A Little Note to Myself - Writing about Politics and Freedom

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Continued from here.

Just a quick reminder for myself:

Here is the sequence of arguments that I shall work through in the present chapter to demonstrate my thesis that freedom is brought about through incessant political activity.

For starters, I will explain what I mean by politics and lay out the definition to which I shall have recourse throughout this chapter. 

We will see that, according to my definition, both animals and humans are capable of politics. It will then be my task to examine what is specific about human politics. This leads me to discuss the special features of language whose mastery renders an animal a human being. 

Human language gives rise to a peculiar interweaving of man’s twin role as individual and social being. Man acquires his consciousness from communal influences; his mind is socially formed, but in such a way as to differentiate itself from society and exert independent influence on it. In this way, we shall discover characteristics of politics that remain invariant throughout human history. These anthropological constants of history are of duplex import. 

First, they point to circumstances of inevitable conflict that are fundamental to politics and will never be abolished, irrespective of the stage of progress in human political development. 

Freedom inherits the permanence of conflict among humans and adds to it her own qualified intensification, by her nature inviting dissent on a mass scale while being adapted to transform conflict benignly. She therefore represents the most highly politicised stage in human development, a state of permanent tension, mutual scepticism and critique.

Second, in his capacity as a political animal man has a twofold potential for freedom, (1) owing to an intrinsic personal propensity to differentiate himself from his social surroundings by acts of volition (anthropocentric freedom), and, much later in human history, (2) as member of a community regulated to attain freedom (sociogenic freedom).

Managing the human propensity for anthropocentric freedom, i.e. coordinating individual and community, is a political task, largely performed by regimes of substantial repressiveness. 

Transitioning from anthropocentric freedom to sociogenic freedom, i.e. generalising freedom as a feature of human society so that every member may enjoy liberty, is a political task, too. 

And so is organising sociogenic freedom: politics discovers freedom, politics builds freedom, politics maintains, defends and develops freedom. Take away politics of a certain kind, and freedom disappears.

I shall briefly describe the path man has taken from anthropocentric freedom—freedom as as fluke, triviality, or privilege—in closed access societies, where most humans are excluded from macro-politics, to open access societies which organise the anthropocentric freedom of humans into a network of sociogenic, self-sustaining, popular freedom—freedom as an outcome of common practice and general entitlement in a community—by involving every member of society in politics.  

This ends the first part. 

The second part analyses the functions of politics in a free society, looking at the multifarious dimensions in which politics gives character to sociogenic freedom: its role as a discovery procedure, as a platform for communication and negotiations, its transrational dimension (solving rational impasses by offering incentives to discount and diffuse specific explosive issues in favour of a broader matrix of mutual advantage) etc.

Finally, I look at constitutionalism and the political system, winding up with a synoptic conclusion of the political system of freedom as a dynamic mechanism equilibrating mass dissent and pacifying strategies that keep mass conflict organised by freedom non-violent and serviceable as a discovery process that informs the community of interests and views dispersed among it and the needs to tolerate and relate them to one another by concession, compromise or fair competition for authorisation.