Homo PoliticU.S.: An Introduction to American Political Communication.

We anthropomorphize various animal kingdoms by referring to them as "communities." We assign to them divisions of labor, management tables and other "human" attributes. These animal kingdoms are not likely however to become"political" in any more than a metaphorical sense because (as far as we know) they lack certain attributes that render humankind what Aristotle called "Homo Politicus."

The Attributes That Make Us Political:

1. Consciousness--The awareness of and capacity to reflect on our surroundings.
2. Self-Consciousness--The ability to "externalize our perceptions of ourselves . . .to consider our actions . . . To refer to ourselves in the abstract.
3. Historicality--The capacity to deliberately pattern behavior and to modify that pattern based on consideration of the past behavior of ourselves and others.
4. Symbolicity--The ability to represent reality with a structure of relatively arbitrary abstractions. The ability to learn through metaphor.

We define Individual interests, but very little reflection is necessary to see that some of our interests are maximized by cooperation. Cooperation in turn creates interests of its own.

Interests become "prioritized" as we learn that:

• Original Interests create or influence the creation of "offspring" interests.
• The acts of engaging in and sustaining patterns of cooperation create their own interests.
• The social organizations that we "join" become interests in themselves that influence our agendas with regard to other interests.

In short, we become Agents of Interest and engage in actions that promote those that we believe benefit us and/or institutions to which we feel allegiance.

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In the abstract the above considerations make sense; they explain our motivations to political action. In reality, though, it has been thousands of years since any "human" has actually perceived what could accurately call an "individual" interest. As soon as people became social animals, we began to "socialize" our offspring to accept as givens the interests and allegiances that we had come to accept before them. By now all humans are so enculturated that they can very likely no longer perceive of any individual interest that has not been instantiated and reinforced by some group or institution.

While we will discuss socialization as a relevant issue, it is far too cumbersome to incorporate it into every day discussion, so we will continue to speak freely of "individual" and "personal" interests.

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We are being Political when the interests we promote relate to our roles as "public" (as opposed to private or interpersonal) beings or "citizens."

These interests generally take the form of what John Locke referred to as "inconveniences"--the inevitable conflicts that arise from too many people having to much self-determination in too limited a space.

"I easily grant that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of Nature, which must certainly be great where men may be judges in their own case, since it is easy to be imagined that he who was so unjust as to do his brother an injury will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for it."

Basically it comes down to the ration of one's right to exercise his or her freedoms against one's responsibility to limit such expression in order to safeguard the freedom of others.

Individual Liberty : Social Order

Hence, Political Communication need not be about politics. I can have a personal conversation with you with the strategic goal of influencing your or enhancing my public station, and that conversation can be viewed as political. Likewise, the President of the United States can schedule a meeting with . . . oh let's say one of the interns of his executive staff in the Oval Office of the White House, and that meeting may not be "political" at all.

Remember, as always, categorizations are for the purpose of illumination. Whether something is or is not "political communication" is less important than what we learn about the content and/or ourselves by viewing it as political communication.