Politics - Organising Coerced Cooperation
Man depends both on voluntary cooperation and on coerced cooperation. Politics organises coerced cooperation.
Typically, a large part of coerced cooperation does not depend on the exercise but the threat of coercion. Politically induced cooperation may be attained via persuasion and voluntary conversion, but in a large number of cases political effectiveness ultimately depends on the credible threat of coercive enforcement.
True, not under all circumstances is coercion tantamount to imposition and oppression. The need for coercion may be generally recognised, and its acceptance may be taken for granted or even actively supported thanks to internalisation via education, habit, or indulgent inertia.
True, in many liberal democracies, the peaceful transition of governmental power by virtue of the electoral process is taken for granted nowadays.
However, try to run counter to the rules of the electoral game, forge ballot input or intimidate people so as (not) to vote in a certain way, and at once you will realise that the process is backed up by force.
However, try to run counter to the rules of the electoral game, forge ballot input or intimidate people so as (not) to vote in a certain way, and at once you will realise that the process is backed up by force.
The point here is that there is a dimension to politics that makes it ultimately different from other forms of human social interaction in that it relies on coercive enforcement.
A world without politics would be a world without enforceable social behaviour. And politics is resorted to when we seek to establish enforceable behaviour in a community. This is why politics is closely tied to the presence of an agent - the state - with enforcement capabilities superior to that of any other agent.
Politics tells the state what to do. Politics determines who is allowed to influence the state and, in particular, who is the legitimate management of the state.
Politics tells the state what to do. Politics determines who is allowed to influence the state and, in particular, who is the legitimate management of the state.
Political Scarcity and the Indelible Need for Politics
Political behaviour has its root cause in the fact that people generate conflicts amongst themselves that are insurmountable on the basis of voluntary compromise / give and take / agreement. Politics is the spectrum of options that are available to give preference to one decision in the face of mutually exclusive decisions.
Notice, the lack of unanimity in deciding (important) issues - so-called political scarcity - is an anthropological constant. i.e. it is something that is necessarily present in any human community, down to a partnership between two persons. Thus, politics is an inevitable part of human efforts to cope with the challenges of life. There is bad politics, and it deserves our criticism, calling for attempts at avoiding or improving it. But no plausible and realistic conception of "the good society" can possibly aim at abolishing the indelible need for politics.
Freedom and Politics
In defining politics as efforts to ensure social validity of certain practices among human beings, we ought to recognise that not all socially valid practices are the result of politics. However, as we noted above, a world without enforceable social behaviour is impossible. Thus, many of the guidelines and restraints that orient our behaviour are socially compelled thanks to political commitment. This also holds true for behaviour in a free society. There is a need to authoritatively establish norms to be generally heeded so as to ensure freedom among members of a community. Freedom evolves over lengthy periods of time; she is not the result of a one-off founding event, like a convention in which a social contract is ratified. Nevertheless as freedom unfolds her continued existence depends increasingly on the possibility of participation of all citizens (concentric circles of freedom) in the process whereby the power structure and the rules are established that underlie a free society.
Freedom must be sustained by power, and power is sustained by politics, which latter defines the conditions and objectives of power.
The special and inalienable significance of politics for freedom derives from the fact that it is not enough to proclaim and implement certain rules whose observance results in freedom; rather, what is needed to approximate conditions of freedom is the establishment of a political process and a power structure that are capable of supporting liberty, which is a dynamic process that includes multifarious interests, views, and ambitions whose accommodation will never admit of a static and predictable pattern of its outcome ( = liberty).
Politics and the state are immanent to freedom. They are needed to achieve her.
Not surprisingly, throughout history, freedom has taken shape by offering opposition and alternatives to extant forms of politics and the state, especially those exhibiting high levels of repression and arbitrariness.
Political scarcity
Here, we introduce the concept of political scarcity (see also above), which we define as "Zuspruchsknappheit" - a lack of concurrence -.
Obviously, not just any lack of concurrence matters. The old lady, on being asked what the giant turtle rests on on which, in turn, according to her cosmology, the world is resting, replied: "It's turtles all the way down." Who concurs with her view? Hardly anyone. Does it matter? No.
Political scarcity designates a state of affairs whereby
- resistance to - a lack of communal concurrence vis-à-vis -
- a proposal (that bears on the community and is usually ardently desired or opposed, respectively, by socially weighty groups)
- is so pronounced as to have significant social consequences.
For instance, a topic such as abortion is likely to generate political scarcity. Its social consequences may include the blocking of access to or the dismissal from power of a political party representing the views and interests of large sections of the population.
