Politics deals with actions aimed at utility, and utility is not morality. But it is not simply egoism either, so there is a need to defend the spiritual, and fundamentally valuable, nature of political engagement against all those who dismiss it as completely immoral, the preserve of crooks. (“Croce oppositore,” La Rivoluzione liberale 4, no. 31)
These words were written in 1925 by Piero Gobetti, an Italian intellectual and critic, who rose to prominence in the years immediately after the First World War. A radical liberal, editor of the newspaper La Rivoluzione liberale (“Liberal Revolution”) and intransigent opponent of Mussolini’s Fascist Party, he died in exile in Paris in 1926, at the tragically young age of twenty-five.
Gobetti’s claim is exceedingly relevant to our time, in which the prevailing tendency seems to be to dismiss political life as “the preserve of crooks” and nothing else. We have good reason to expect little from our politicians, of course, but Gobetti in his time was equally critical of the parliamentary bargaining and dealmaking that did nothing to address the real problems of his country. By “politics,” he meant not just the affairs of the legislature, or the activity of the parties, but politics in a broad sense, comprising social movements and public intellectuals as well as state institutions. Among the latter is where idealistic commitment, the demand for autonomy, and the will for justice can be found, and it is due to the latter that we are justified in assigning an ethical value to politics.
In his association of politics and utility, but an “enlightened” utility, a utility that serves some further — moral — purpose, Gobetti calls to mind Max Weber. (See, in particular, Weber’s lecture on “Politics as a Vocation.”) Gobetti’s thought owes much to Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher, who divided practical activity into the ethical and the economic (to be understood in a broad sense, as matters dealing with utility). Indeed, the above quotation comes from Gobetti’s essay on Croce, in which he also writes the following:
But the political man is not relegated to, or confined within, the boundaries of the utilitarian field on which he makes his first moves. Politics creates new relationships, becomes an instrument of moral life, goes to the sources of knowledge.
We should not fall in, of course, with those who identify politics and morality tout court. But neither should we accept the assessment of our low-grade Machiavellians and false realists, who think of politics as a mere exercise in rhetorical skill, or even more simply as plunder and corruption. We cast our lot with those who can indeed see, in politics, a form of emancipation. Political activity presupposes a strong consciousness of one’s interests and one’s developed convictions, but also the acceptance of rules of the game, which safeguard the convictions of all from external predation. Politics, through a long and arduous process, allows us to arrive at a consensus, even if provisional, and to acquire some consciousness of our common interests. Briefly: it makes civil life possible.
In this sense, in the field of subjective life, politics — when we approach it with conviction, with intransigence, and with respect — has the ethical value of a form of emancipation.
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