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The Impossibility of Liberal Closure
Having attempted a comprehensive account of liberty - her philosophy and ethics, her history and economics, her politics including the role of the state, and her legal system - I have found, contrary to my initial presumption, that liberal closure (see Transrationality and Ethical Closure) is unattainable. In fact, I have come to conclude that liberal closure is incompatible with the fullest evolvement of liberalism`s central value: freedom.
Hayekian Conceit
In my initial Hayekian conception of a free society I endeavoured to discover principles and rules apt to reduce the need for governmental participation and intervention, emphasising the Hayekian theme that the absence of governmental discretion tends to be the preponderant condition of a spontaneous order, that is to say: not all government discretion is detrimental, but in order to achieve a free society to the fullest possible extent, arresting government discretion is likely to be the foremost strategy.
A free society I understood to be characterised by a simultaneity of peace, high degrees of personal autonomy in parallel with minimal government involvement, high productivity and unprecedented levels of wealth.
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Paths of Renunciation
First doubts appeared during the course of my analysis of anarcho-capitalist views held by authors (von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) closely associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI) in Auburn, Alabama. Surprisingly, while I had never believed in anarchism, it turned out rather a demanding task to explain why exactly I was in favour of the state. This task would preoccupy me for quite some time.
The second traits suspect from my point of view, yet strongly emphasised by the LvMI were (a) apriorism and (b) the shape von Mises tried to give it in his praxeology. Incidentally, von Mises increasingly struck me as being a crypto-anarchist, i.e. a person holding minarchist and anti-state views that are practically undistinguishable from anarchism.
Coming to grips with apriorism and anarchism would prove decisive in my turn against classical liberalism. It turned out that anarcho-capitalism has a valuable heuristic function to play in that it tends to radicalise the errors of classical liberalism. For example, classical liberalism (at least in its Hayekian variant) may be critical of the state but it does not reject the state altogether, thus creating a zone of vagueness as to the exact functions and desirable extent of governmental activism. Anarcho-capitalism takes a unequivocal stand: a good society requires the absence of the state. This is an easier target to take aim at, than a position manoeuvring between approval and rejection of the state.
Apriorism
Inspired by Hayek's critical attitude toward rationalism, von Mises' apriorism struck me at once as a form of inflated rationalism. I came to evaluate Misesian apriorism as an attempt at epistemic absolutism, a tendency to claim absolute truth, and as such a posture that is both scientifically obsolete and ultimately the handmaiden of intolerance. Human discourse must not be insulated from empirical corroboration or from the test of Popperian objectivity, i.e. the assessment of subjective propositions (views held by individuals) as the object (hence object-ivity) of critical public discourse.
Later I would turn these evaluative standards against Hayekian liberalism, too.
Anarchism
My instinctive opposition to anarchism drove me to explicate the positive functions of the state, and the consequences of their absence. I first conceptualised the state as an equilibrium institution to which we are inexorably attracted. Anarchism, by contrast, is at best an intermittent aberration suffered on the way to a new governmental equilibrium. The two fundamental conditions of human social life are violence and trust. Humans will always compete for the capacity to exert violence to dominate over others. The most effective form of organising violence is the state in its capacity as the monopolist of violent coercion. The state establishes what I call structures of maximal power (SMP). The latter can only be overcome by a new regime of SMP. Any state deviating from this strong trend will sooner or later give way to restored SMP. Anarchy is intrinsically unstable and liable to being ousted by SMP.
Having convinced myself of SMP, and hence, the state as being a constant of civilisation ever since the Neolithic Revolution (the transition of humankind from a hunter-gathered lifestyle to one of sedentary agriculture, my mind was open to further insights into the functionality of state structures, including the proposition that the state may have good grounds to advance the welfare of its population, exceptional means to attain this goal and evolve into forms where it is not juxtaposed to the populace (as a ruling elite may be vis-à-vis its subjects) but as being perfused by it.
At this point, minarchism or crypto-anarchism, to which classical liberals like von Mises and Hayek, seemed to be wedded, increasingly became suspect to me as ignoring or underestimating the positive role of the state in ensuring freedom and indeed being a vital form of living liberty. This new understanding of the state required me to look closer at the ambit of the state, in other words: politics. And so I was drawn to spelling out a theory of politics and the state.
Turning Hayek Upside Down - Towards Transrationality and a Theory of Feasible Freedom
My critique of apriorism led me to the insight that freedom is a platform on which to act out pluralism, crucial part of which is political freedom as this condition is an immediate consequence of freedom of expression and freedom of association.
My critique of anarchism convinced me that the state is social technology whose use we must and ought to compete for. From this point on, I renounced affiliation with the liberalisms that are based on a strong presumption against the state. In discovering the dubiousness of such an affiliation, I began to see Hayek through doubting eyes.
Eventually, I discovered that Hayek was arbitrarily excluding politics and the state from the realm of spontaneous order, which he reserved for economic activity and social interaction under the rule of law, which latter he portrayed as mirroring in their distinct ways the automatisms of the market. Hayek intimates that "generally accepted, abstract rules of just conduct" - his formula for the rule of law in a free society - are capable of guiding humans so as to form a benign overall spontaneous order much in the vein of the rules that make for markets that are intact and hence register exceptionally high levels of performance from which both the individual and the community benefit in unprecedented manner.
By contrast, my findings suggest that politics and the state evolve and act as a spontaneous order and that they contain the workings of an invisible hand effecting unintended positive consequences of human action directed at other objectives than those thus indirectly brought about. We may found political parties to consciously and purposefully advance specific agendas (legalisation of unions, prohibition of abortion etc.), but at the same time in pursuing party politics we may also promote transrational ends such as substituting physical wars with rhetorical wars, learning to compromise in the context of political institutions that balance partisan demands against accommodative behaviour among the contending parties, launching long-term learning experiences that establish trust, and a culture of trade-offs and toleration. Thanks to transrational games, intellectual (rational) stand-offs may get replaced by / transformed into new traditions of accommodation and considerate competition.
Transrationality is the key concept in my theory of the spontaneous order of politics and the state.
The other concept is that of politics as a discovery process, by which intuition I stand Hayek on his head, as I suggest that in order to attain feasible freedom - a dynamic equilibrium between historically maximal dissension under conditions of peaceableness, personal autonomy, productivity and wealth - the public needs to resort to political competition so as to optimise the timeliness, representativeness and completeness of information available when negotiating the conditions of a peaceably competitive civil society.
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