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"Identity politics rejects the model of traditional give-and-take politics, presupposing instead that the most important thing about us is that we are white, black, male, female, straight, gay, and so on. Within the identity-politics world, we do not need to give reasons—identity is its own reason and justification. Because identity politics supposes that we are our identities, politics does not consist in the speech, argument, and persuasion of normal politics but instead in the calculation of resource redistribution based on identity—what in Democratic parlance is called 'social justice.' The irony of identity politics is that it does not see itself as political; it supposes that we live in a post-political age, that social justice can be managed by the state, and that those who oppose identity politics are the ones 'being political.' What speech does attend this post-political age consists in shaming those who do not accept the idea of identity politics—as on our college campuses. In the 1960s, college students across the country fought so that repressed ideas would receive a fair hearing. These days, college students fight to repress all ideas except one: identity politics." Joshua Mitchell   "In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a 'reason' for the 'unendurable pain' of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics, and can hold out no future—for itself or others—which triumphs over this pain. The loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late-modern age, is thus homologically refigured in the structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age—identity politics." Wendy Brown   "In the beginning was Napoleon. His influence upon the history of the German people, their lives and experiences was overwhelming at a time when the initial foundations of a modern German state were being laid. The destiny of a nation is its politics, and those politics were Napoleon's—the politics of war and conquest, of exploitation and repression, of imperialism and reform. The nations and the other states were left with no option but to acquiesce or to resist. Rarely have power politics and pressure from without so dominated every sphere of life. The great reforms which so altered the state and society were themselves shaped by these forces. True, it was with the French Revolution that the ideas on which the modern world is based, and which went on to become an integral part of modern consciousness, first came into being. The French Revolution marked a new era in world history. For the Germans, however, the collapse of the old order became a reality only under Napoleon, and in the form of a military imperium." Thomas Nipperdey   "He had a deep contempt for politics and politicians. Politics, he maintained, was the curse of the modern age, as religion was of ages past. Just think of the sheer quantity of human misery caused by politics in this century—in Central Europe, Russia, China, Africa—he would urge rhetorically. Are you an anarchist, then, she asked. But of course he wasn't. He seemed to have a rather old-fashioned Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of society through the application of science. He made a stark opposition between the pursuit of knowledge, which was science, and the pursuit of power, which was politics. All forms of pseudo-knowledge, from divinity to deconstruction, he maintained, had to impose their false world pictures on others by becoming political." David Lodge   "The amateur politician sees the political world more in terms of ideas and principles than in terms of persons. Politics is the determination of public policy, and public policy ought to be set deliberately rather than as the accidental by-product of a struggle for personal and party advantage. Issues ought to be settled on their merits; compromises by which one issue is settled other than on its merits are sometimes necessary, but they are never desirable. If the arena in which the amateur acts is the city and the question at hand a limited one, his tendency is to endow the issue with generality—either by making it a national issue or by finding in it wider implications. The amateur takes the outcome of politics—the determination of policies and the choice of officials—seriously, in the sense that he feels a direct concern for what he thinks are the ends these policies serve and the qualities these officials possess. He is not oblivious to considerations of partisan or personal advantage in assessing the outcome but (in the pure case) he dwells on the relation of outcome to his conception, be it vague or specific, of the public weal. Although politics may have attractions as a game of skill, it is never simply that." James Quinn Wilson   "Already there are practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions may be gone; and possibly only three great faiths will remain. Those things which are already strong are growing stronger; those already weak are growing weaker and are ready to vanish away. Thus, as the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at her disposal, and as the larger human groups absorb and assimilate the smaller, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought in each of its regions become more closely interwoven with those of every other. Finance, even more than politics, has now made the world one community, and finance is more closely interwoven with politics than ever before." James Bryce   "It has been said that war is a continuation of politics, though employing different means. Lenin would undoubtedly have reversed this dictum and said that politics is the continuation of war under another guise. The essential effect of war on a citizen's conscience is nothing but a legalization and glorification of things that in times of peace constitute crime. In war the turning of a flourishing country into a desert is a mere tactical move; robbery is a 'requisition,' deceit a stratagem, readiness to shed blood of one's brother military zeal; heartlessness towards one's victims is laudable self-command; pitilessness and inhumanity are one's duty. In war all means are good, and the best ones are precisely the things most condemned in normal human intercourse. And as politics is disguised war, the rules of war constitute its principles." Viktor Chernov   "Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word 'education' has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force." Hannah Arendt   "The statesman is also an artist. For him, the nation is exactly what the stone is for the sculptor. Führer and masses, that is as little of a problem as, say, painter and colour. Politics is the art of creating a state, like painting is an artistic creation with colours. Thus, politics without the people or against the people is pure nonsense. To form the masses into a Volk and the Volk into a state has always been the deepest meaning of politics." Joseph Goebbels   "In 17th-century Europe the disciplines freest from religious politics were what we now call, collectively, science—what the educated of the time called natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was thought to be a politically neutral field of study, not the concern of governments and religious establishments. The case of Galileo shocked the Europe of his day in part because contemporaries (including Galileo himself) believed natural philosophy should dwell in an empyrean realm beyond the reach of politico-religious authority. In the 21st century, sadly, science has become almost as much a part of politics as regime theory or international relations. Scientific research no longer provides a refuge from politics; it plays too important a role in the legitimation of policy." James Hankins   "Van Leenhof, holding that reason, and not hereditary principle or tradition, must be the exclusive basis of political legitimacy, maintains that 'everything is good insofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everything else being slavery under the appearance of government.' 