Parapolitics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Parapolitics is the politics of vision and virtue. The term was first conceived and richly elaborated by Professor Raghavan Iyer of Oxford University in his seminal work Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. It goes beyond the confines of past and present modalities of encounter and embraces a richer view of the political than is found in the politics of stability, power and self-preservation.
Parapolitics is best understood as the noetic activity of continually rethinking the foundations as well as the frontiers of political principles, systems and issues.
In this sense, the ‘parapolitical’ transcends conventional politics while still being reflected in it.
The dialectic of parapolitical engagement calls for establishing critical distance, understanding the costs of commitment and recognizing and accepting limits and possibilities in relation to all perspectives, policies and programs.
To quote Iyer:
"Parapolitics signifies the imaginative application of seminal ideas vitalizing political theory and practice; the elaboration of fundamental principles into paradigms of relationships among persons and between civil means and humane ends; the quest for political understanding and action based upon expanding self-awareness; and the ever-receding perspective of ideals rooted in the ethics, metaphysics and psychology of self-transcendence." (Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, pg 27)
The text below has been tagged for further editing by Wikipedia:
Peter Dale Scott has uses the term "parapolitics" in a completely different manner than Professor Iyer. According to Mr. Scott,
"...the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as a `system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.'...I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional... it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture's rational surface. Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged." The term is used to describe either covert political activity that is hidden from the public or a complete (de facto) political system hidden from the public; political actions of subterfuge, secrecy, and deceit; and is increasingly used in discussions on democracy to describe coalitions of institutions and corporations who operate above or outside of the elected government.
