Beyond politics

a study on the political and the globalizing analysis proposed by Pierre Rosanvallon

Abstract

Drawing on Pierre Rosanvallon’s conceptual distinction between politics and the political, this article argues that the latter can only be apprehended through what Rosanvallon terms a globalizing analysis: an analytical approach that reconstructs the structures of intelligibility, legitimacy, and normativity through which collective life is organized. Rather than treating the political as a mere aggregation of institutions, actors, or events, I examine how political meaning is produced, constrained, and rendered legitimate in situations of tension and asymmetry. To do so, I analyze the boundary arbitration between Brazil and the United Kingdom, the Pirara Question (1904), and situate it within the unequal imperial international order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article shows that the arbitration instance functioned not only as a diplomatic mechanism, but as a political grammar through which Brazil sought to affirm sovereignty, legality, and international legitimacy under conditions of structural inequality. By mobilizing contributions from conceptual history, political theory, philosophy, and sociology as analytical instruments - rather than as external supplements - I demonstrate how a globalizing analysis of the political allows historians to move beyond event-centered narratives and to historicize the normative foundations of political action itself.