Conceptualizing Politics

Ideological conflict comes closer to identity conflict, but should not be mistaken for 
it. At stake here is not the consolidation of a new collective actor and its recognition 
by other players, but rather its self-identification by a unifying and defining concep-
tion of humankind’s or a nation’s destiny – what in German is called Weltanschauung 
or conception of the world. Weltanschauungen are mostly exclusive and universalistic 
ideologies; they include all the possible faithful and deny the rights of all oth-
ers. Soviet Communism in the Cold War was the paramount example,
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 though 
some versions of Western ideology did not display a higher degree of inclusiveness. 
Throughout history monotheistic religions have time and again played the role of 
expansive and truth-touting ideologies; the recent emergence of fundamentalist 
and murderous positions in the Islamic world is witness to the fact that ideological 
conflict has not ended with the Cold War.
The three types of conflict are, in Max Weber’s words, ‘ideal types’, in the sense 
that they design conceptual models that only rarely come up in reality in their pure 
form and unmixed with each other. Concrete conflicts are often a mix of two or 

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Politics and power  7
more types, in which, however, one type is prevailing and defining. This can be said 
of the archetypical conflict that opposes men to women, though often we should speak 
of sheer oppression and exploitation rather than conflict, because the element of 
resistance is weak or absent. Beyond all anthropological, socio-economic and reli-
gious aspects, this conflict also heeds direct political moments, as in the long-lasting 
exclusion of women from electoral franchise (even in Switzerland until 1971) and in 
the war against women (exclusion from education in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan until 
2001 and in Taliban-infiltrated areas of Pakistan, later kidnapping, raping, enslave-
ment of women and young girls in Africa and the Middle East after 2011) waged by 
Islamist
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 terror groups since the end of the twentieth century. In light of these events, 
the ideological conflict pursued by an extreme version of Islam with its moderate 
versions and with liberal cultures comes together with the defence of the economic, 
social and political privileges men enjoy in societies in which the patriarchal power 
structures have so far survived all attempts at cultural modernisation. The cruel and 
despising attitude towards women (as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or 
LGBT people) displayed in this war binds together a political defence of privileges 
within the family and the community with pre-political, allegedly religious sense of 
superiority deeply rooted in a fragile and aggressive male identity, bred on violence. 
In this fusion the presence of both the ideological and the identity moment nour-
ishes fanaticism, an attitude completely opposed to a reasonable way to manage poli-
tics and nonetheless so coessential to all conflicts in which gender, race, ethnic and 
religious aspects have played a role – from the persecution of heretics in the European 
Middle Ages through the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century to jihadism.
This differentiated account of conflict has a twofold sense. The practical sense 
is that whatever regime actors may choose for their polity, they must know how 
to come to terms with conflict in its three-tiered configuration and renounce any 
attempt at reducing the three types to just one, for example falling into the self-
delusion that a settling of interest-based conflicts can also dissolve an identity con-
flict. Theoretically, the core question asks whether or not conflict is conducive to 
good politics, whether politics should get rid of it or coexist with it. This question 
sounds very normative, as if we were at this stage in the position to say what good 
politics is, or more in general as if the search for a ‘good’ model of politics were this 
book’s leading aim, which it is not. All of this will become clear later.
Different that the models of politics people have in mind may be, one feature is 
likely to be common to all or nearly all of them: ‘good politics’ always contains a 
certain degree of order and regularity, which makes the life of the people somehow 
possible, whatever the degree of liberty, equality or happiness the regime makes 
room for. Daily shoot-outs or complete administrative chaos – as we shall better see 
in Chapter 3 – do not fulfil what the people expect from politics. But how to bring 
about this result? Should conflict be regarded as a threat to civil (in the sense of non-
feral) order and be possibly eliminated or marginalised? Does good politics mean 
an order in which conflict is prevented from coming up, and conflict-less integra-
tion is the supreme aim? This is the integrationist path in social and political theory, 
prevailing in antiquity (Aristotle, BCE 384–322) and the Middle Ages (Aquinas, 

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