Publics and Polis, Global

Conceptual Roots

The ancient Greek polis shaped the very idea of politics. In its earliest use, politics meant the common affairs of the polis, a small state with its center in a single city. It meant the participation of [Page 1419]citizens in shaping shared institutions and decisions. The polis was thus contrasted to a kingdom or an empire in which power was not shared among the citizens. This core meaning of politics as collective participation in shaping a way of life was renewed in Renaissance political thought. Throughout the modern era, it has been basic to struggles against hereditary monarchy and imperial domination, and efforts to create institutions in which citizens would participate and which would serve the public good.

Over centuries, the word politics has taken on a much more general meaning. People use it today to refer to every manner of struggle over power in the world. There is politics of interpersonal relations, politics inside bureaucracies, politics of cynical manipulation of public opinion by self-interested leaders, politics of state power often backed by military force, and politics of interstate relations through the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. Understanding global society does indeed depend on analyzing all these sorts of power relations and others such as economic or cultural power. But attending to the more specific idea of the polis helps us make an important distinction.

In one sense, politics may refer to power in all its forms, but in another, it refers to citizenship and public life. These are the crucial ingredients of a republic, a state governed by participation and care for “public things” or the “commonwealth.” Such public goods can be mundane and material, like the streets of a city, its waterworks, or its capacity to dispose of waste. But public goods might also be less material, like the advantages of living in an aesthetically pleasing city, a relatively egalitarian society, or one with open and lively communications media. At a global level, a healthy environment is a key public good today. Many of these fit the economic definition of public goods, those that cannot be enjoyed without being shared and that in Paul Samuelson's phrase are “non-rivalrous—not diminished by being shared.” But the commonwealth also presents a broader orientation to the public good as a purpose or standard of evaluation distinct from both the private goods of citizens and the personal good of a ruler. It thus includes not only infrastructure and public finances but also the institutions that enabled citizens to rise above mere response to necessity and create a way of life that was intrinsically good.

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