Why We Hate Politics / Polity Short Introductions (PDF)

Politics was once a term with an array of broadly positiveconnotations, associated with public scrutiny, deliberation andaccountability. Yet today it is an increasingly dirty word,typically synonymous with duplicity, corruption, inefficiency andundue interference in matters both public and private. How has thiscome to pass? Why do we hate politics and politicians so much? Howpervasive is the contemporary condition of political disaffection?And what is politics anyway?

In this lively and original work, Colin Hay provides a series ofinnovative and provocative answers to these questions. He begins bytracing the origins and development of the current climate ofpolitical disenchantment across a broad range of establisheddemocracies. Far from revealing a rising tide of apathy, however,he shows that a significant proportion of those who have withdrawnfrom formal politics are engaged in other modes of politicalactivity.

He goes on to develop and defend a broad and inclusiveconception of politics and the political that is far less formal,less state-centric and less narrowly governmental than in mostconventional accounts. By demonstrating how our expectations ofpolitics and the political realities we witness are shapeddecisively by the assumptions about human nature that we projectonto political actors, Hay provides a powerful and highlydistinctive account of contemporary political disenchantment.Why We Hate Politics will be essential reading for all thosetroubled by the contemporary political condition of the establisheddemocracies.