La esencia de lo político

Zusammenfassung

The essay addresses the question of What is Politics?, starting with the seminal answer of Aristotle, and reviewing its assimilation by other classic authors, especially Maimonides -- the great medieval and Sephardic thinker . This analysis is done not only in behalf of the history of political ideas, but instead for shedding new lights on some problems of contemporary politics: the roles of language, rhetoric, religious transcendence, emotion and feelings; the purpose of political science; and the relationships between statecraft (public engineering) and selfcraft (the government of one´s own life), or between public life and individual conscience --or foro interno. Finally, the essay focuses on the notion of sound judgment or practical reason, stressing the importance of freedom, inventio and isegoria as necessary building blocks of sound judgment, and as antidotes to the views or social trends that, perhaps with the best of intentions, or attempting to minimize the natural uncertainty of personal and public life, glorify absolute prediction and executive, overly controlling or even dictatorial attitudes, with the subsequent risk of transforming modern democracies in "watchful societies".