What is the people? A key concept of politics, little understood

An important British political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), argued that “at all times politics is an unpleasant sight”. When it comes to politics, it is difficult to associate it with common sense, responsibility, reason, balanced judgment. On the contrary, it – meaning not a vague non-existent actor called “politics”, but the actors who take part in it, according to more or less established rules and dynamics – is often stained by excesses, moralism, disguised piety, corruption . Politics, then, can only live on simplifications and reductionisms. Even – or above all – at the cost of clarity and a sense of reality. The cardinal subject of a democratic order (but not only), the people, does not escape these dynamics. A concept that ignites souls and inflames passions, that of the people. And, precisely for this reason, it needs a cold historical-terminological survey. That’s what Loris Zanatta tries to do in People (Liberilibri, 76 pp., 14 euros). The volume is part of the new “Voltairiana” series of the Macerata publishing house, created with the intention of proposing agile reinterpretations of the key concepts of the public debate to clean up the contours of the many ideological distortions.