Concept
Politician
Overview
A politician is a person who participates in policy-making processes, usually holding a position in a political party or an elective position in government. Politicians make decisions and influence the formulation of public policy. The roles or duties that politicians perform vary depending on the level of government, whether local, state, or national. The ideological orientation that politicians adopt often stems from their previous experience, education, beliefs, the political parties they belong to. They try to shape public opinion accordingly.
Politicians sometimes face many challenges and mistakes that may affect their credibility and ability to persuade. These mistakes include political corruption resulting from their use and exploitation of power to achieve self interest. Ideally, they prioritize the public interest over their own profit. Challenges include how to keep up with the development of social media and confronting opposition media, in addition to discrimination for or against them on the basis of gender or race.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Any artifice of politicians may assist nature in the producing of those sentiments, which she suggests to us, and may even on some occasions, produce alone an approbation or esteem for any particular action; but it is impossible it should be the sole cause of the distinction we make betwixt vice and virtue. For if nature did not aid us in this particular, it would be in vain for politicians to talk of honourable or…
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Names Politician several times; opens on Politician.
All that the man of society, of travel, of science, of learning, the politician, the moralist, could gather, is used at will in the great poetic structure; but all converges to the purpose, and is directed by the intense feeling of the theologian, who sees this wonderful and familiar scene melting into, and ending in another yet more wonderful, but which will one day be as familiar--who sees the difficult but sure…
R. W. Church, Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia.
Names Politician twice.
There is no necessary incompatibility between this principle and the other. It is easy to give the effective power and the full responsibility to one, providing him when necessary with advisers, each of whom is responsible only for the opinion he gives. In general, the head of a department of the executive government is a mere politician. He may be a good politician, and a man of merit; and, unless this is usually…
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
States what Politician is; names Politician twice.
Philosophers who discussed Politician
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
- John Locke
- Thomas Sowell
- Antonio Gramsci
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Isaac Abarbanel
- Marcello Pera
- James Doull
- Constantin François Chassebœuf, comte de Volney
- Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias
Related ideas
- Executive (government)
- Government
- President of the United States
- Rhetoric
- Social class
- George W. Bush
- Pericles
- Communication
- Public administration
- Governance
- Biography
Place in the tradition
Part of British philosophy.