Politics - 4 - [Draft]**

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Continued from here. 

§ 6  Prolegomenon to a Political Anthropology of Freedom

Individualism is a copious resource for mankind which has lain dormant for millions of years. Freedom is the mode of operation that man has chanced upon to be able to make the fullest use of the dormant potential of individualism.

As a prolegomenon (preface) to a theory of politics under conditions of freedom, I shall lay out the anthropological framework of the political propensities of human beings, in the course of which I explain

• why man is a naturally individualistic being, 

• why his individualism can flourish only under conditions suited to his social nature and needs, and 

• why it has taken a long time and very special conditions to create a social environment in which it is possible to lift the potential of individualism.

Freedom may be regarded as a state of affairs such that the individualistic potential of humans is brought into balance — to a greater extent than ever — with our inescapable dependence on social ties and social considerations. Politics, being a discovery procedure with full public participation, is a key part of the heuristic apparatus by which we ascertain the conditions of the balance between the individual and society.

Freedom is a platform for reciprocal, socially responsible, and productive individualism. The conditions of individualism are not themselves of an individualistic nature—that is to say, they do not originate in the individual herself. Rather than being causally rooted in needs and desires, supposed natural or truly attained entitlements of the individual, the conditions of individualism represent first and foremost a matrix of social relationships, being derived from and dependent on collective arrangements.

However, before turning to the unique features of politics under conditions of freedom, I shall take a closer look at the anthropological foundations of the political disposition in humans. This will help explain how political behaviour is intrinsic to the human condition in a way that renders freedom a project of political indeterminacy, whose outcomes are impossible to predict and resist capture by any single ideology.

Having established the central and in many respects invariant role assumed by politics in the human condition, I shall be able to spell out more fully my contention that freedom is the most eminently political stage in the development of human society.

§ 7 An Anthropological Framework for Politics

The starting point of the anthropological framework that I propose for understanding the role of politics in a free society is my definition of politics as "exerting influence to affect what is socially admissible."

I then explain that what is specific about the nature of the human animal is rooted in features peculiar to human language.

I discuss the exceptional traits of human language and the unique effects they have on the social nature, the conditions of self-awareness, individual behaviour and other capabilities of the human being.

From that I derive the result that man is invariably a political animal owing to the fact that language 

makes us, at the same time,

• social beings, 

• individuals, 

• uniquely intelligent beings capable of transcending their instincts, 

• part of a species-wide hyper-intelligence linking dispersed human intelligence to form a powerful collective process of creating objective knowledge, 

• creators and contributors of cultural evolution,

and—more recently in human history—enables us also to

• stumble on, recognise, and develop procedures to deal with political scarcity (irresolvable or hard to resolve fundamental disagreement in a community requiring special management, i.e. political treatment) without reverting to violence and oppression, and

• advance from anthropocentric freedom (spontaneous disposition of the individual to engage in autonomous acts) to sociogenic freedom (socially prevalent rules protecting the ability of every person to engage in autonomous acts). 

If anything, freedom as we know it, i.e. sociogenic freedom, is going to increase the incidence and variety of political behaviour in humans. That is to say, people have more and better opportunities to exert influence on their social environment than ever before, and the thriving and survival of freedom depends on this kind of political activism, which will not be confined to formal politics but takes place—perhaps even predominantly—in the multifarious ways by which a human being partakes in civil society.

In the introductory part of the chapter on "politics," I therefore hope to show that human language, a social phenomenon, creates the individual and adds vital capabilities to the set of anthropocentric propensities in the human being. From these added capabilities man generates processes of cultural evolution, which, in turn, produce skills and institutions that put our species on the path that leads it from anthropocentric freedom to sociogenic freedom—comprising sophisticated procedures of social coordination as embedded in systems of custom and tradition, morality, law, and economic interaction.

The driving force behind all these means, events, and stages of evolving civilisation and freedom is political activity.

Continued here.