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Continued from here.
Quick summary of the main points in Prelude to Politics (4):
Freedom may be regarded as an
- interconnected system of lower-level public goods (such as political freedom) constituting in aggregate the higher-level public good of liberty.
Thus, freedom necessitates agencies capable of providing public goods, the most important and most powerful provider of public goods being the modern state. In that sense, freedom demands big government.
In order to be able to serve as a universal service provider, the state must be restricted by rules that tie it to demands and capabilities suitable to the attainment of high levels of social performance. Restricting government in order to make it powerful enough to sustain freedom requires the involvement of the broad public in the definition of the aims of the state and the control and management of government performance.
Freedom and Big Government - Adaptations to the Seminal Evolutionary Trend Toward Individualism
I would tend to think of the modern state as being a more or less natural response to the descent of communal forms of exceptionally high social cohesion and the ascent of modular man, which I define as:
Important government functions - the one's that make for liberty - are geared toward individualism and especially toward increasing the efficiency effects of individualism. Broadly, this is an evolutionary trend, even though conscious adaptations to an individualistic world do play an important role in the emergence of modular man.
The state leverages the individualistic trend by organising institutions such as political freedom, equality (of the right to participate) in politics and before the law, property rights that strengthen personal autonomy etc.
In this way, the state becomes the most radical privatiser of life ever recorded in history. The massive privatisation of countless dimensions of social life includes the law and ethics.
Law, Freedom, and Individualism
Concerning law, freedom has the effect that huge areas of human discretion are now
determined
which is protected by the law ("higher legislation") so long as the decisions taken within the newly granted private "sub-legislations" comply with the grander legal framework. So effectively, individual citizens create law where it did not exist before (e.g. founding associations with functions uninhibited by government, etc) or where it was pre-empted by impositions of the authorities (e.g. vocational choices, religious affiliation etc).
Ethics, Freedom, and Individualism
Concerning ethics, modular differentiation of society and man (individualism) is accompanied by a multiplication of accounts and claims of justice and just behaviour - for many reasons, one of which arising from the fact that individualism makes possible separation from and challenges to stayed ways of life and their concomitant notions of justice and just behaviour.
With communal uniformity no longer assured, a new mode of justice emerges in which the possibility of accommodation between alternate views of life is always a parameter in determining right and wrong - absolute justice does not become relative justice, but justice legitimised (not only by basic culturally accepted values but also mots importantly) by consensual procedure.
Freedom is the transcending of socially uniform justice by legitimacy-producing, justice-mediating politics.
Continued here.
Freedom and Big Government - Adaptations to the Seminal Evolutionary Trend Toward Individualism
I would tend to think of the modern state as being a more or less natural response to the descent of communal forms of exceptionally high social cohesion and the ascent of modular man, which I define as:
- man constantly rebuilding his identity by slipping into varying modes of status and function (identity-building modules) that make him fit into circumstances unregulated by the customs and ideology of a close-knit (quasi-ancestral) cultural community -,
- the individual as an agent capable of autonomous action far beyond the limits of culturally-bonded humans under the tutelage of tribal and kinship communities.
Important government functions - the one's that make for liberty - are geared toward individualism and especially toward increasing the efficiency effects of individualism. Broadly, this is an evolutionary trend, even though conscious adaptations to an individualistic world do play an important role in the emergence of modular man.
The state leverages the individualistic trend by organising institutions such as political freedom, equality (of the right to participate) in politics and before the law, property rights that strengthen personal autonomy etc.
In this way, the state becomes the most radical privatiser of life ever recorded in history. The massive privatisation of countless dimensions of social life includes the law and ethics.
Law, Freedom, and Individualism
Concerning law, freedom has the effect that huge areas of human discretion are now
determined
- no longer by tradition and powerful administrations of uniformity (the elders, the church ...) but
- by personal decision-making,
which is protected by the law ("higher legislation") so long as the decisions taken within the newly granted private "sub-legislations" comply with the grander legal framework. So effectively, individual citizens create law where it did not exist before (e.g. founding associations with functions uninhibited by government, etc) or where it was pre-empted by impositions of the authorities (e.g. vocational choices, religious affiliation etc).
Ethics, Freedom, and Individualism
Concerning ethics, modular differentiation of society and man (individualism) is accompanied by a multiplication of accounts and claims of justice and just behaviour - for many reasons, one of which arising from the fact that individualism makes possible separation from and challenges to stayed ways of life and their concomitant notions of justice and just behaviour.
With communal uniformity no longer assured, a new mode of justice emerges in which the possibility of accommodation between alternate views of life is always a parameter in determining right and wrong - absolute justice does not become relative justice, but justice legitimised (not only by basic culturally accepted values but also mots importantly) by consensual procedure.
Freedom is the transcending of socially uniform justice by legitimacy-producing, justice-mediating politics.
Continued here.
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