Attempts at Liberty (7) - A Diary Note - 24. 01. 2015

Image credit. Continued from here and here.

Yesterday I read chapters 4 and 5 in Sen's The Idea of Justice, two chapters in Stephen Holmes Benjamin Constant and worked on my own chapter on "The State."

The Idea of Justice

On the first two I shall be reporting at some future date - Sen is a very slow developer of his ideas, and is not really going much beyond repeating the advantages of a non-transcendental approach to justice (in chapter 4), and stresses the central importance of objectivity and impartiality in our quest for justice (in chapter 5). He seems to discern between (1) Popperian objectivity I as the ability to outsource inner propositions to a public platform in which subjective ideas become the OBJECT of public reasoning, and (2) Popperian objectivity II as a set of methods helping to establish truth-likeness, techniques of authenticating arguments as more or less likely to be admissible; this could include even criteria of coordinated communication, making sure people are not talking past each other.

Benjamin Constant

Holmes gives an account of Constant's life and the main perspectives that he has on liberty. Particularly inspiring is Constant's effort at equilibrating the opposite dangers of freedom from politics and over-politicisation, which I find very useful in fine-tuning my ideas about dissension and peaceableness, in which I have tended to emphasise the need for political participation - which as such I uphold; but, of course, it is important to leave space for arguments that warn us about excessive political engagement.

Also, Holmes points out the main ideas of Constant's distinction between the freedom of the ancients and the freedom of the moderns: the former corresponds pretty much with Jerry Miller's concept of civic republicanism, where freedom is freedom to be part of the politically influential public, implying though a complete submission of the individual to the polity and an absence of individual rights and the rule of law. For this reason the freedom of the ancients, idealised at the time of Constant, does not qualify as an ideal to me imitated by the moderns.

Flow of Argument in My Chapter on "The State"

The two single most important challenges to any human community are violence and distrust. If the many other fundamental challenges of communal life are to be tackled with any chances of success, a community must

• keep destructive violence at bay, 

• ensure its ability to operationalise violence for productive purposes (defending against outsiders and policing insiders), and 

• create levels of trust amongst its members, 

• (a) allowing for coordination and cooperation sufficient enough to sustain peaceful coexistence, thus

• (b) guaranteeing the community's survival amidst scarcity and rival communities.