What makes a political concept political

There is one area that political theory has barely begun to probe: what makes political thought political? Not ethical, not philosophical, not historical, but political. What kind of everyday thinking is entitled to be called political thinking, and how should we, as scholars, try and make sense of such thinking? I take the political concept as the basic unit of political thinking—and by “concept” I mean a unit of meaning and of understanding that is incorporated in a unit of language, a signifier. The meeting of “concept” and of “politics” creates two dynamics in opposite directions. The first dynamic infuses thinking with the inescapable characteristics of concepts in general. Concepts are ambiguous, indeterminate, vague, and inconclusive. Ipso facto, political thought will necessarily display those components as well, and I have dealt with that question recently. The second, addressed here, identifies central features of the political, and then explores the manner in which language—as thought, text, speech, and non-verbal expression—discharges those features, and the manner in which concepts carry specifically political import. They do so in two ways: either through special attributes that are plainly political, or through the substantive issues they address. Because human interaction and thought always have a political dimension, whether significant or trivial, some fundamental features of political concepts are universal in a macro sense, while at the same time having particular manifestations at different times and places