Zubiri’s approach to polictics a creation of our own world mediated by tradition

Abstract

This article argues for the primacy of the concept of tradition over the concept of power in the understanding of [Xavier] Zubiri’s political philosophy. The reason for that primacy is that Zubiri’s concept of society includes the public realm, which is the ordinary object of study of political science. From that stance, society can be regarded as a political community. Man is a political being in as much as he exists in society and, conversely, society exists among men. The fact that man and society belong to each other finds its diachronic expression in the concept of tradition. Tradition means possibilities being passed on. Man adopts those possibilities as his own, but he does so within a political framework that supports the construction of our own world. Possibilities are a form of power, but that power is subordinate to tradition in Zubiri’s thought. In this sense, politics cannot be approached from the
power of the one who governs, as Marquínez Argote suggests, but as a creation of a political community mediated by tradition.