Introduction: Political Theatre and the Theatre of Politics

For thousands of years, the study of politics has been understood as inseparable from the study of social life as a whole. Art, religion, history, politics, and morality were all understood as interconnected, as constituted by and constitutive of one another. To segregate the study of each from the others would have been inconceivable to the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, medieval Christians, philosophes of the European Enlightenment, Romantics, and the radical intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An ecological conception of politics, which views politics as part of a dynamic whole that is best understood—and possibly, only understood— as a whole, is still operative in many cultures to this day, and it lost its position of dominance in the West only very recently. Today it is simply taken for granted, even among most academic scholars, that politics is politics, and art is art, and the two domains share no obvious or essential connections. But this was not always so. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.