Prelude to Politics (18) -- P. as Non-Totalitarianism & P. as Substitute for Unanimity -- An Emerging Thread of Arguments

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Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(17):

• the importance of political freedom is that it enables us to bring to the fore the true multiplicity of views, creeds, and ambitions in people, by which process we discard, not necessarily consciously, the totalitarian visions of society, as exemplified for instance in

• the assumption that liberty is some sort of predetermined standard, some Platonic structure of perfection hovering in the background of our messy world

• but this view is increasingly being superimposed by insights (experienced through political activity) into the procedural, open-ended, and indeterminate nature of liberty

• the impossibility of an "axiomatic" derivation of rights demonstrates the importance of political competition as a means of discovering and legitimately establishing the basic rules by which people are expected to live

As I write here

• Freiheit heißt Bekämpfung des Ideologischen durch ideologische Vielfalt

• freedom is a process whereby ideology is contained by ideological multiplicity

• the defining characteristic of liberty is the need inhering in her to invite an entire population to openly debate and decide what her meaning is

• liberty is thoroughly democratic in that she cannot exist unless all mature members of the community are given the opportunity to participate in political competition

• hopes of substituting principles for the processes of politics are misconceived, betraying a lack of understanding the essence of freedom 

Also, another approach to defining politics

• social order cannot exist unless a large number of precepts achieve general recognition in society, many of which can gain their functionally requisite social preponderance only in spite of the lack of unanimous support and understanding 

• politics is the business of championing universal efficaciousness for ideas and corresponding practices that cannot be expected to ever attain unanimous acceptance and conviction

• politics is the hard and difficult business of finding tolerable compromises in the face of decisions that need to be taken in the absence of bilateral or unilateral unanimity

• politicisation ought to be avoided, where it is unnecessary and defective, i.e. where it crowds out civil society 

• but it is a misconception to conclude from this that politics is fundamentally and exclusively evil, and that it ought to and can be eliminated and replaced by a world void of the state - the most powerful instrument of turning politics into reality

• imagine a world peopled only by libertarians sharing the same fundamental convictions; being individuals, in no time will they develop divergent views as to what liberty is and requires, what state she is in and what her prospects are

• liberty is one big effort to allow people to develop divergent views and aspirations 

• reconciling these different views and aspirations requires political expression, political mediation and ultimately politically determined and controlled enforcement

• liberty is a state of affairs characteristic of a civilization with the highest degree of specialisation and division of labour ever attained in the history of mankind 

• it would be preposterous to rule out political participation for free individuals in a society where the management of violence, power and politics have naturally and sensibly become specialised nodes in the division of labour

Continued here.