Politics (10) - Political Man Ultimate Resource in Social Affaires & Flow Theory vs. Inventory Theory of Freedom & Politics Civilising Power - (10) Februrary 2013 - Literature Review of My Work on Politics and Freedom

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Continued from here.

P014 The Blue Gravel Walk of Freedom from 02/03/2013

In this post from February 2013, I am sill wedded to an obscure ideal of cut-and-dry freedom hovering intangibly somewhere in the nondescript background of the more graspable argument rolled out to show that liberty is conditional in manifold ways. Two worlds are meeting in this text: my past as a libertarian and my future as a researcher of liberty. What makes the difference between the two is my transition from 

• expelling politics from the realm of freedom, as the libertarian is wont to do - for being alien and detrimental to it 

to a

• new pragmatism which recognises that like science, which does not happen spontaneously, improvements in social arrangements depend on human volition and design. 

It is strangely inconsistent to extol Julian Simon, author of the thesis that human beings are the ultimate resource - proposing that resources do not exist independent of human design - while insisting on a minimal, by nature rather problematic role of man's discretionary activities in most other areas of life where human intervention may be applied. The power of trial and error applied under the guardianship of a highly intelligent species is not broken once we enter the field of social organisation. Yes, we are prone to errors, but we are not at all precluded from operating as the ultimate resource in forming the conditions of mutual coexistence among ourselves. The fact that we do commit fatal errors in this regard does not prove that human design sends us up an blind alley; to the contrary, it only goes to show that such intervention is an art, perhaps even a science in some respects, that demands of us learning and the sieving of good and bad practices.

On rereading the post three years later, I would like to emphasise that I have come to appreciate freedom is a process rather than a fixed and finite set of sates of affairs. It is a way of dealing with one another in a certain spirit and under certain rules. The most important overall outcome is that no social force attains absolute preponderance over the citizenry in its multiplicity, and that the means and possibilities of challenging the status quo (of power holders, opinions, social norms - you name it) remain in place for any free citizen to turn to.

Vociferous defenders of liberty tend to imply an inventory of freedom (inventory theory of freedom), shall we say: a warehouse with an assortment of goods, whose complete availability represents freedom whereas any damage to the wares or removal from the store represent violation of freedom. By contrast, freedom is more like a flow process like a river whose relatively constant shape is subject to permanent flux (the flow theory of freedom).

Very broadly speaking freedom is a way of communicating, rather than an entitlement to expect certain invariant outcomes. All this is due to the fact that freedom is brought about through the human capacity to act politically.

Markets and other manifestations of liberty (like the rule of law) are not self-generating (unless you look at the matter in the most extensive time dimensions); they are dependent on conditions exogenous to the processes of liberty.

This is why I am interested in politics and the state; it is not sufficient to look at politics and the state from a purely normative point of view, you have to capture them in a positive theory to understand how they are related to the emergence, the contemporary stage and shape of freedom and its future prospects.

Liberty is a lot more messy than many people think - or to put it - hopefully - more felicitously: I think of liberty as a gravel walk.

In between the gravel are beautiful blue globules. The globules are manifestations of liberty; the gravel is all sorts of other stuff, relevant and irrelevant, but also lots of stuff adverse to liberty. 

Historically, today and in the future liberty will always be fragmentary, dispersed, discontinuous, displaced, flattened, stretched, disrupted, superimposed upon by other stuff - in a word: liberty will always be a shimmering scheme in a gravel walk with different densities and distributional patterns of blue globules.

So, we ought to develop a keen eye for liberty in its real dispersion, in its actual coexistence with phenomena and structures many of which being antithetical to freedom or ambivalent vis-à-vis liberty, such as state structures.

To be able to defend and further liberty in the real world, I must be prepared to recognise it in its granular spread amongst the gravel. Liberty is often contaminated with non-liberty and the transition between liberty and non-liberty is continuous, rather than discrete, and this within a multidimensional grid - there are blue globules underneath the top gravel.

The same agents and institutions may both enforce and destroy liberty, consider for an example disparate practices of the legal system. I agree with most of the things expressed in this blog in favour of free markets and liberty, which is why I am interested in what we have not yet said about liberty, especially that it is happening amongst us, right next to goings-on hardly compatible with liberty. I want to be able to name some of the 2 567 876 acts that every minute are committed in the USA to make liberty happen (including acts attributable to the Aunt Sallys of libertarian critique, like state institutions) - and not only the 3 453 876 acts perpetrated against liberty.

I want to understand the imperfection of liberty, to appreciate her the better, to grasp her more realistically and to be able to act more effectively in her favour in the messy, messy political arena, where she is born and reborn, savaged and yet reborn anew.

The source.

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P015 Alchian on Politics from 02/02/2013 

is a good summary of my criticism of anarchism, my defence of the state and the role of politics in civilising the inevitable structures of maximal power in human communities.

There are disagreements and competing ends among human beings that cannot be removed by voluntary market transactions.

Von Mises despises anarchism and praises the state. An anarcho-capitalist despises the state and praises anarchism.

I would like to meet someone who could demonstrate to me how a market product, how transacting in free markets can overcome the antagonism between the classical liberal von Mises and his anarchist opponent. Even if it were possible to offer political systems - like classical liberalism or anarchism - as vendable products, you cannot buy both, "the liberal state" and "anarchism".

You will have to resolve or, more generally, manage the differences on another plane. You need politics to sort these things out. And politics inexorably develops structures of maximal power, the most effective form of which being the state.

However, it is not a foregone conclusion at all that organising (structures of maximal) power is of necessity and uni-dimensionally destructive or otherwise evil.

To argue otherwise is tantamount to claiming that the development of humankind is an unmitigated descent into infernal conditions. After all, the technologies of power have advanced tremendously since Genghis Khan complained that an empire cannot be ruled from the back of a horse - implying that he could do a good job either at fighting and conquering or at ruling, but he could not do both properly. Since Genghis Khan's days, we have managed to organise power so as to dramatically improve levels of peaceableness, wealth, and welfare.

These attainments required us to act as political animals, as shapers and tamers of power and its most effective instrument: the state.

The consequences of the state are prismatic and ambivalent, like those of other tools with infinite uses. No one would say, a knife is evil just because a knife can be used quite improperly. And would it be sensible to suggest that human life is naturally and in any case evil, just because it can be a way of engendering as well as suffering evil?

By contrast, the absence of a dominant power results in disoriented and vehement struggles for preeminence. Hence empirically, anarchy is a highly violent state that sooner or later gives way to a more peaceful one, i.e. a more efficient structure of preeminent power.

On the scale of historic time, anarchy is a brief episode of violent anomie. As an operable societal model, it is quite simply an impossibility. It is too destructive to survive.

The theory of anarchism, in whose perspective state power is a monolith of evil, precludes itself from analysing structures of maximal power as part of the universe of evolutionary adaptations that are summarised in the term human progress.

Characteristically, anarchist theory seeks to immunise itself against empirical challenge by claiming to be rooted in an imperturbable foundation of self-evident premises.

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Continued here.