'Knowledge of matters' he considers the only light by which we can proceed in debate about politics and the exclusive aid to adjusting our lives to the 'nature of God's order and guidance,' a typical Spinozist usage, later Morelly's l'ordre de la nature, denoting the fixed and rational structure of reality and Man's place in it. Conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, as in everything else, in van Leenhof's opinion, 'the root of all evil.' Reason and 'wisdom,' he adds, again employing the populist Spinozist phraseology he had coined, as well as being the key to assessing everything in politics is the path 'whereby we share in God's nature, the highest human good and happiness.'" Jonathan Israel   "For most people, politics had been a laborious business of preserving and asserting their interests, a matter of quarreling, selfishness, and conflict. The political stage had seemed to be peopled by groups and associations, by string pullers and conspirators, by gangs and cliques. Heidegger had himself voiced this resentment against politics when he assigned the whole sphere to the They and to 'talk.' 'Politics' was seen as a betrayal of the values of 'true' life, family happiness, spirit, loyalty, courage. 'A political person is distasteful to me,' Richard Wagner had said. The antipolitical mood would no longer reconcile itself to the fact of the plurality of human beings; instead it was looking for the great singular—the German, the Volksgenosse, the laborer of hand and head, the spirit." Rudiger Safranski   "Classical virtue had flowed from the citizen's participation in politics; government had been the source of his civic consciousness and public spiritedness. But for many in the eighteenth century, virtue now flowed from the citizen's participation in society, not in government, which the most enlightened increasingly saw as the source of the evils of the world. 'Society,' said Thomas Paine, 'is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness: the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.' It was society, not politics, that bred the new domesticated virtue of politeness. Mingling in drawing rooms, clubs, coffeehouses, and even counting houses—partaking of the innumerable interchanges of the daily comings and goings of modern life, including those of the marketplace—created affection, fellow feeling, credit, and trust that bound people together in the natural harmony of the social world that was as marvelous to the eighteenth century as the discovery of the force of gravity in the natural world." Gordon Wood   "Politicians, one immediately feels, ought to be high-minded and committed to policies; they ought to 'talk sense' to voters rather than rely on empty slogans, selfish appeals, and political payoffs; elective officials ought to vote and act on the basis of conscience rather than at the dictate of party 'bosses.' But the choice is not a simple one. An amateur politics of principle may make the attainment of the certain highly-valued ends difficult or impossible, whereas politics of interest may, under certain circumstances, enable those ends to be realized much more easily. Institutions should be judged by the ends they serve, not by the motives of their members, and on this basis it is an open question whether the professional politician is not the person best equipped to operate a democratic government in a way that will produce desirable policies." James Quinn Wilson   "If our thought processes in the political realm reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn't even make it out of bed each morning. So if you're curious about people's capacity for reasoning, don't look at cases where being right doesn't matter and where it's all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life. Look at discussions that adults have over whether to buy a house, what jobs to take, where to send their kids to school, what they should do about an elderly parent. Look at the social negotiations that occur among friends deciding where to go for dinner, planning a hike, figuring out how to help someone who just had a baby. Or even look at different sort of politics—the type of politics where individuals might actually make a difference, such as a town hall meeting where people discuss zoning regulations and where to put a stop sign." Paul Bloom   "Everyone found a part of him in Jack. Before that, politics was just left to all the corny old people who shouted on the Fourth of July—and you know, all the things that made me so bored with politics." Jacqueline Kennedy   "The theoretical difficulty with the social justice framework is that, for all the operatic denunciations of white privilege and perfidy, there's ultimately no need for anyone to apologize for anything in a world filled with clashing interests but devoid of moral standards. If politics is simply about who gets what, and it is understood that all humans will attempt to get as much as they can, then history's subjugators did not really commit any transgressions. They just won. And those who have inherited the privileges those winners secured have no more right to perpetuate their advantages than do those who want to take them away. But they also have no less. This nihilistic worldview reverses Clausewitz's famous dictum: politics is now simply war carried out by other means." William Voegeli   "The aim of identity politics would appear to be to politicize absolutely everything. To turn every aspect of human interaction into a matter of politics. To interpret every action and relationship in our lives along lines which are alleged to have been carved out by political actions. The calls to spend our time working out our own place and the places of others in the oppression hierarchy are invitations not just to an era of navel-gazing, but to turn every human relationship into a political power calibration. The new metaphysics includes a call to find meaning in this game: to struggle, and fight and campaign and 'ally' ourselves with people in order to reach the promised land. In an era without purpose, and in a universe without clear meaning, this call to politicize everything and then fight for it has an undoubted attraction." Douglas Murray   "The mythical organization of society seems to be superseded by a rational organization. In quiet and peaceful times, in periods of relative stability and security, this rational organization is easily maintained. It seems to be safe against all attacks. But in politics the equipoise is never completely established. What we find here is a labile rather than a static equilibrium. In politics we are always living on volcanic soil. We must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions. In all critical moments of man's social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity. This hour comes as soon as the other binding forces of man's social life, for one reason or another, lose their strength and are no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers." Ernst Cassirer   "Politics too is an art, perhaps the most elevated art and the greatest that exists, and we—who give form to modern German politics—feel ourselves like artists to whom has been entrusted the high responsibility, beginning with the brute masses, of forming the solid and complete image of the people from the original brute mass." Joseph Goebbels