What is politics today? What is its relationship to the tradition from which it emerges? The questions are difficult ones to answer in part because contemporary politics seems so schizophrenic. In affluent Western countries politics is increasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and managed economies on the other. Hannah Arendt seems quite confirmed in her claim that the once-glorious public realm of appearance is fundamen-tally degraded when it is overrun by concerns more appropriate to the private realm, such as household management and gossip. If this" unnatural growth of the natural"[47] inclines us to nostalgia for a time when the two realms were more decisively sepa-rated, such nostalgia is likely intensified by the" ethnic cleansing," rape camps, and genocide that we now associate with names such as" Yugoslavia" and" Rwanda." But as improbable as any flight to the past may be, it is even less likely that the politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological society. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the attempted genocides of our time are only made possible by quite modem forms of technology, organization, and experience,'but also recent scientific and" medical" advances. Consider just two: first, the corporate driven and controlled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to genetic" information" such as" all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of [any] newborn child." If there is any doubt that such developments will lead us to redefine the human being, these may be laid to rest by the case of John Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation [Rifkin 60-61]. So much for Locke's attempt to ground the institution of private property in the fact that" every Man has a Property in his own Person"! 2 In its place we seem to be moving