Abstract

The subjective side of politics is what connects individual and group actors to power structures as well as the working of institutions and legislation. Paying attention to it helps not to fall into the objectivist trap of regarding politics and policy-making as a process fed by itself. Two of its axes are legitimacy, seen here in Weberian rather than behaviorist terms, and political identity. Another is normativity, though not in the terms in which normative political philosophy pretends to make politics an application of moral law. A demythologizing approach to democracy is among the results of the shift of perspective advanced here.