Arendt’s quote on politics and plurality is one of my key intellectual landmarks:

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

Having immersed myself in Actor-Network Theory for the last several years Arendt’s characterization of action as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” seems a little quaintly 20th Century — but her assertion that “plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life” changed my vision of politics, and few days pass without my recalling this quote.

Prior to this understanding, I saw politics as an essentially coercive activity, done by one gang of people to another (that is, to me).

But this ignores the fact that gangs must cultivate relationships before they can become gangs, and even more importantly, it misses the crucial insight that operating as a gangs is only one possibility of alliance, and thankfully not necessarily the most common one. Certainly alliances can be a means to coercive action, but alliances can also be a end in itself, and if you think about it, one of the most fully satisfactory ends a person can accomplish. It could even be argued that goal of coercive force might actually be a means to an us-versus-them feeling of alliance, which could help explain the strange euphoria so many people feel in the face of an enemy.

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To put it in terms of a professional dichotomy I’ve been entertaining/obsessing over, the idea of politics as essentially pluralistic changes the nature of a political problem from what is conceived as an engineering problem (active agents working on a “hard” system of passive/unfree parts) to a design problem (active agents working on or within a “soft” system composed at least in part of active/free participants).

If you see politics as social engineering, obviously you’ll want as little of it as possible. You’d be crazy not to. Social engineering is a horror (whether the social system is a governed public or a privately managed company) because it requires people to play set roles in a system and minimizes variance among parts for the same reason factories adopt Six Sigma: smooth and efficient functioning.

But if you understand politics as a participatory forming of alliances, its meaning changes from social engineering to social design: the belief that we are empowered to take collective action to change situations for the better (which pragmatists call meliorism and what innovation professionals call “design intervention”). Social design makes the system responsive to the people who constitute it, who in turn respond to the system by choosing to perform as participants — or by changing the system for more satisfactory participation.