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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7511137" data-attributes="member: 4937">Given the breadth that you've ascribed to politics, this is hardly surprising.  You'd be harder pressed to define what isn't politics.  Since you've used politics to mean everything, including its opposite, you're at a tautology.  By politics you mean, everything, which is why 5a is closest to what you believe: "the total complex of relations between people living in society", despite the fact that the very fact that '5a' suggests its a marginal and uncommon definition and not what most people mean by the term.My favorite dictionary of all is still Webster's 1828, which defines politics thusly: "POL'ITICS, noun The science of government; that part of ethics which consists in the regulation and government of a nation or state, for the preservation of its safety, peace and prosperity; comprehending the defense of its existence and rights against foreign control or conquest, the augmentation of its strength and resources, and the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals. politics as a science or an art, is a subject of vast extent and importance."I would argue that the fundamental problem you have is that there is a sphere of thought which has arisen to prominence since 1828 which believes that politics is not merely a part of ethics, but the whole of it.  When you use the word politics, you don't actually mean any of the definitions that (yet) appear in the dictionary.  When you mean 'politics', you mean not merely a sphere of ethics, but the whole of ethics and normative ethics in particular.  Unfortunately from my perspective, this puts you not only at odds with the dictionary as I read it, or the word as I use it, but with the very basis of liberal government and liberality.  It's not that I disagree with you, or Webster, that politics is a subject of vast importance and scope, but that I disagree that the whole of human behavior is the proper business of the Polity.  But as you know, we disagree sharply over the importance of the individual relative to the group, of the private relative to the public, and of the meaning therefore of words like 'identity'.... and well, 'politics'.</blockquote>

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