Politics (4) -- (4) Causal Steps / Stages of Political Activity & Rights Need Incessant Political Support & Lever of Influence -- Literature Review of My Work on Politics and Freedom

Image credit. It is March, and winter is losing its power. We had a mild winter, anyway. However, March brought a spell of snow, which is quickly thawing in the strengthening sun.

 Continued from here.

In the below post, I extend and deepen the rationale for the need of politics in a free society and its inevitable presence in any type of human community.

Concerning politics, my basic point is that being resourceful, humans have plenty of reasons and motives to differ from one another, which creates rivalrous strategies that call for powerful instruments of assertion. Manoeuvring for advantage involves political schemes.

One might postulate a hierarchy of causal steps - (a) rivalrous personal objectives encourage us (b) to embark upon political scheming (c) to achieve these ends, especially (d) by conquering the structures of maximal power which are (e) perfected in the institution of the state. So some of our ambitions lead some of us to pursue political strategies that make them usurp or share in the enforcement power of the state. Getting there and shaping (the nature and quality of) the state requires political activism. There is no alternative to it. Not everyone will participate in politics, but some will, and this is enough to make the consequences of political activity inescapable to all of us. Certain threats or ambitions are so strong, they make some of us seek the level of power that it takes to avert the menace or fulfil the aspiration.

I would call this the anthropological base of politics: the need to organise different reactions among human beings to fears and ambitions.

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P006 - Why the State Persists from 12/01/2012

[N]either markets nor more generally liberty are capable of creating their own preconditions.

These preconditions are of a political nature. In Alchian's words, you have to incessantly "persuade the rest of society to enforce [certain] rights ... if they don`t ... we don't have them ... they're gone."

These rights have to be negotiated, fought for and established outside of the markets and within a framework that is not identical with and does enclose liberty only if you are lucky and politically/persuasively successful.

And this political process is an ongoing one. It does not stop at any point. Not even if a libertarian dictator prohibited that process, it would reassert itself sooner or later.

Why?

People are resourceful, imaginative and very diverse. This creates all the time any number of new and diverging ideas, interests and ambitions. Among these ideas, interests and ambitions there are many that drive people to seek to efficaciously influence other human beings and society at large. One avenue that gets you to exercise this influence is the political process. The most effective use of the political process allows you to access the most powerful instrument for impacting other people and society at large - and that is the state.

Hence, there will always be a tremendous demand for that instrument: the state.

If you drop out of the competition for state leverage of your concerns, others will overtake you gladly and mercilessly, and lever their goals (and send you back to "square one"). A free society cannot stop that ongoing process, and ought not to. And hence, a free society is always prone to see interests and ideological proclivities ascend that are detrimental to liberty, just like an unfree society may see interests and ideological proclivities rise (and at some point eclipse again) that are favourable to freedom.

There is no totally reliable way known so far to control these swings (in favour of more rather than less liberty). Freedom is even more endangered, if out of disdain for the state you do not even make an effort to create political structures that protect liberty, but piously hope for private arrangements to do the trick -- after all the Wild West's cowboys could do without the state and some ancient Icelandic communities, too.

It is this core content of the demand for politics-and-the-state that explains the persistence of the state.

Whatever the merits and demerits, relative efficiencies and inefficiencies of the state, say, as transaction-costs-reducer and scale-economy-provider of protection, punishment and rights enforcer, it is this influence-leveraging component in the vast package of state services that makes it indispensable and always in demand by the most active and ambitious in society.

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Continued here.