The Primacy of the political

The Primacy of the Political, the final part of a trilogy by R. Sundara Rajan (the other two being Innovative Competence and Social Change and Towards a Critique of Cultural Reason) is an attempt to formulate a discursive model for political theory. The core of the work is therefore a lengthy hermeneutically oriented discussion of political judgement (Chapter IV), which projects the notion of political competence as a language mediated capacity of human subjects to recognize the common good by way of discourse. This discursive conception of the political which is mediated on the one hand by a relationship to the moral and on the other to the rhetorical, is the distinctively classical conception which can be contrasted with the modern paradigm of politics as the episteme of power relations. The earlier chapters build up to this contrast of the classical and the contemporary paradigms and stake out a claim for the primacy of the political in the classical mould. The work is a return to the classical idea of the political by way of a long detour via the theory of judgement, the Kuhnian theory of paradigms, Ricoeur's theory of textual hermeneutics and rhetorical theory. Ranging from discussions of sociological and political theory to philosophy of language and philosophical logic, the work seeks to connect the Aristotelian-Kautilyan conception of the political to contemporary debates in the metatheory of the social sciences. The work consists of five chapters and an appendix which seeks to explore the notion of a critical science which emerges from the preceding studies of the various dimensions of the primacy of the political.