Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Welcome to the new Books Network. Welcome to new books in critical theory. It's a podcast that's part of the new books network. On this episode I'm talking to Peter Allen about how to think about politics, a guide in five parts. So, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Henry. This is an incredibly well-timed book given, well, everything that is happening with politics both nationally and more globally as well. And I guess a good start in point is the word politics, because one of the things that the book does is I guess it has a very specific understanding of politics. And it contrasts with maybe how academic study politics, with political science, or with maybe how we talk about politics in our everyday life. So a big question, what is politics? What do you mean by that word? So in terms of definition, Harold Lazwell said that politics is about who gets what, when and how. And that's a definition that I'm pretty happy with. I think the thing that you gesture at and that I do in the book is sort of push it beyond where political science generally draws the border of what politics is, right? So, political science would say something like, well, the process is by which it's decided who gets what, when and how, are existing mainly in formal political institutions. And the thing I'm saying in this book is actually politics is sort of more than that. It's not just confined to formal political institutions. And indeed the kinds of resources that are being distributed in that process. So, you know, the question of who gets what, when and how. They aren't so obviously sort of material in the way that those institutions tend to think about them. So political science, I refer to that as the systematic sort of empirical study of political phenomena. But like I say, it has focused generally on these sort of legislatures or on what's happening in certain parliaments, in certain places, so like DC or Westminster. And the book is largely about saying actually politics is about, you know, our lives. It's about the way that that sort of tension and those processes and that sort of dynamic of people disagreeing about how society and their own lives should go kind of goes all the way down into our day to day lives. So that was the thing I was really sort of pushing back up with the book, I guess, because let you say, given everything that's been going on in the political world in the last sort of five to six years, or it's probably even longer than that. Now I think about it. I wanted to try and write something that would actually speak to inverted commas normal people about how it feels for them to experience politics in their day to day lives. So that's essentially where the sort of book comes from and it does relate, like you say, to that sort of question of what politics is. You kind of mentioned that sense of like, you know, everything that's been going on and you introduce quite early on this way of describing our current moments as being kind of poly crisis. And then you come back and sort of unpack and explain that term right near the end of the book. But I think it's quite a useful idea for kind of framing both where we are now, but also actually it gives a kind of further sense of why you've written the book. So this term, poly crisis, kind of, what does it mean? And I guess kind of why was it useful for you to be using it? So the term poly crisis is, to the best of my knowledge, it's a term coined by Adam II's, the economic historian who wrote, crashed among other excellent books. And he essentially uses the term to describe the way that all of these sort of events and trends are actually intersecting and sort of combining on top of one another. So it's not just the case, for example, that we're dealing with climate change, we're dealing with climate change and economic instability. And then that economic instability brings about sort of political instability and it's sort of, I wouldn't say a virtuous circle, whatever the opposite of a virtuous circle is, they're all sort of interrelated. And II's argues that that can have this sort of overwhelming sense. And he actually does say that, you know, this is a sort of analytical thing that we can sort of say, we can look at politics and say, oh, these things are sort of interacting in their overwhelming political system. But he also says that the poly crisis sort of gets into your head and it's sort of, it's part of the way that you begin to think about your own relationship to politics. So at the individual level, it also becomes overwhelming. And I quite liked it in that sense because it does, for me, at least feel true that the way that we have all kind of felt about politics in the last few years is that it's sort of hard to get a grasp on what's going on. It's sort of, you feel like you've maybe kind of got to grips with the fact that the sector you work in is, you know, under huge financial strain. But then you look and you see that actually there's now some massive geopolitical threat which might result in two nuclear powers invading one another or all of these kinds of things, right? So it is even talking about it makes me feel overwhelmed. So it is that sort of thing of, I thought it was useful because it captures that sense of overwhelm, I think, which is, which is like you say, where I sort of kick off the book. At least that's the sort of starting assumption is that all of us are feeling something like this right now. That I guess kind of sense of overwhelm is when you've kind of mentioned this, you know, it is something that runs from global events through to everyday lives. And part of, I guess, the kind of experience is we often think of politics as, you know, what's going on in Westminster, the Congress parliament, you know, these sort of formal things and a kind of, you know, which MP is up, which MP is down, you know, these sort of things. But one of the things you do quite early on in the book is to kind of say, actually we can think of politics much more broadly. We can introduce ideas like power, but also kind of broad structures. And I guess the kind of the things that maybe in everyday life you don't see, but are really influential. And I'm kind of interested in picking up on what you were saying about polychrysis, how you brought in this idea of power into the analysis, where that kind of figures and where it gives you a very different view of politics, just compared to, you know, will the Prime Minister resign or something like that? