Organising the Chapter on Politics (1) — Individualistic Politics - Anthropocentric Freedom and Sociogenic Freedom

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How do I start? What is the chapter's upshot? How do I get from commencement to conclusion? And what needs to be fitted into the intermediary road?

These are mere notes, intended to help collect my thoughts and find the broad outlines of a chapter's story line — bear with me if the writing appears terse and abstract.

Politics — Wider and Narrower Sense

I suppose, I shall begin with a distinction between politics in a wider sense and politics in a narrower sense. Politics in a wider sense is any effort to make one's social environment comply with one's needs. That would even include bilateral influencing, as in a situation where one spouse is trying to get his partner to accept his demands/desire (say, to go to a sports event rather than to the opera). So there is a good reason why we would refer to certain private activities in small groups or even bilateral relationships as "practising politics". But, of course, this is not the sense in which we more ordinarily speak of politics. Politics in a narrower sense suggests the idea that people try to make an impact on what counts in a community, usually understood to be of rather large a size, even an entire nation made up of millions of people.

The Politics of Freedom

Concerning politics in a narrow sense, I would like to introduce a further distinction, pertinent to our subject matter: politics. I argue that we can make out a clear distinction between politics in the absence of freedom and the politics of freedom — politics in a free society. 

This distinction is very important, because it implies a thesis that makes my account of liberty rather controvertible. Freedom, I argue, is defined by a style of politics quite specific to her. This, in turn, implies that freedom is first and foremost a political phenomenon. We create freedom by acting politically, by practising politics and practising it in a uniquely peculiar way. A free society is necessarily a highly politicised society. High levels of political activism are the hallmark and sine qua non of free societies. 

Anthropocentric Freedom and Sociogenic Freedom

Politics in a free society marks progress that takes us from anthropocentric freedom to sociogenic freedom. 

Anthropocentric freedom is a kind of freedom everyone is capable of; it is the human disposition to act according to one's volition. Even a toddler has plenty of moments in which the little human is anthropologically free. Parents can tell you a thing or two about it. 

Anthropocentric freedom is not yet socially coordinated; it requires social coordination. Acts of anthropological freedom can be inconsiderate and ruthless, even self-destructive and exceedingly anti-social.  Our first encounter with politics is in the cradle and the playpen, when our parents try to coordinate our anthropological freedom (acts of volition) with theirs.

Politics, both in the wider and the narrower sense, is the effort to coordinate people's anthropocentric freedom. Everyone has that disposition to act according to his will, but some among us are able to assert their dispositions more successfully and make them more dominant than those of others - though not even the parents of a baby or tyrants holding sway over a people succeed in it entirely. 

Pre-Individual Man

In acting out our anthropocentric freedom we inevitably confront the same anthropocentric freedom of others, which issues in some kind of more or less satisfactory coordination among the disparate ambitions for freedom, including retreat, subjection, and annihilation. In fact, annihilation, the threat of it, violence, and exploitative subjection of the powerless by the powerful dominate the style in which the social coordination of anthropocentric freedom is carried out in larger communities throughout most of human history. 

The organising principles of politics prior to the ascent of freedom target the individual truncating it by 

authoritarian repression and coercive instrumentalisation, 

hierarchical stratification in an order of natural and immutable inequality, and 

subordination of the person to cultural stereotypes. 

Mutual dependence and submission to ancient common customs, possibly more dominant than violent repression in early small groups such as those of gatherers-and-hunters, do not seem to suffice in larger communities where physical oppression lies close to the surface of order and hierarchy in society. 

Stark and impregnable inequality appear natural to man in pre-liberal human relationships and social orders. A feature partly supported by ideology, partly by the facts of material life. There is not yet within reach a culture nor an economic base capable of sustaining a community where every human is of comparable status — not in every regard, but with respect to highly momentous issues such as support and protection by the law, access to political power, to economic opportunities and other life chances.

Ascent of the Individual

But then, nudged by the rise of Christianity and slowly gestating throughout the entire medieval epoch, Europe gives birth to an entirely new form of human identity: the individual. The spread of individualism as an increasingly predominate cultural pattern within the Christian hemisphere opens up a completely new way — sociogenic freedom, as I call it — in which anthropocentric freedoms are being coordinated in society. Every person is given the same share in certain basic endowments — freedom and equality — whose proportions must be heeded in all the manifold ways in which human relationships may be shaped, changed and multiplied. The specifics of this equal endowment need not detain us at this stage of the argument — what matters is this altogether new perspective whereby, whatever the natural and legitimate inequalities among human beings, they are not absolute any more but must be reflected in relation to the new constraint that every individual is fundamentally equal to and as free as any other individual in certain important respects.

"[T]he core of Christian revelation was the 'grace' which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding ... " of the individual human being. [Siedentop, Larry (2014), Inventing the Individual. The Origins of Western Liberalism, Penguin, Random  House, UK, p. 312 ]

Coordinating Autonomous Agency

In the era of individualism the task of politics assumes a new dimension. A vital new side-constraint is to be taken into consideration. With the ascent of the individual, the community needs to deal with a new concept and a new material reality: a person's autonomous agency. People act on their own, following up  their private purposes. Individual autonomy on a mass scale must be factored into what politics is trying to achieve. This cannot be accomplished without inviting the individual into the political arena, the commanding heights of politics. You cannot cope with the constraints and pressures of an individualistic world unless you allow the possibility of mass political participation.  If you want to succeed in politics and the holding of power, you need to know what individuals do, what they think, and what they intend to do, and you need to accommodated these data to the minimal satisfaction of those who implacably produce them.

At the same time, if you do, you stand to earn tremendous advantages in term of power and effectiveness, and you are likely to entice an entire population to accept constraints on their freedom so that political power, that you have turned into a service industry, will be able to shower them with goods, public goods, that the individual of its own accord cannot provide but benefits from so as to become a more effective individual. 

The key to understanding modern politics is that it is an adaptation to the individualistic character of society. Neither the individual qua individual nor the specialists in violence and governance can escape from the individualistic nature of society, and hence modern politics is being constantly subjected to the litmus test of how well its measures and institutions help people to be effective individuals.

Rather than an atomistic circumference, rather than a monadic sphere, individualism is a tissue of social relationships set in a complex cultural environment, and it is its thoroughly social character that is a challenge to politics, and needs to be addressed by it.

There is no need to idealise the individual — she is the fundamental constraint for modern politics. There is no need to worship individualism — it simply is the stuff from which society must be made in the present age, for better or worse.

Continued here.