Historicising Depoliticisation: Forms of the Political and its Alternatives

Abstract

This chapter starts with the central observation of the volume, that the study of depoliticisation brings into play the crucial idea that the history of politics needs to be written in terms of changing conceptions of the political. This implies that depoliticisation does not always mean the same thing: to historicise the political unavoidably implies historicising depoliticisation. The central challenge this contribution addresses is how to reconstruct depoliticisation as the drawing of boundaries between the political and its alternatives. By delineating two dimensions of the political—whether it concerns communication or power, and whether it is located in civil society or in the state—four forms of the political are distinguished, each with its own variety of depoliticisation. These four types—liberal democracy, mass democracy, technocracy, and populism—are identified not as timeless categories but as abstractions from manifestations of politics that were dominant in specific periods of modern European history. In this way, the contours of a history of depoliticisations are sketched. This approach allows us to see that the depoliticisation characteristic of the neoliberal era—removing the potential for choice around a particular political issue—is but one of the forms in which depoliticisation presents itself in modern history.