Prelude to Politics (8) -- The Self-Binding of Government and the Public -- A First Chain of Points - An Emerging Thread of Arguments

Image credit. Yesterday was the first warm day in April, after a stretch of rather dismally overcast weeks. From the window it looked a cold and ghastly day, but once in the outside it turned out a real spring day with vibrant chirping and the caressing of warms currents in the air. Today is a warm April day, with sun and rain coming and going.

Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(7)

• no pristine, incontrovertible standard of freedom or other issues of public concern, 

• rival views give impetus to political competition 

• even shared premises are likely to lead to diverging and eventually competing interpretations that deed political rivalry and competition

• the institutions of freedom envisaged by liberals depend on political initiative and support: markets, for instance, cannot create their own preconditions. Hence, they will be shaped by political influences, on which disagreement exists 

• institutions of freedom therefore do not betray features of unique determination often implied in liberal visions of freedom - which more often than not are stronger on critiquing a lack of such uniformly determinable freedom than on working out concrete conditions of freedom

• caught up in a dynamics of optimising its material base and political support, the state evolves rational strategies of political inclusion 

• the state becomes engulfed and permeated by a stream of politics comprising a public constituency (as opposed to a power elite)

• the state becomes a liberal state by opening up, eventually encouraging and adapting to diversified public demands on it

• the state becomes more powerful and efficient by constraining itself so as to have to answer to a demanding public, one that forces more intelligent, more public-regarding, more service-like solutions on the state

• the state binds itself to the demands of the public

• the public binds itself to the needs of a pluralistic discovery and rectification process (orderly political competition and political institutions apt to keep tensions high yet sufficiently diffused to avoid blockage of political compromise by irreconcilable conflict)

• hence, democracy does not mean direct rule by the people, but stands for an entire culture and network of institutions that are liable to soften and coordinate divergences to a level of rivalry that is compatible with, in fact, productive of long-term political cooperation within the community 

• It is this dynamic of self-binding both by government and the public that brings about and maintains freedom, rather than the clarion calls of political heroes blessed with exceptional political wisdom or the force of ideologies of unassailable truth and consistency

Continued here.