Prolegomenon Concerning Politics

Image credit.

I shall have to rewrite the first three posts on "Politics - 1 -, - 2 - , - 3 - [Draft]*". Only now am I beginning to succeed in working out that vital insertion on the anthropological, historically invariant, features of politics, drawing out the full implications that allow me to link up that introductory part with the rest of the chapter.

In the envisioned chapter, I start off with my definition of politics as "exerting influence to affect what is socially admissible."

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

I explain the exceptional traits of human language and the unique effects they have on the social nature, the conditions of self-awareness and 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 fundamental disagreement in a community) 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.