A Collège de France coproduction - CNED
Extract
"Politics as I understand it is both a field and a job. As a field, it refers to the place where the multiple threads of men's and women's lives are knotted together, the place that provides the overall framework for their discourse and actions. It refers to the existence of a "society" that appears to its members as forming a meaningful whole. As a work, politics qualifies the process by which a human grouping, which in itself comprises no more than a simple "population", gradually takes on the face of a true community. In this way, it is constituted by the ever-contentious process of elaborating the explicit or implicit rules of participation and sharing that give shape to the life of the city."
