls 1971)? All this is of course true, but it is necessary to remind ourselves that, for instance , Rorty moves from the perception of cruelty to an affirmation of existing Western democracies as the best solutions to the human condition, drawing upon himself charges that he thinks this the best of all possible worlds. In other cases, the failure to engage fully with political society leads to unrealistic proposed solutions, such as proposals for equality, which can pretty easily be shown, in the American context, to be unnecessary and unrealistic (Kane 1996). Other theorists who accept the abstract existence of injustice may nonetheless advocate, apparently to those very persons who are dominating and exploiting others, that they turn to an ethic of caring for those other persons. This seems to confuse the reprobates with the choir, and overlooks the fact that overprivileged people are predisposed against the sermon and are not, in any event, listening...

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