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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

> Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others.

I believed that it was quite clear from context what I meant by "politics." It should be obvious that I was not talking about all forms of social organization, as in "office politics." I don't believe it's reasonable to believe I meant that all social interaction should be avoided, but when several people claimed to take this interpretation, I was very clear about the definitions I was using.

> By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities.

Yes, that is correct. This is also, to my knowledge, the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."

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Actually, I think I understand what the root issue of this semantic disparity may be. Some dictionary definitions of politics relegate it to government / state organization.

Others, particularly political scientists, view it as the universal process of resolving power interrelationships among individuals.

To an anarcho-capitalist, most (all?) individual interactions that involve transfer of power are voluntary market exchanges. That implies a social structure that is non-political in the sense that no state need be involved in society. But to a political scientist it is just one of many potential political systems to be debated and evaluated, with its own power structures, etc.

Communists didn't feel their preferred system was political either but rather a scientific inevitability. This is often why some half-joke that Libertarianism is the Marxism of the rich...

As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.

> As I understand it, the field of political science deals almost exclusively with the state. The fact that political scientists can often provide useful insights to other organizations like companies is obvious, but I would call that an inevitable extension of the field rather than a primary concern.

Corporations are exercises of state power, as well as being structurally somewhat similar to "ministates", so I wouldn't exactly see insight from political science (if viewed as being "the study of the state") into corporations as outside of the primary concern.

There is a significant branch of study in political science (often overlapping with economics, history, and philosophy) called political theory or philosophy that is not specific to the study of the state. It is this area where academics inquire into political first principles that don't necessarily presume a state.

John Rawls and Robert Nozick's works, or Edmund Burke, and MIchael Oakeshott fall into this area of inquiry, along with some of the works of Peter Drucker, Murray Rothbard, Fredric Bastiat, etc.

Yes, I have mentioned this before in this thread. Of course the ideas of refraining from political action are relevant to the field that studies political workings, in the same way that atheism and other forms of religious skepticism are relevant to religious studies.

We are going in circles. There is a big difference between rejecting the definition of a word and rejecting an entire field of inquiry.

Rawls works are largely about the ends of the state rather than the means by which states achieve those ends.

What do you mean, joke? That's what's actually going on. Proprietarianism is Marxism seen from the side of the bourgeoisie.

I attempting to be polite.

> the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."

From my limited reading about the topic, that is not the case. According to wikipedia, politics is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level[1]. I have taken just one, very 101 like course on Governance and the most prominent theories that were discussed used politics in the broader sense (but detailed from a narrower perspective due to the scope of the class). Group theory[2], for instance, calls nearly all interactions between interest groups as political. Elite Theory [3], also used similar connotations.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_theory)
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
  [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory

I previously skimmed the Wikipedia article on politics, and it does mention companies once and "individual level" once. And yet, everything else I can find in the article assumes that the state is the topic of discussion.

The same goes for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science. I also did a quick Google search for political science curriculums, and everything seems to deal with governments.

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