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in the in political theory powers, you know, absolute, your core concept and it's been, it's been covered quite well, I think. I mean, the sort of key theorists that most undergraduates would cover, there's a background on barats who sort of focused on this kind of idea of agenda setting power, but then this Stephen Luke's who is probably the most famous theorist of power and he talks about, you know, the different faces of power. So Luke talks about this idea of a sort of overpower and that is the kind of, you know, who's up, who's down, what's going on in Congress, what's going on in Parliament. He also talks about covert power, which is similar to back record barats. It's about that idea of, you know, how are people using their power to shape the very sort of agenda that is being discussed in political life? So that's a sort of more subtle kind of power. And I think the thing that I was sort of most interested in emphasizing for the reader in this book was this third idea that Luke talks about, he calls it shaping power and it's this idea that, you know, you can use your power to shape societal structures in such a way that make people feel that their interests or their wants or desires and preferences are such a way. And more commonly now we sort of refer to this as something like structural power and I think that's an increase in the familiar category for people who are used to discussing things like gender inequality, for example, and obviously racial inequality. So I talk about that quite a bit in the book and I discuss how it relates to a bunch of things that all of us encounter in our own lives. So social class is including some of your own work actually is, you know, is some of the perhaps the most obvious aspect of this, the way that class does this sort of shaping. It is, it exerts a shaping power on our lives in terms of things like job opportunities, educational opportunities, but then equally, quite small things in some degree, small things, you know, like the role of accent, for example, in shaping how people have perceived and the kind of power that that can either give to you or not give to you. And the example I dwell on quite a bit in that chapter is the case of the culture of Charleston statue being taken down in Bristol in the summer of 2020. So if your listeners aren't aware, there was a series of protests around the Black Lives Matter movement and it's sort of culminated one day in people pulling down this statue of Charleston who was a slave trader, but also, you know, as, as, as, using the profits of that was a philanthropist and that was sort of how he was presented in the public domain in Bristol. So his statue sort of indicated that he was a philanthropist, not a slave trader. And there'd been this ongoing local democratic sort of process around trying to do something about this statue which people in the city weren't happy about. So they tried to have the statue removed or they tried to have a second plaque put underneath it saying, you know, that this guy was also a slave trader. These efforts had come to nothing because it turned out that there had been powerful lobby groups, in particular a group called the merchant ventures who had been arguing against this. And on the day the statue came down, it was through, it wasn't organized, it seemed to be a largely sort of impromptu move by the protesters. And the reactions were quite predictable in some sense. So pretty Patel who was the home secretary at the time said something like, oh, it's a jobery and all the rest of it, Kirstaama who was then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, he said something like, I agree that the statue should have come down, but I don't agree with how it was done. It should have been done democratically and all the rest of it. And of course, this was a sort of classic thing where they weren't aware that there had been this process going on in the background the whole time. But the way I frame it in the book is through these different kinds of power, right? So the people pulling the statue down to some extent were using in that moment overt sort of power, you know, they were clearly making something happen that they wanted to. But that was also a reaction against the kind of covert power and the shaping power that people with greater resource bases and better contacts and who were better able to sort of navigate the machine of local democracy were able to use. So in that sense, power, I think that example shows us is that it's not just about sort of doing what you want within the context of what we could think of as something like a game, but it's also about who gets to shake the rules of that game and potentially in a way that that means that they can kind of get what they want more of the time. It's that sort of actually that example sets of something that comes later in the book, which is this idea that people have lots of political knowledge every day all the time and often again, this kind of traditional view of politics. I mean, sort of you don't do this in the books, I'm trying to stop myself saying the mainstream view or whatever and the book is much more nuanced than that. But often there's a sense when we discuss politics of, you know, this survey is suggested that people don't know who their MP is. That means they don't know anything about politics. But one of the things you do in the book is say actually people know about politics. They live politics and there's lots of political knowledge every day. And I guess it'd be interesting to hear building on that example of, of course, them how people kind of live politics and how they understand and have lots of political knowledge every day. Yes, like you say, there's a sort of established view in political science that people don't really know anything about politics. So there's been some pretty big studies over the years that claim to have established this. But my kind of starting point with this was, well, let's have a look at what they're actually measuring and it does tend to be things like in the American case, it's often, you know, could you name who the Speaker of the House of Representatives is, how many senators are there from this party? There is kinds of things