Diagnostic practice never proceeds under ideal conditions. It is challenged to succeed at each of its steps. One has to ask: What phenomena were accessible to the diagnostician? Did he or she attend to the really significant ones? Did he or she describe and analyze them in an adequate language? Did he or she construct a compelling genealogy? Is his or her prognosis trustworthy? Is his or her diagnostic prescription realistic? Uncertainty inhabits political diagnosis and defines its natural limits and, indeed, that of all political philosophy since there is no viable political philosophy beyond diagnosis. Diagnosis also models, in a more conscious fashion, the everyday practice of forming political judgments. The uncertainties evident in diagnostic work thus carry over into all political judgment and thus into all politics.

There are epistemological and ontological reasons for this uncertainty and we need to examine both, even though (or rather, because) our political philosophers, including our diagnosticians, largely bypass this kind of inquiry. We need to speak of politics as a domain of uncertainty, in addition, because the raucous voices of certainty usually dominate actual political debate.

The ontology of uncertainty

Our political uncertainties stem from layers far below the surface of political life. (No wonder then that our political philosophers do not want to consider them.)

Our political order is in flux, perhaps in crisis, and possibly even in peril and that not only here and there but globally so, not only in unstable regions but equally in the most settled states. The signs are easily recognizable. The world’s population, now at 7.2 billion, is set to rise quickly by another 50 percent. This growth, unevenly distributed across continents, is bound to create new poverty, new needs, and new political demands, plausibly also large-scale migrations and perhaps even war. In its course, traditional structures, values, and understandings are quickly dissolving. At the same time, technological change is not letting up, affecting economic, military, and political power in unpredictable ways. Environmental degradation remains also uncontained: the pollution of the air, the earth, and the sea proceed afoot and these affect lives, living spaces, and resources in ways that burden the political sphere. We see the economic weight between developed and developing countries shifting with consequences for global power relations. What adds further weight to all this is that we are also affected by increasing confusion about the nature and meaning of politics. We are uncertain about what to ask from politics – expecting too much of it or too little. We are equally uncertain about what it demands from us, what sort of commitment it calls for. It appears that our concept and conception of politics have lost their mooring.

We are thoroughly artificial creatures: shaped by historical circumstances that have assigned us the place we live in, the language we speak, the convictions we have, what we know and how we feel. We have learned to remake our bodies, our minds, and, indeed, our lives through training, education, technology, and science. We keep ourselves alive with the help of manufactured drugs, medical devices, and interventions. We live on highly processed foods, cover our bodies with man-made materials cut according to local custom, fashion, and whim, live in cocoons surrounded by gadgetry, and lock our front doors to shield out the surrounding world. We move on land, in water, and in the air inside metal containers whose movements we control with specialized technical skills. We communicate through invented symbols with the help of mechanical and electronic devices. We live attached to computers, operate machines, process documents, buy and sell goods with the help of a man-made system of exchange. And in the face of all this we still like to think of our condition as “natural” and thoroughly abhor the “unnatural.”

It is true, of course, that in addition to the artifice around and within us we are living beings with organic strengths and weaknesses, with bodily capacities and limitations, with physiological needs and desires. Birth and death, growing up and growing old give shape to our personal, social, and political existence. In politics, for instance, the natural cycle of birth and death necessitates a constant transfer of power and generates thus the peculiar instability of all our arrangements. Political regimes are characterized by the way they handle such transfers. Hereditary monarchy and electoral systems of government have developed elaborate mechanisms for it whereas messianic and dictatorial regimes often fail over this issue. The handicaps of the young and the old, health and disease, and other biological advantages and disadvantages make it impossible also to maintain a system of genuinely universal suffrage. The result is a diversification of power in every conceivable political system. Physiological needs and desires and the emotions they provoke in us (enthusiasm and terror, hope and despair) are motors of social and political activism.

I have argued that the exceptional volatility of our situation is forcing upon us a reassessment of both politics and political philosophy. Our diagnosis has shown that both are today in crisis. In the course of this political crisis new forms of political order have come into being (mass democracy, totalitarian government, the corporate state, supra-national alliances and organizations), new political forces have been unleashed (imperialism, anti-colonialism, global capitalism, contemporary terrorism in all its colors), and new political ideologies have sprung up (liberalism, socialism, anarchism, Communism, fascism, National Socialism, libertarianism, Islamic jihadism).

These transformations have disrupted the practice of politics and just as much our understanding of it. We have become unsure, in consequence, of the possibilities and the limitations of politics. We find it impossible to agree on a common good. Even worse, we are losing sight of the need to search for any such good. We are in danger of losing politics itself in this process since it has the search for the common good as one of its objects. But human life cannot do well without a shared pursuit of the good and a sense of community. Even individuality cannot flourish without a common language, shared concepts, and a shared culture. Everybody speaks of the threats to our natural environment; the disintegration of our political order is even more insidious because less noticed. It reveals that there are dangers that come from within in addition to those from outside.