Politik (3):
Big Government Needed to Provide the Public Goods of Freedom
The advance of freedom and the growing performance capability of the state develop in tandem, being mutually reinforcing trends. The all-important connecting piece between freedom and the state is politics as a public entitlement granted to any citizen who is determined to participate in shaping the community she lives in.
Freedom Presupposes Government as Universal Service Provider - Political Freedom Being a State Service
The strengthening of the state is a necessary condition of its ability to provide public goods in increasing quantity and quality. Fundamental rights - robust conditions of freedom - that make for a democratic public represent a form of public goods. Enabling people to become a major influence on the constitution, the aims and the practices of the state is a state-provided public good, that, in turn, lifts the intelligence of the state to a level where it becomes a comprehensive service provider to the population at large.
This is important to understand, not least in the face of wholesale strictures condemning the "nanny state". It lies in the nature of the state in a free society that it performs a comprehensive and ubiquitous service function. This service-orientation is hard to ascribe to an exploitative predator state, while it does make sense considering the new permeability of the state - its being impacted by a comprehensive public - attained under robust conditions of freedom.
Strong Government Is Restricted Government - Managing Democratic Redrafting of Social Contract
In a free society the state is strengthened by restrictions, some of which imply a change in the nature of communication between government and the people, the latter becoming a new source of information and orientation for actions undertaken by the state. Indeed, the state may be looked upon as an institution that manages the ongoing redrafting of the social contract by citizens and their political associations who keep feeding the state with information on their convictions, needs and demands.
Among the most basic and consequential of the public goods guaranteed by the state are two achievements -
Big Government as Naturally Radical Privatiser
One can safely say that the modern state is the most radical privatising agent, achieving the most extensive permeation of society by private entitlements and privately organised arrangements of all time. However, the state's privatising effect has become so natural to us that we hardly note the extraordinary extent to which it suffuses society. Therefore we are simply not attuned to appreciating the role in everyday life of the state in making recent generations operate under the most comprehensively privatised living conditions ever attained.
Ours is a society of privatised competences, which is not only reflected in a high percentage of private ownership and the nature of the property rights that preponderate among us. The protected private domain of the individual extends far wider than outright ownership would indicate.
Large areas of human conduct have been cleansed of invasive, status- and-custom based, paternalistic impositions on the individual. These are now areas where individuals enjoy unprecedented latitude for personal decisions and freely negotiated outcomes based on
Privately Determined Law - New Sub-Jurisdictions of Law
In this sense, vast new sub-jurisdictions (of privately determined law) have sprung into life, where free individuals decide on what passes as socially valid conduct, with the state staying in the background as an enabler (of these sub-jurisdictions), an occasional umpire and enforcer. Of course, there are public considerations and public edicts that interfere with this process, or rather, accompany it, but this serves largely to strengthen rather than compromise the general thrust whereby individual freedoms, initiatives, aims, and perspectives take centre-stage in shaping the legal space.
In a way this is only natural, for a free society, though not necessarily inconsiderately egotistical, is inevitably individualistic far more than societies with a lesser concern for freedom. After all, freedom as conceived of in modern civil society is based on a strong presumption in favour of personal freedom. Historically, freedom has emerged to replace religious and kinship tutelage, shifting large swaths of responsibility to the individual.
The Political Citizen - A New Kind of Social Persona
This links up with the unique nature of politics in a free society. Political citizens represent a new kind of social persona - they are neither serfs, nor potentates magically merging to form a demos with the ability and right to rule with absolute sovereignty. (Incidentally, sovereignty is not an lordly impulse but a certificate tagged to a ware only after it has gone through considerable political processing.)
The social persona of the free political citizen is that of a negotiator partaking in a community of "free and equal" negotiators. This transcends the pattern of "us" versus "them". The task is different from ruling, oppressing, and exploiting as much as one can get away with. The task is also different from owing a lord services in the first place, while trying to preserve meagre residual claims of one's own. In a society of individuals, people have lost their subordinate position in a collectivity - say as members of a kinship group or a ruling or oppressed class. They face each other as individuals, stripped of an other-directed status, at once endowed with the the latitude and at once encumbered by the burden of having to define of their own accord what acts and attitudes count as socially valid.
When people approach each other as individuals they are in a different position from being mere representatives of a culture imposed upon them. They have a new Interessenslage (set of interests), which offers new options, new room to manoeuvre, new choices and compromises.
Legitimacy - A New Plane of Justice
When individuals meet, it is a plurality of notions of justice that meet. Therefore, individuals are forced to invent and institute a new plane of justice, a plane of meta-justice, delivering a new concept of legitimacy, which is the final product of the political process in a free society.
Not entirely, but in large measure, freedom is the transcending of socially uniform justice by legitimacy-producing, justice-mediating politics.
Continued here.
Big Government Needed to Provide the Public Goods of Freedom
The advance of freedom and the growing performance capability of the state develop in tandem, being mutually reinforcing trends. The all-important connecting piece between freedom and the state is politics as a public entitlement granted to any citizen who is determined to participate in shaping the community she lives in.
