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I am sifting through the numerous RedStateEclectic posts that I have dedicated to examining the relationship between politics and freedom. In this series of posts I shall endeavour a literature review of these posts, hoping to extract titbits to be included in the second chapter of Attempts at Liberty (see also here and here and here), entitled "Politics".
My visit to Bodrum (Turkey in late September, early October 2012) marks a turning point in my research into freedom. The radically dogmatic dismissal of the state and the function of politics in a free society that I encountered among the elite of anarcho-capitalism and prominent exponents of The Mises Institute(s) from all over the world at the one-week conference struck me like a provocation that I could not leave unanswered on my part. I may have been naive in expecting a conference attended by a large variety of open-minded scholars; what I encountered was the worst form of politically correct uniformity ever - I felt even less free to express my thoughts than during my visits to various Communist countries in the 1970s and 1980s. From then on I embarked on a search for a number of questions, among them rather centrally: why am I not an anarchist - and have never been. Which turned out to compel me to better understand how the state works, to look with appropriate care at the intricate conditions and constraints of 'the state', an issue that evidently is closely linked to "politics".
So here is the first of the many posts that reflect my interest in politics and the state - I tend to use the compound phrase ("politics and the state"), but now I am looking for what is specific to politics and justifies dealing with it as a subject almost sui generis.
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In the below article I am largely concerned with the state, but I make mention of politics too. The correspondence with an anti-state libertarian is interesting, written in November 2012, it shows how I have been able to emancipated myself rather quickly, that is since September 2012, from ideological blinkers.
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P(olitics) - 001 More Thoughts on The State from (11/30/2012)
The main finding here is that - emphasis added:
We libertarians have no effective theory of political change toward more freedom (we can only hope it will somehow happen, in the process becoming mopers), and that has to do with our normatively motivated disdain for and prejudice against the state.
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P - 002 Prelude Concerning the State from (11/20/2012)
Here I set the stage for an appreciation of the state as a tool of liberty, a factor to be reckoned with in a free society, by putting the evils associated with the state in a wider perspective encouraging a better understanding of the role of politics:
In fact, adjusted to scale, I would not be surprised if pre-state human communities betrayed at least as enormous and as systematic a propensity for atrocities and other morally outrageous activities as can be discerned in a history of the state. With uneven success, admittedly, progress in terms of peace and humaneness seems inseparable from the presence of state structures and impossible to deliver by more rudimentary forms of human association. And indeed, if one mentions the misery and carnage attributable to the human instrument called 'the state', one ought to give consideration to opposite effects as well: how many (billions of) human beings were able to live to begin with thanks to the presence of a civilizational package containing the 'state' element, and not just live, but live lives of significantly increasing quality? [...]Differentiating good governance structures from bad ones seems to me a more promising, yet a less uplifting and far more cumbersome and intricate proposition than a general hankering after a stateless utopia. [...]Neither markets nor liberty can self-generate their indispensable preconditions - these depend on politics, and as long as politics remains even just a residuum there will be organised power and the state.
I no longer agree with the following assessment, tough:
Constraining state power is likely to be [the] best we can achieve.
I see a larger scope for designed improvement, with the state serving as a new social technology empowering us in unprecedented ways to attain betterment - as I have argued in the first chapter on The State. In fact, I worked out another paradox of freedom: If you want a more powerful state, if you want really big (and not only brutally effective but socially efficient) government, constrain it.
The subsequent statement reveals inner conflicts of transition - I am still emotionally attached to identifying myself as a classical liberal and try to incorporate my new findings into what I perceive to be classical liberalism's true beliefs. Characteristically, I do not clearly differentiate between "is" and "ought" - and I am to this day not clear whether classical authors can be put on stage to demonstrate my thesis that liberalism ought to be regarded as a welcome form of "statism". (Most liberal classics are presumably ambivalent in that respect and it takes some averaging of their views to arrive at liberali statism. See my Average Freedom.)
I believe classical liberalism is fundamentally a theory of the (successfully constrained) state. Classical liberals are - in a way - statists, and ought to be.
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In
P - 003 A Hard Day's Work, from 11/13/2012
I am still mainly concerned with the state - nevertheless, for my present purposes, I would like to point out that the ideas expressed below do imply the importance of politics, especially modern politics in a free society. In the post, I am still strongly attached to the libertarian presumption against the state, which is why I overstate my case by proposing sweepingly that natural risks are increasingly being replaced by social risks. In the meantime I have come to think that it is precisely the task of modern politics to make sure that social arrangements that mitigate risks from nature are not themselves becoming inordinately risky.
Man is an uncertainty remover. In this capacity humankind has invested enormously in the business of reducing uncertainties (threatening its survival and welfare) that arise in the physical world. The result of man's efforts are mind-boggling. However, in order to achieve the levels of advancement in improving his protection against an adverse environment, man had to chance upon as well as create appropriate tools not only in the physical world but in the social realm as well. A certain, more advanced level of command over the physical world presupposes commensurately higher degrees of specialisation, division of labour and concomitant social complexity.[...D]uring the course of human progress man replaces uncertainty emanating from the physical world by uncertainty generated by the social world. More complex social arrangements help conquer the physical environment more effectively, but expose the species to new risks of a social nature. Nowadays, we are not as much jeopardized, say, by the inclemency of weather than by defects in the social "technologies" that we have chanced upon and developed by and by to be able to gain more control over nature.Storms are less of a problem than Stalin.
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