The political game...a critical sociology of the political field

#### This book was first published in English in 2019 by Routledge, with a title that is difficult to translate into Spanish: “Active Politics: A Critical Sociology of the Political Field,” where the word “actor” resonates simultaneously with action and performance. * With this word, my aim was to describe, starting from the title itself, the mechanisms of the contemporary political field and the activity that takes place in it (actions, as well as performances, in the theatrical and dramatic sense of the term). Given the difficulty of translating the word while preserving its multiple meanings in the English language, I quickly abandoned this idea, looking for another image that embodied the same concept. The solution I arrived at was to title this book “The Political Game: A Critical Study in the Sociology of the Political Field,” precisely because the concept of play is not limited to the possibility of separation from reality in various cultures (as Huizinga noted in his book “The Man-Player”), but goes beyond that to pretend that the political world is a stage, in front of audiences who may not be paying attention to what is going on in it. In other words, if a political game exists within a differentiated space, it is because those who play it are actors through not only theatrical, but also symbolic, representations of the interests of individuals and groups that are represented through a conflict characterized by intense debate and serious play.