Gareth Harper asks: What is/are “politics?”

Date/Time

18/09/2025 (Thursday)

8.00 - 9.30 pm

Location
The Adelaide





A presentation by Gareth Harper

“Politics” was one of the earliest sub-divisions of philosophy, and it is still an active area of inquiry, despite spawning so many offshoots across the social sciences.

But Karl Marx, himself a political philosopher of the first rank, said that the point of philosophy was to change things (1844).

So why is it – 2500 years after the first giants of political philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) – that we still do not have a comprehensive definition of “politics”?  How difficult can such a definition be?