Research into Liberty (4) - A Note on Rousseau and Transrationality

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I am interested in Rousseau’s fundamental question: how is it possible to be free and yet obedient to social constraints (principles, rules)? How do democratic regimes actually work in free societies?

My research into theories of freedom has made me aware that a free society cannot be fully accounted for by reference to rational insight into the workings and justification of the overall order. There are lacunae in public reasoning that are bridged by forms of interaction whose effects in terms of fostering workable social cohesion and peaceable coexistence are not consciously sought for. Thus democracies cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of commonly held or complex philosophical justifications; fragmentary justifications plays a role, but their coherence also depends on transrational structures, as I surmise in my paper X.

How and why do democracies function, work satisfactorily? And how does the inter-meshing of conscious strategies and transrational outcomes contribute to viable democratic practices? Such questions may yield significant implications for the ethical evaluation of types of social order based on political freedom. 

Widespread commitment to a political order, whether expressed by articulated reasoning or by revealed preference, may be important to that order, while not meriting the status of cause, being instead the reflection of numerous factors such as habits, traditions, inertia, opportunism, self-interest, etc. Is it possible to explain the functioning of a reasonably successful constitutional democracy in terms of a contiguous network of mutually compatible justificatory arguments? Why and how do we coordinate and collaborate in the absence of an ultimately consensual political morality?

Are the emergence, the presence and depth structure of a society’s common moral and political values adequately captured by the analogy of a deliberated consent? Is ignorance, rational and substantive, underestimated? And what forces are at play to keep the negative consequences of ignorance at bay?

Cohesion may be in large part due to emergent properties of dynamic disequilibrium interactions. Contributors to cohesion will not necessarily be predictable from the behaviour of individual persons /arguments.

There may actually be a tacit parallel between rationalistic justificatory accounts of democracy and neoclassical economics on one hand, and the intuitions of transrationality and heterodox economics, on the other.