1 - Making the political
from Part I - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
How can our shared, humanly created environment be effectively transformed – to make it better, less confining, more tractable to our control? Is it even possible to change, in a spontaneous and noncoerced way, the social and political world we inhabit? If we are unwilling to accept coercive impositions by the state or the powers that be, it seems that only public or collective action has such a capacity. After all, when we as individuals act for social change, we usually do so within the parameters of an already existing set of institutional arrangements, histories, and social understandings, created and animated largely through the work of others. Innovation is an extension of these socially constituted practices, whose contradictions, gaps, or inadequacies engender change yet persist in constraining it. Hanna Pitkin echoes the beliefs of many when she notes that “for most of us … private, isolated acts will make little difference” for public life unless taken in concert with others. Such intuitions find their most prominent institutionalization in democratic regimes, which for both normative and practical reasons facilitate collective as opposed to bureaucratic, dictatorial, or unilateral action. Participatory acts in public arenas – such as voting, collective protest, the exercise of and respect for free expression – coordinate a plurality of individual actions and authorize collective interventions in shared space.
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- Making the PoliticalFounding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao, pp. 3 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010