Glen Newey and the Concept of the Political

Anno LIV, n. 225-226, maggio-dicembre 2019

In “Real Legitimation, Anarchism and Power Loops”, Glen Newey proposes a criterion to identify the space of the political. According to him, what do we do? is the basic political question which captures what is essential about politics. In this article, I draw on and develop this suggestion by elucidating how different conceptions of politics meet the basic political question. My aim is to show how Newey has pinpointed an innovative and powerful way to understand what are the basic conditions for assessing what falls within the realm of the political.