like that. And in the British case, the British election study, for example, used a set of items that asked people, they showed people a photo of, for example, John Birkow and said, you know who this is and things like that. So it's a very sort of institutionally focused definition of knowledge. And it's recall essentially. So in the philosophical sort of lingo, it's knowledge of something, it's propositional knowledge, not sort of practical knowledge or knowledge, how know how. At my point in the chapter really is that the more that this has been studied, the more that that view has been called into question. So there's some influential work from the United States, primarily looking at the cases of gendered political knowledge and racialized political knowledge and showing that the apparent gender gap in political knowledge, which would argue that, you know, women know less about politics than men, often disappears if you just tweak the items that are being used to measure knowledge. So for example, if you ask about women politicians or if you ask about policies that predominantly affect women, then even within that sort of institutional game, that gender gap can can disappear. And in the case of race in the States, there's evidence that shows that black Americans actually know quite a lot about aspects of the work of the state, which we could definitely think of as being political. So for example, knowledge around the carceral system is the example used in this paper that I talk about in the book. And that just shows that there could be these other sort of dimensions to political knowledge. And I think that this is something I want to pursue more empirically. I think there could be a case that, you know, we might see this in the case of class, for example. So as opposed to saying that working class individuals just don't know as much about politics or other people, it might be that, in fact, they know different sorts of things. And it does seem just a bit implausible to me that we would be happy to say that people take no much about politics because actually, to a large extent, people navigate their lives. And the people who it's claimed know the least, actually in many ways, have the most interaction with real hard frontline politics of all of us. So the kinds of middle class, in inverted commas, politics nerds who do well on political knowledge tests, they're unlikely, for example, to rely on the state for their housing or their income. They are not likely to have to navigate, for example, universal credit systems and things like that. And so what I'm trying to do, I guess, in that in that chapter is simultaneously, sort of argue that if we take politics to be a bigger thing than I think it's considered in a lot of the political science literature, then we need to sort of look elsewhere. And I think we just need to be a bit more credulous about these kinds of findings that just don't seem to chime with, again, you know, like kind of how our lives are and how it seems quite clear to me that most people do have a more of a serious relationship to politics than that would suggest. I mean, it's interesting that later on in the book, you kind of crystallize that sense of people having quite strong sense of knowledge of saying how they interact with the state as their sense of politics into this question about, well, what should politics be doing in people's lives? And I mean, I was going to try and think of a way of making that less abstract, but actually I'll have posed in the book. And I'm intrigued both as to how you answer it, but also, I guess, how it relates to that kind of sense of people having everyday knowledge of politics and the political system. Yeah, that's probably my favorite part of the book actually. And it was a sort of question that, you know, it's one of these questions that sort of emanates from actually kind of lived experience, because I have quite a few friends who are deeply committed to a bunch of political views, right? So, for example, views about international politics or views about the kinds of foods that people should eat, but then I could see that this was really deeply affecting their sort of personal lives. It was affecting relationships with friends and family. It was affecting how they would, you know, for example, go on the dating market, things like that. And I was kind of thinking, that's quite interesting, isn't it? Because where would you say the right level is? Like, how big should politics be in people's lives? Because you also have to sort of accept that actually a lot of great political change that we would all kind of, or most of us would applaud over the 20th century and early 21st century, comes from people who do have this sort of outsized role of politics in their lives. So, you know, people who let politics take over their lives, and essentially, in many ways, give up their life outside of politics in order to see their political goals. So, it was sort of that question of, yeah, how big should it be in someone's life? And in sort of classic academic fashion, I don't really think there's a clear answer, so I don't kind of have a satisfying answer to it in some sense. But the thing I, as I talk about in the book, is I use a lot of philosophical work of this fantastic American philosopher called Valerie Tiberius, who talks about a lot about well-being. And her argument essentially is that we just need to be able to make room in our lives to understand and appreciate what the things are that we value. So, really kind of get a sense of the kind of range of values that we have in our lives. So, these might be, for example, friends and family and in politics and work and other kinds of things. But then also appreciate that these are often going to be in conflict and that we need to be able to kind of honestly and kind of clear our, in a clear our sense, look at how these conflict. So, in a sort of, again, unsatisfying way, that's essentially the chapter isn't so much an answer to the question is more of a sort of discussion about how someone might answer the question. And I think interestingly with politics, it is that sort of sense that you want to reflect on it sometimes, but sometimes your gut kind of moral reaction is the correct one, right? So, if you think that something is just wrong, sometimes that's going to be the right reaction and it's absolutely correct to be angry about