Kenneth Minogue (1930-2013) Politics: A Very Short Introduction (1995)
Chapter 13. Can Politics Survive the Twenty-first Century?
...We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be reinterpreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring harmony. In other words, in this new form of society, human beings are becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral ideas.
The echo of the past always illuminates. Qui bono? the Romans used to ask. Who benefits? In an egalitarian world, everyone is equal, except perhaps the managers of equality. And certainly in the foreseeable future, there will be endless and not unprofitable work for those whose business it is to spell out in ever greater detail the rules of the game of life, and to adjudicate conflict, and to teach the benighted what thoughts a just society requires. Politics will have died, but everything will be politics.