Depoliticisation, Good and Bad

In this paper, I offer two criteria that would help political agents identify bad depoliticization. According to many critics of liberal political institutions, depoliticization is an undesirable trait of a social order (Schmitt, 2007; Honig, 1993; Mouffe, 2005; Fossen, 2008). This is because it unjustifiably narrows the scope of political action. However, the critique of depoliticization also involves certain dangers. Neither agonistic theorists nor populist politicians, who are also often critical of the liberal wave of depoliticization, present a principled position about how to distinguish the political from the non-political. As a result, the critique of depoliticization is not able to provide a limit on what is to be politicized. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. For instance, increasing politicization of truth-conducive activities such as collection and recognition of scientific evidence might lead to a lack of responsiveness to empirical evidence (Gauchat, 2012). This is because, once the scientific inquiry is subsumed within political contestations, individuals’ cognitive capacities can be easily curbed by their passions and group feelings. Given the potential costs of not following the best empirical evidence in policy-making, such a pattern of politicization could induce detrimental and even disastrous outcomes. By employing certain evaluative standards, I aim to avoid the call for unlimited politicization of social life while exclusively denouncing bad depoliticization. By this means, one might still benefit from the valuable insights of the critics of depoliticization without accepting the implausible implications of their views. I hold that an instance of depoliticization is bad if the following jointly sufficient conditions are met: 1- Depoliticization implies arbitrary categorization of social domains. 2- The alleged trade-offs between eradicating an instance of depoliticization and other socially desirable objectives do not suffice to justify depoliticization. By introducing the first criterion, I show how certain instances of depoliticization constitute a conceptual challenge which political theorists ought to address. I contend that an instance of depoliticization is problematic insofar as it ignores significant similarities between existing political structures and the depoliticized domain of social life. This is an instance of arbitrariness because significantly similar items are not categorized according to the same definitional standards, i.e. essential characteristics we focus on when we define things. By drawing an analogy between equality of persons before the law and equality of similar items before the definitional standards, I hold that the violation of the latter constitutes a form of cognitive arbitrariness. For instance, depoliticization of workplace relations is an instance of such arbitrariness since it ignores a significant similarity (authority and power relations) between workplaces and common political structures (Anderson, 2017). However, the first condition alone is not sufficient for bad depoliticization. According to the second condition, an instance of bad depoliticization should not be a necessary evil which is to be tolerated for the sake of some greater social good. In this regard, the alleged trade-offs between politicizing a domain of social relations and achieving the greater social good should be false.