something. But the kind of smart approach, I guess, is knowing when actually that first reaction might be misleading you in some way or it might be taking you away from other values you care about. So, the example I use in the book is one of the examples, but the main one is this group. of Trump supporters called the front row Joe's and they followed Donald Trump around the country. And I mean, it's a serious endeavor that they embarked on. They would queue up really early to go and watch his rallies. They would be away from home for quite a serious amount of time. And based on most of the accounts, then weren't rich people. So they were spending money often that they didn't really have to do this to go and watch a billionaire person who actually his policies weren't really going to do anything for them. And the question is, well, is that, you know, for me, the question if I was one of their friends would be, well, is that really what you want to do? You know, how does that sit with all these other values? Because we've all read loads of accounts of Trump supporters in kind of liberal families and families being torn apart about that. And again, I'm not saying that they're wrong. Maybe I'm missing a trick. Maybe going to watch Trump's rallies, you know, all the time is the best thing in the world. But I would, I think if I was, you know, kind of friendly voice to them, I would just say, really think about how this sits with all of your values. Maybe do that sort of totting up work before committing to something like this. And that's kind of the approach in the end that I come to in the, in the chapter is that I think maybe the best way for people to decide the role of politics in their lives is to actually have a better sense of what they want from their lives full stop. The intriguing thing and this kind of brings us, sorry, into the middle of the book, it is the way that this, I suppose, kind of links into formal politics. One of the things you try and think through is this question about how representation might work. And I guess if people are thinking about, or what do we want from politics, there's also a question of how does representation work and how can we get, again, like, no, I'm quite comfortable with ideas of kind of better forms of representation or, you know, more representative systems, but also I guess there are kind of bigger debates around, as you touch on in the book, whether, you know, particular social groups having more or fewer members in politics actually translate into political change. Yeah, so this is an issue that I've, not, I wouldn't say change my view on, but so when I last spoke to you, Dave, it was seven years ago, I think something like that when my first book came out, which was very much a sort of argument that, you know, the composition of political institutions mattered hugely and that if we got that right, then kind of broader social change would follow. And I still think that to an extent, I guess, but this is very much something where I have kind of changed my overall view in that, or at least dampened my view in into one that kind of sees this as as actually a lot more sort of contingent than maybe I initially gave it credit for. So I think it's worth saying straight off the bat that, you know, I'm not arguing against the diversification of political institutions. It's really important and it does produce good outcomes for groups that were previously underrepresented. So for example, I think Jane Mansbridge, the political theorist has this great quote, which is, you know, women are better at representing, women and blacks are better at representing blacks and working class people are better at representing, working class people. And I think that's true for a bunch of reasons that I discuss in the book. So the thing I'm sort of more interested, I guess, is why that it, why it hasn't almost brought about that feeling that things have changed. So why do people feel frustrated with democratic politics? Why has that feeling not not gone away or not even really been diluted if anything? It's got worse across this period. So that was the thing I was interested in. And the answer in many ways is not massively sort of surprising, I guess, to anyone who's kind of studied political institutions, which is that institutions are finicky and hard to work with. The issues that politicians are facing now are potentially increasingly complex or at least increasingly interrelated. So I use the analogy of Rubik's cube, you know, it's sort of like you move one part to try and solve that. And then simultaneously you make your job really difficult when you flip it over and try and solve the other side. And to some extent, all of these sort of political outcomes that we're seeing are overdetermined. And it's really difficult if you're a politician, I think, to make a convincing case that, you know, we pressed button X and everything's changed. I mean, this week we're speaking in May 2025. You know, I saw yesterday a Labour front bench in the UK arguing that that wages have increased or because of the Labour government that's not even been in office for a year and you sort of think, fine, but is this really helping? That kind of bigger picture, right? Is it fair for you to sort of take credit for this thing that to me just seems quite clearly not really anything to do is, you know, the kinds of kinds of things you've done since you've entered office. And that relates to a sort of bigger question about what politicians are sort of claiming and not claiming and how that relates to people's sort of democratic disaffection as well. I talk a bit about the de-politicisation literature, which was really kind of popular in, I guess, sort of, naughty early noughties. So I was an undergrad around then and everyone was sort of interested in this idea that politicians were giving away power and it sort of went out of fashion for a while, but I think we're kind of seeing the almost like the end game or whatever of that when with things like a tense water kind of scanned in the UK where politicians just seem absolutely unable to do something so basic as stop water companies from putting literal human excrement into rivers. And my point just to wrap that up then is kind of like where you can kind of have all of the diverse representatives that you want. But if something like that seems to be outside of the scope of a political institution