The State - (10) - [Draft] - Conclusion

Image credit. Continued from here.

§ 40 - Less Power Is More Power

Freedom requires stability and predictability of human interaction in a community that adds up to

• peace, 

and in combination with other elements of freedom, to

• cooperation on an unprecedented level of productivity.

This is where the vital link between freedom and the state comes into the picture. For its functioning, strength, and effectiveness, the state too depends on the kind of peaceful coexistence with and among its citizens that derives from stability, predictability, and productive cooperation in a community.

At the same time that the state is rationally interested in productivity- and wealth-enhancing peace, it is uniquely capable of ensuring conditions that promote a free and peaceful society.

Jean Bodin discovered and elucidated in the 16th century that less power is more power. 

In his work he explains that adherence to binding rules makes for credibility and efficiency in a ruler. An earnest willingness to make concessions to the needs of its subjects and even to devolve rights and responsibilities of power to them captures important segments of the populace by making them duty-bound, obligated by responsibility and sharing a stake in the stability of the order that has given them a voice and a station.

At the outset, we have roughly defined freedom as containment of arbitrariness.

In this sense, freedom gradually becomes a tool of sovereign power. The hinge that couples freedom, power, and the state is the paradoxical experience that by decreasing arbitrariness vis-à-vis his subjects the ruler gains in popularity and effectiveness. The state's ability to effect larger, socially valuable goals increases. For instance, a sovereign that consults his subjects before levying more taxes tends to foster the willingness of the people to pay taxes and thus ultimately broadens his tax base. 

Power-sharing turns compliance into voluntary cooperation.

Delegation strengthens the credibility and effectiveness of power. Thus, separation of power e.g. leaves the unpleasant task of conviction and punishment to a neutral, rule-based, objectivity-seeking agency rather than the ruler, who reserves acts of grace to his portfolio of competences, advantageously claiming to exercise power based on non-arbitrary justice while having everyone benefit from the efficiency of a professional judicial system.

  

Freedom of speech improves the level of pertinent information available to the ruler, whose ability to help or react judiciously is enhanced, which in turn buttresses her popular legitimacy. A free-spoken  citizenry with its representative bodies is instrumental in improving the monitoring of policies. Showing the people respect by according rights and power to them creates a new base for recognition and active support of the sovereign.

Power has its subtleties and paradoxes. Making the best of them is what freedom is about. At certain strategic junctures, the state can afford to be weak, because it is very strong, not only and primarily in terms of physical coercion - no, more importantly, because it has capabilities no other agents can bring to the table: consider religious toleration in Bodin's age when faith-based strife gives the state a chance to become stronger than ever.

Restricted by self-imposed religious neutrality and toleration, the state shows the way to solve the excruciating problem of violence in religiously intolerant society. It has the capacity to break the feud dynamics among religious zealots, stepping in as a level-headed mediator capable of implacable peace enforcement and reasonable arbitration in a community that cannot achieve peace without external help.

The state functions as a transrational go-between (see below) that represents its citizens but not their vengeful ambitions, repressing lethally destructive fervour by imposing conditions of peace like the prohibition of public debate on religious issues that ultimately brings about the privatisation of faith. 

In organising religious toleration, the state engages in a variant of peace-keeping whereby dangerous tension is reduced by diffusing it in multiplicity, neutralising the dangerous side-effects of faction by creating an atmosphere of pluralism. Instead of letting the foes segregate into regional base camps from which to fight religious wars, they are absorbed by a larger kingdom, where faction is reduced by plurality and peace is being kept by a tolerant role model of toleration that is stronger than any of the inflammable parties.

This is another case of the state organising transrational solutions. The latter are due to arrangements whereby contenders, locked into dissension that is insurmountable from what appears to each party to be a position of ultima ratio, are given strong incentives to avert their energies from the deadly impasse to issues often similarly weighty but more amenable to agreement. Crudely speaking, the state is in a position to entice citizens to move from

• single shot games that provide no release from mutually destructive absolute disagreement

to 

• iterated games that widen the horizon of mutual advantage for the involved contenders.    

Less power is more power: From Spinoza to John Milton, from Locke to Montesquieu, from Hume and Kant to Thomas Jefferson, numerous later writers associated with the liberal tradition would take up this crucial insight to expand on and variegate it. In fact, germinating liberalism and the impetus it gave to the growth of freedom are deeply inspired by the discovery of power as a productive force, a source and conduit of energy to be marshalled next to the fossil fuels and the steam engine that help make the leap into the era of open access societies.

Freedom, as I will argue more fully below in § 41, is a scales with two pans: dissension and pacification. By virtue of balancing dissension and pacification, violence and distrust are transformed into constructive competition and effective trust. For such balance to be attained,

• the state is forced to admit dissension, if it is to operate on a satisfactory level of effectiveness, and security both for itself and for the citizenry. 

Simultaneously, 

• the state needs to have sufficient power and authority to provide the public goods of freedom, including mechanisms - like the political infrastructure within which political competition and mass dissent take place - that keep the centrifugal (anomy-oriented) and centripetal (unduly power-concentrating) forces of open pluralism within the bounds of a society characterised by unprecedented peaceableness, personal autonomy, productivity and wealth.

§ 41 - Freedom = Democratised Dissent + Appropriate Pacification

In essence, freedom is a balance of

• democratised high pressure mass dissent

and 

• pacification strong enough to (a) diffuse the pressure of democratised dissent and (b) channel and (c) non-destructively combine it with the other ingredients of peaceful coexistence in a free society.

Power under Freedom

Power takes on a specific meaning in open access societies as we encounter them in the most advanced historical stage of freedom: power turns out to be dependent on dissension, while at the same time the exercise of power is conditional upon an ability to ensure pacification both by embracing the populace through competence sharing and concessions to their needs, as well as by implacable coercion based on popular legitimacy and effective trust. 

Freedom - a Balance of Dissension and Pacification 

We may summarise:

Dissension - Requirement and Result of Open Access Power:

(a) Dissension - Requirement of Open Access Power Power

(b) Dissension - Result of Open Access Power

Pacification - Requirement and Result of Power:

(a) Pacification - Requirement of Open Access Power

(b) Pacification - Result of Open Access Power Power

Politics is about

• organising the state under conditions of open dissent and appropriate countervailing pacification, 

or, as one may also put it, politics is about

• using the state to organise open dissent and appropriate countervailing pacification. 

Being home and dry with these results, it is time to turn to the subject-matter of politics in a free society.

Tenth of ten sequels on "The State", and 

End of Chapter "The State"