Trans-Rationality
Incidentally, this example shows that man has made progress in partially resolving political scarcity by shifting the conflictual energy of hardened disagreement onto a new plane, where the seminal power of strife is dissipated by directing it into the channels of legitimacy, i.e. procedures that are generally recognised as bringing about fair decisions - especially considering the long-term - in the face of an impasse of disagreement.
Politics is not only of
- the traditional type, which reduces options by emphasising custom, or of
- the Machiavellian type, which tends to expect feasible outcomes to be dominated by egotistical and particularistic strategies emphasising guile, fraud, and violence; there is also
- politics of the freedom-regarding type that seeks to redefine contention in terms that include the entire population and are broad enough to leave space for credible long-term reconciliation.
Politics as Foundational Rule-Setting
The most fundamental tension inhering the human condition originates in the twin position of man as individual and social being. No matter how socially subordinated (in a tightly knit group of hunter-gatherers) or outright repressed (in Stalinist Russia), man as individual has a unique view of the world to which correspond equally unique notions of need and desire. These proclivities may not be well developed and assertive in a given individual, but they are extant in all of us and gain presence and force either (a) through resonance among the weak contributors or (b) by dint of forceful protagonists spearheading deviant needs and desires, or (c) thanks to interaction between both (a) and (b).
Peculiar interests and a corresponding desire to align the world to these interests are constitutive to the individual human being. For this reason it is equally constitutive to the individual to seek to influence not only the inanimate environment but also her fellow humans. Thus, every human being has a potential to develop a political agenda, a list of concerns that she would like her community to conform to.
The endeavour to influence the community so as to make it conform to certain preferred expectations and practices, is the very essence of politics.
Setting apart the issue of purpose and self-consciousness, it appears evident that non-human animals too engage in politics. That is, they seek to influence their community to make it conform to their desires. This is apparent in an alpha animal that insistently acts upon the members of her community to subordinate them to her leadership. But in practising politics, non-human animals do not stray far from the ambit that makes sense in terms of their instincts. A horse will bolt or attack, but it will not set up an elaborate trap to cope with the political challenges by other horses. For a number of reasons (physiology, brain structure, lack of higher language functions etc.) multi-step reasoning is no option in horses, but if it were to emerge, it would hardly progress beyond the most rudimentary stages, as it literally would not make sense to the animal, leading too far away from the reassurance of its instincts.
Man is different. Man has an urge to venture farther and farther away from the confines of his instincts. Man has even evolved an instinct to question his instincts. He dares challenge the reassurance of his instincts because he has auxiliary means at his disposal that protect him on his expeditions away from the instinctual home turf: he has reasoning to safeguard him, learning, human objectivity, educated trial and error.
Political activism is exceptionally pronounced in humans, because of their natural ability to
- evolve sophisticated perspectives of the self and from the point of view of the self,
- differentiate their own position vis-à-vis their fellows, and
- build self-enhancing strategies based on multi-step reasoning.
Man has almost unlimited powers of imagination and persuasion. He has the capability of divining visions. His entire biological makeup is geared toward adapting to the world around him by envisaging new desires and working out techniques of realising them.
Man is naturally eager to make an impact on the community in which he lives.
Making Sense of the World - By Means of Politics
Acts of political self-expression play a pivotal role in lending meaning to the world in which we live. The intentions of political actors are highly versatile. Among its many objectives, politics aims at creating a community of credible morality, it strives to establish justice or preserve the well-tried corners of the world in which have comfortably settled, and it is an activity dedicated to implementing our ideals and defending them as far as humanely possible. Politics is a major contributor to our sense of reality, it feeds our readiness and ability to perceive what we accept as the real world. Politics is a creative force that accommodates the human urge to live in a world that makes sense and where things accord with our idea of order.
We are, in no small measure, the inventors, the furnishing artisans of the biases through which we experience and evaluate social conditions. In judging social "reality", we enclose egregious errors in our perceptions, we are subject to deception, we chase rainbows and fall prey to phantasms. In weaving the narrative texture of society and its supporting conventions, we cannot rely on formulae that assure us of the ultimate truth. The projection of society varies from person to person, and our talking past one another may remain as unnoticed as the differing meanings that we attach to the noises of our common vocabulary.
The market may enable us to rearrange property rights so as to attain Pareto improvements. The market may be an excellent coordinator of the household budgets of people who will never get to know each other. But the market cannot give birth to ideals, it cannot form purposes and objectives, nor can it chain ideas to feelings. The market cannot obey a calculus that lies outside its own regularities. The market is an experiment nested in an experimental set up far more complex and comprehensive than itself. The market takes its data, its preconditions, its beginning and its end from the super-experiment of human life. Markets are shaped by politics.
Continued here.
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