to change, then yeah, is it any surprise that we've got a problem there? I mean this sense of polychrisis, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who is arguing that both the UK but also more globally political systems are functioning well and delivering outcomes the populations actually desire. And so towards the end of the book, and it kind of picks up on what you've just been saying around the kind of lack of maybe levers that politicians have and how this like feeds through into this question about what politics should be for people. But where I guess can change happen? Are you kind of optimistic? Political systems responding to some of the problems that you use to frame the book? Or I guess are we kind of trapped in these systems that really kind of don't sound small? But it's because we need to be looking for power and change in other bits of political life. I mean I'm pretty pessimistic, I'm afraid. Yeah, I think I mean part of the narrative of the book is that I sort of started off as this bright-eyed bushy tailed kind of young political scientist who was quite optimistic about all this stuff. And I think that is very much reflected in the discussion we had however many years ago was, you know, I sort of thought that there were these things that you could change and that change would, you know, you could sort of as you say, move a lever and then change would follow. And now I just don't think that, but it's not that I think there's a sort of kind of ontological issue here that means that things can never change. But I think there's a sort of unwillingness I guess to see it. It's certain politicians. I feel like it is related to my first book in as much as I think professional political professionalization has quite a lot to answer for this in the sense that, you know, we have, you know, on the, on the, on the center left, I think we've seen, you know, generations of politicians who sort of grown up fighting the kind of political wars that came just before them. So, you know, in this country, it was a lot of people who worked in and around new labor, then becoming MPs themselves and, and all the rest of it. But the problem with that is if you're sort of still fighting the war that was, you maybe aren't quite so attuned to the war that is and I think the Democrats in the, in the United States are sort of maybe the best example of that. So in that sense, I would never say give up on formal politics, but I think if people are looking for satisfaction from politics, the obvious answer is to is to look sort of closer to home in many forms. We are seeing kind of outbursts of this, I think. So I talk a bit about just stop oil, which to me feels like a sort of pretty done and dusted case of people realising that, you know, the kind of outcomes that they're looking for or the kind of political attention that they want is just not going to come through the normal channels. So they're doing things that maybe they would never have thought that they would do. And I think that that could be the way that things end up is that people increasingly have this relationship to politics they just never expected to have. So, you know, most of us might think, "Oh, well, I vote," and maybe you're a member of a political party and maybe you go to the odd kind of community meeting and then all of a sudden there's going to be increasingly, I think, as a result of the sort of issues that Adam Tewes talks about as part of the polychroces, it's going to be that it's sort of at your door. There's that sort of I can't remember, I think it's a tweet or maybe something in the LRB, which is sort of about climate changes, that sort of thing that you're watching on screens, lots and lots, and then all of a sudden, you know, the screen that's filming, the thing that some fire is your screen. And I think that that changes people's relation to politics in that it's simultaneous, the shows, the failure of of big, you know, political institutions, but also re-emphasizes that politics is really, really important. And you know, it's not something that you can ignore, I guess, even if you're not feeling any satisfaction from it. Yeah, I guess that defense of politics is something that, you know, everyday readers will get from the book and it's really valuable in that sense, but it's also, I think, a good starting point for the book's use by, you know, kind of political studies, political science as well, you know, bridging those parts of the discipline that you're kind of critical of or, you know, want to be in dialogue, but at the same time, you know, showing that there's still a really kind of important role for the subject and the study. And I guess that kind of sets a concluding question really because I could see in the book various quite, you know, in depth and detailed research projects that might flow from some of the big ideas in the book, you know, these kind of big questions about power or the role of politics in everyday life. But at the same time, you know, sometimes in a gender setting text, you can kind of feel like, well, I've set the agenda now. I'd quite like to do something else. So what are you thinking of in terms of either taking the book forward or maybe a different kind of research agenda altogether? So I think it does the thing I'm working on at the moment does grow out of the book. So I'm writing a trade book. That's a sort of history of contemporary Britain that tries to make sense of why the country is sort of how it is now by looking at the last 30 years of British British politics and culture. But it does this by looking at six public figures lives. So we follow these sort of six people through their successes and their failures. But through that, you get a story about technology, economic change and political fragmentation. So, you know, in some sense, it's a book in academic speak about the public sphere. So we know which I think is a big part of this book. And the sort of fundamental theme is that all of these changes, you know, the kind of dismal note that I've just been going through there, you know, all of this sort of these terrible things in many ways. For some people, these are a threat. They threaten their status or they threaten them getting what they want out of out of the public sphere. And then for other people, it's an opportunity. So I've written about half of that and hopefully it will be out in about two years.