There is no human politics without some kind of consciousness of it, however false or inadequate that may be. And we can be sure of this falseness and inadequacy as an underlying condition of our politics against which we are constantly bound to struggle. One might almost say: no politics without false consciousness and the struggle against it. Hence also that incessant to-and-fro over the common good. Politics is not like breathing or digesting or being pulled by gravitation of which we need not be aware at all. It is not a natural kind whose identity and character is fixed independently of our thinking, willing, imagining, and understanding. Politics is, to say it differently, a hermeneutic enterprise and how we understand and interpret it is one of its constitutive features. Because of this, the fortune of politics is tied to that of our political concepts and our political judgment. It follows, in particular, that the current uncertainties and confusions of our political thinking are an integral aspect of the political crisis in which we find ourselves and that we will not resolve the one without addressing the other. This point is easily missed, for we find ourselves overburdened with practical problems and thus overlook that our political concepts are also in crisis and that the one crisis bears on the other. We need to remind ourselves in consequence again and again that our conceptual confusions and misunderstandings are inseparable from our most practical, down-to-earth political problems.

It is for this reason also that the thinking of our political philosophers calls for attention, if we are to understand the state of our politics. What those philosophers offer us is not a view of political reality from outside, but an integral element of it. This holds of the normative theorists who see themselves as standing above and detached from the political ground; it holds equally of the political naturalists who understand themselves as politically neutral scientists and also, of course, of the political diagnosticians. The diagnostician is, in fact, the one most likely to grasp that our thinking about politics is itself something political. The presumed detachment from politics claimed by the normative theorist and the political naturalist are for the diagnostician characteristic illusions of political thinking, aspects of our false political consciousness which themselves call for political diagnosis.