Attempts at Liberty (5) - Themes - Government and the State

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Continued from Attempts at Liberty (4) - Themes - History

I have additions to this list: 

• Economics,

• Politics (& Democracy),

• Law,

• History,

• Government ( & the State),

• Philosophy,

namely:

• Liberalism and Other Claimants of Freedom

• Knowledge and Science,

• Thinkers and Theories of Freedom

• Conclusion: Paradoxes, Myths, and Surprises 

Today I want to write about the potential chapter on "Government and the State"

Government and State - Two Distinct Terms?

I will use the terms interchangeably, but do note they can assume distinct meanings, as in German: die Regierung (government) and der Staat (the state). Die Regierung is considered to be occupying itself with ruling, that is: issuing decrees, ordinances, statutes, laws - enjoining the addressees, often the population at large, to act or not to act in certain ways. By and large, it is fair to say, regieren is issuing commands, whose violation will be sanctioned.

Der Staat is a more comprehensive term, it includes government (Regierung), but encompasses far more than the commanding function delegated to public authorities, comprising executive organs (administrative bodies etc.), state projects and enterprises, such as public transport, schools and universities, the military and so on.

Writing about the State

I have decided to take the chapter on the state as my entry project in actually writing up Attempts at Liberty. I have worked extensively on the subject and have plenty of fully formulated material in my abandoned vast German manuscript on Freiheit verstehen. 

I dare say, in-depth research into the nature of the state and its relationship with freedom has led to an epiphanic turn in my attitude toward freedom. 

Many liberals tend to blow up the tension between freedom and the state into a strong presumption against the latter, often to the point where they become crypto-anarchists, that is they argue as if they were anarchist while on asking them they would deny being anarchists.

It was the arrogance and, indeed, totalitarian intolerance, of a group of anarcho-capitalists with whom I spent a week of conferencing in Turkey that triggered in me a strong impulse to come up with a clear justification of my strong intuition that the state is an institution needed to ensure liberty.

Soon I managed to come up with a crop of arguments in favour of the state as an indispensable institution of freedom. These insights heralded my departure from (modern, strongly anti-government varieties of ) classical liberalism. 

One's attitude vis-à-vis the state is absolutely pivotal in one's conception of freedom. I would argue that liberalisms espousing a strong presumption against the state do not understand liberty. They are anti-government ideologies but not strictly speaking doctrines of freedom. The reality of feasible freedom is much better captured in the notion that liberty requires a strong state, while a strong state prospers when it is constrained by binding rules. In a free society, a strong state is structured so as to significantly contribute of its won accord and by its very nature to resolving the tension between freedom and public coercive authorities.

Freedom cannot prevail in the absence of a state. At the same time, there s no guarantee that the state may never get usurped by forces that turn it against freedom, and even less so is there a guarantee that no action taken by the state, even in a free society, is immune to criticisms suggesting the violation of freedom. The latter aspect, however, is an inevitable and productive feature of the state in a free society. Freedom and the legitimate business of the state are under permanent discussion in a free society. In a free society there can never be complete disagreement as to what freedom is and to what extent she has been achieved. 

Almost paradoxically, freedom is a state of the world that ensures that freedom remains contentious, with wide-spread and severe but not explosive conflicts of opinion.

With this I turn to John Gray's chapter 9 "The Liberal State" in his book "Liberalism".