Freedom Presupposes Government as Universal Service Provider - Political Freedom Being a State Service
The strengthening of the state is a necessary condition of its ability to provide public goods in increasing quantity and quality. Fundamental rights - robust conditions of freedom - that make for a democratic public represent a form of public goods. Enabling people to become a major influence on the constitution, the aims and the practices of the state is a state-provided public good, that, in turn, lifts the intelligence of the state to a level where it becomes a comprehensive service provider to the population at large.
This is important to understand, not least in the face of wholesale strictures condemning the "nanny state". It lies in the nature of the state in a free society that it performs a comprehensive and ubiquitous service function. This service-orientation is hard to ascribe to an exploitative predator state, while it does make sense considering the new permeability of the state - its being impacted by a comprehensive public - attained under robust conditions of freedom.
Strong Government Is Restricted Government - Managing Democratic Redrafting of Social Contract
In a free society the state is strengthened by restrictions, some of which imply a change in the nature of communication between government and the people, the latter becoming a new source of information and orientation for actions undertaken by the state. Indeed, the state may be looked upon as an institution that manages the ongoing redrafting of the social contract by citizens and their political associations who keep feeding the state with information on their convictions, needs and demands.
Among the most basic and consequential of the public goods guaranteed by the state are two achievements -
- (a) personal autonomy, and
- (b) the conditions of peaceful productivity
Big Government as Naturally Radical Privatiser
One can safely say that the modern state is the most radical privatising agent, achieving the most extensive permeation of society by private entitlements and privately organised arrangements of all time. However, the state's privatising effect has become so natural to us that we hardly note the extraordinary extent to which it suffuses society. Therefore we are simply not attuned to appreciating the role in everyday life of the state in making recent generations operate under the most comprehensively privatised living conditions ever attained.
Ours is a society of privatised competences, which is not only reflected in a high percentage of private ownership and the nature of the property rights that preponderate among us. The protected private domain of the individual extends far wider than outright ownership would indicate.
Large areas of human conduct have been cleansed of invasive, status- and-custom based, paternalistic impositions on the individual. These are now areas where individuals enjoy unprecedented latitude for personal decisions and freely negotiated outcomes based on
- contract (documents expressing private stipulations, rather than demands of an impersonal tradition)
- flexible, often novel, path-breaking, even culture-changing individual argumentation, as well as
- considerations that are strongly influenced by the personal and bilateral motives and needs of the involved private parties.
Privately Determined Law - New Sub-Jurisdictions of Law
In this sense, vast new sub-jurisdictions (of privately determined law) have sprung into life, where free individuals decide on what passes as socially valid conduct, with the state staying in the background as an enabler (of these sub-jurisdictions), an occasional umpire and enforcer. Of course, there are public considerations and public edicts that interfere with this process, or rather, accompany it, but this serves largely to strengthen rather than compromise the general thrust whereby individual freedoms, initiatives, aims, and perspectives take centre-stage in shaping the legal space.
In a way this is only natural, for a free society, though not necessarily inconsiderately egotistical, is inevitably individualistic far more than societies with a lesser concern for freedom. After all, freedom as conceived of in modern civil society is based on a strong presumption in favour of personal freedom. Historically, freedom has emerged to replace religious and kinship tutelage, shifting large swaths of responsibility to the individual.
The Political Citizen - A New Kind of Social Persona
This links up with the unique nature of politics in a free society. Political citizens represent a new kind of social persona - they are neither serfs, nor potentates magically merging to form a demos with the ability and right to rule with absolute sovereignty. (Incidentally, sovereignty is not an lordly impulse but a certificate tagged to a ware only after it has gone through considerable political processing.)
The social persona of the free political citizen is that of a negotiator partaking in a community of "free and equal" negotiators. This transcends the pattern of "us" versus "them". The task is different from ruling, oppressing, and exploiting as much as one can get away with. The task is also different from owing a lord services in the first place, while trying to preserve meagre residual claims of one's own. In a society of individuals, people have lost their subordinate position in a collectivity - say as members of a kinship group or a ruling or oppressed class. They face each other as individuals, stripped of an other-directed status, at once endowed with the the latitude and at once encumbered by the burden of having to define of their own accord what acts and attitudes count as socially valid.
When people approach each other as individuals they are in a different position from being mere representatives of a culture imposed upon them. They have a new Interessenslage (set of interests), which offers new options, new room to manoeuvre, new choices and compromises.
Legitimacy - A New Plane of Justice
When individuals meet, it is a plurality of notions of justice that meet. Therefore, individuals are forced to invent and institute a new plane of justice, a plane of meta-justice, delivering a new concept of legitimacy, which is the final product of the political process in a free society.
Not entirely, but in large measure, freedom is the transcending of socially uniform justice by legitimacy-producing, justice-mediating politics.
Continued here.
No comments:
Post a Comment