Reconsidering the Political: Concept, History, and Applications

Application summary

This three-year project aims at a novel, refined conceptualization of “the political” and of being “political” (adjective) – a conceptualization that is both theoretically sensitive and easily implementable in real-world social research. What, exactly, makes things political? What qualities and substantial propositions do various theories of “the political” share and what types of concepts of the political emerge out of them in comparative and functional reading? How does politicality manifest in the study of political thought, political violence, or political art? What kind of a concept of politicality would empirical research on these fields require? In a nutshell, this project aims at a better concept of being political with respect to the criteria for good social science concepts, such as being coherent, parsimonious, and sufficiently differentiated toward other concepts. The engine of the project is the theory of “the political” – a specific strand identifiable in Anglophone political theory since the 1980s, but one with deeper roots in the German and French traditions. The project’s core conceptualizing work is in political theory, and methodologically it employs the approaches of (Sartorian) conceptual analysis, conceptual history, and metaphorology. However, the project critically elaborates its contributions in bidirectional interaction with three adjacent fields: the history of political thought, the study of political art, and the study of political violence. Rather than dictating conceptual qualifications from the outside, the project seeks to implement them in a sensitive manner, first identifying the conceptual needs in target areas by systematic literature review, functional conceptual analysis, and scholarly consultation. The project produces a series of articles of highest international standards and its findings are applicable in any field where being political plays a role.