Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement

For another account that examines the role that prevarication plays in social life and its abundance therein, see Sacks’s (1975) “Everyone Has to Lie.”

I refer to passion in the dual sense of both love and suffering, following Wacquant (1995b).

After already losing one election for Senate in 1941 and having committed himself to not running again for the Congressional seat he currently held, Johnson’s 1948 Senate campaign was, at least retrospectively (see Caro, 1990/1991), an election that would determine Johnson’s future in politics—should he lose, there was a strong chance that he would never hold elected office again.

Speaking to its dominance is the wealth of subjects that rational choice theory has been applied to: voter turnout (Aldrich, 1993), rebellion (Lichbach, 1990, Mueller and Opp, 1986), the drafting of the United States’ constitution (McGuire, 1988), decision-making by Nasser during the 1967 crisis (Mor, 1991), the differing responses to the transition from communism to democracy between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Whitfield and Evans, 1999), and what is more relevant for our current discussion, the selection of politics as a career (Payne and Woshinsky, 1972, Recchi, 1999).

For example, Norris (1997) explores the processes of legislative recruitment by looking at how potential candidates and party gatekeepers “interact within different institutional settings” to determine who runs for political office.

Perhaps the two most paradigmatic exemplars of political culture approaches are Almond and Verba’s (1963) The Civic Culture and Bellah’s (1985) Habits of the Heart.

Sears and Valentino (1997) report that periodic political events such as elections create pre-adult political dispositions that continue to exist later in life, while Hyman (1959) argues that the political values of most Americans have crystallized by age 16.

For example, Lasswell (1948) argues that “[o]ur key hypothesis about the power seeker is that he pursues power as a means of compensation against deprivation. Power is expected to overcome low estimates of the self by changing either the traits of the self or the environment in which it functions” (39). Applying similar analyses, Winter (1987) has explored leader appeal and performance, and Barber (1972) has examined presidential success based on measures of activity vs. passivity and optimism vs. pessimism.

Given the basic postulate behind elite theory—that all societies can be divided between two classes—the ruling class and that which is ruled—much of the research on elites is aimed at determining the factors that differentiate one class from the other, much of it with an eye to how the two are said to differ psychologically (Hedlund, 1973, Shamir, 1991, Sullivan et al., 1993, and Winter, 1987).

Prewitt (1970) stands out in his adherence to Chinese box epistemology in analyzing the recruitment of city council members in or around San Francisco. Some of the other “better” examples of Chinese box epistemology include such classics in social scientific analysis of politics and political participation as Lane’s (1959) Political Life: Why and How people Get Involved in Politics, Lipset’s (1960) Political Man, and Milbrath’s (1965) Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics.

These first three shortcomings are the same ones that Katz (1988) claims plague traditional criminological accounts.

Made evident in their overarching emphasis on background “factors” is the fact that these approaches are all based on an intrinsically substantialist ontology—which is to say that they view the reality “out there” to be identified, dissected, and measured by the scientist as one of substances or variables rather than one that consists of relations or processes. For two trenchant critiques of substantialist thought, see Bourdieu (1968) and Elias (1978; especially pp. 104–128). My chief grievance against Chinese-box epistemology, however, is more in line with the challenges that Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) brought against traditional empiricist and idealist philosophies of action—that they elide the active engagements between habitus and world through which the motivation for action is dialectically developed by a “mutual moulding and immediate ‘inhabiting of being and world’” (Wacquant, 2005, p. 466).

Just as phenomenal attractions can seduce one into action, we might hypothesize that the inverse is also true: namely, that the phenomenal foreground can carry repulsive features which repel one away from a given course of action.

Here one is well-advised to recall Elias’s advice that “while one need not know, in order to understand the structure of molecules, what it feels like to be one of its atoms, in order to understand the functioning of human groups one needs to know, as it were, from inside how human beings experience their own and other groups” (1956p. 237).

It is worth emphasizing that there is every reason to believe that the lived reality of the political animal is indeed plural—thus there are lived realities not a single reality. Such is one of the insights behind Bourdieu’s concept of field, spelled out most forcefully in his Rules of Art (1996). Although they exist as relatively autonomous worlds unto themselves with their own unique logics, fields contain not one viewpoint but multiple discrepant viewpoints that exist within the broader shared logic of the field as a whole.

For other works arguing that examinations of “how” an action is accomplished can lead to an understanding of “why” it is done, see Jackson, 1983 and Bearman, 2000.

For example, Katz (1988) uses a “theory of moral self-transcendence” to vivisect the experiential details in the phenomenal foreground of criminal action (p. 10).

One might even hypothesize that this consequential and problematic structuring of political life is the root cause of the various “conspiracy theories” that arise from time to time among politicos. After all, the last thing one would want before willfully entering into fateful activities is to have the deck stacked against him.

The limiting case of such forms of association is of course “sociability,” in which there is “no ulterior end, no content, and no result outside itself (Simmel and Hughes 1949, p. 255).

This is not to say that all such interactions are in fact “routine.” The point is to again call attention to the fact that the basic structures of these interactions—their form and content—are not altogether different from a range of other occupations which one would scarcely consider to be “where the action is.”

Some may question such an assertion given the apparent frequency in which politicians avoid the “important questions.” Following one such instance, the headline in the Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) read: “Condit ducks and weaves on TV” (Beach 2000). The article went on to report that, “Mr. Condit’s bid to restore his image failed as the Republican congressman repeatedly refused to answer questions about his affair with Ms Levy” (emphasis mine). That politicians avoid such encounters, however, only serves to confirm, the fact that they, indeed, recognize that the given circumstances are pregnant with the possibility for fatefulness – something that they are not willing to subject themselves to in instances in which the odds are clearly against them.

In many ways, the notion of being “presidential” has come to signify, at least within the United States, everything that politicians should embody, from their depth of conviction, to their way of carrying themselves, and their devotion to the broader good. For example, one recent headline read: “Bush Using Electoral Timeout to Practice Being Presidential (Colie, 2000).