Politics, Government and the State 57
human nature, emphasizing that, far from being Aristotle’s ‘political
animals’, most people are security-seeking, cautious and dependent
creatures. From this perspective, the inner core of human existence is a
‘private’ world of family, home, domesticity and personal relationships.
Oakeshott therefore regarded the rough-and-tumble of political life as
inhospitable, even intimidating.
From a liberal viewpoint, the maintenance of the ‘public/private’
distinction is vital to the preservation of individual liberty, typically
understood as a form of privacy or non-interference. If politics is regarded
as an essentially ‘public’ activity, centred upon the state, it will always have
a coercive character: the state has the power to compel the obedience of its
citizens. On the other hand, ‘private’ life is a realm of choice, freedom and
individual responsibility. Liberals therefore have a clear preference for
society rather than the state, for the ‘private’ rather than the ‘public’, and
have thus feared the encroachment of politics upon the rights and liberties
of the individual. Such a view is commonly expressed in the demand that
politics be ‘kept out of’ private activities or institutions, matters that can,
and should, be left to individuals themselves. For example, the call that
politics be ‘kept out of’ sport implies that sport is an entirely ‘private’
affair over which the state and other ‘public’ bodies exercise no rightful
responsibility. Indeed, such arguments invariably portray ‘politics’ in a
particularly unfavourable light. In this case, for example, politics represents
unwanted and unwarranted interference in an arena supposedly
characterized by fair competition, personal development and the pursuit
of excellence.
Not all political thinkers, however, have had such a clear preference for
society over the state, or wished so dearly to keep politics at bay. There is,
for instance, a tradition which portrays politics favourably precisely
because it is a ‘public’ activity. Dating back to Aristotle, this tradition
has been kept alive in the twentieth century by writers such as Hannah
Arendt (see p. 58). In her major philosophical work The Human Condition
(1958) Arendt placed ‘action’ above both ‘labour’ and ‘work’ in what she
saw as a hierarchy of worldly activities. She argued that politics is the most
important form of human activity because it involves interaction among
free and equal citizens, and so both gives meaning to life and affirms the
uniqueness of each individual. Advocates of participatory democracy have
also portrayed politics as a moral, healthy and even noble activity. In the
view of the eighteenth-century French thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see
p. 242), political participation was the very stuff of freedom itself. Only
through the direct and continuous participation of all citizens in political
life can the state be bound to the common good, or what Rousseau called
the ‘general will’. John Stuart Mill (see p. 256) took up the cause of
political participation in the nineteenth century, arguing that involvement