The quest for transformative politics and the circumstances of social complexity

This article challenges the widely held view that a blunt politicization – understood as the application of political norms and procedures to all spheres of society – is the prime starting point for achieving social transformation. Therefore, it reconstructs intellectual reasoning about the limits of such politicization which is ultimately used for conceiving of transformative politics within a more sophisticated matrix. Initially, this article demonstrates how main authors of nineteenth-century social theory, such as Friedrich Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, examined the relationship between politics and social transformation by drawing conclusions from the various revolutionary processes of their time. Then, the article points out how some of these arguments migrated into struggles around the constitutionalization of politics in the twentieth century. As will be argued, they were taken up and expanded on from the 1960s and 1970s onward in strands of societal constitutionalism as well as in the “aesthetics of resistance” by the German socialist writer Peter Weiss. Against this backdrop, this article establishes a systematic framework that reconceives the distinction between politics and the political by identifying four modes of politics. Finally, it is argued that a transformative politics should engage with all four in a strategic manner instead of giving primacy to one of them on a per se basis.