Rational Freedom and Public Happiness
The case for the dignity and worth of politics.
Politics has been hollowed out in the modern age, and we should now be looking at the forces behind this disempowerment. 'Taking back control' is the slogan of the day. One of my mentors back in the day was the Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros and one of his pamphlets was called "The Necessity of Social Control." He showed how the objective socialisation of the world is generating forces requiring new modes of thinking, acting and organising, lest the world become a howling wasteland of power out of control. We need to reassert the primacy of the political if we are to hold onto notions of community, democracy, self-assumed obligation, dignity of and respect for law, sovereignty etc. Meszaros' big books are well worth investigating, check his work out.
There's been a denigrating of public life and the political which leaves us, as social beings, adrift. My own work began with Hegel and his idea of the state as an ethical agency, and Marx's response to Hegel's political philosophy. Marx criticised Hegel's doctrine of the state, but identified in it a principle of authority which he used as a yardstick for true freedom: "A state which is not the realization of rational freedom is a bad state."
The point is, human beings, as the great man Aristotle argued, are social beings, we need each other in order to be ourselves, we need a "politkos bios" in order to individuate ourselves as social beings. Individuality and sociality are two sides of the same human coin. In the modern world, we have come to see the state as a necessary evil, a mere instrument for keeping the civic peace between self-interested individuals, a market conception in which each sees the others as means to personal ends, and all become playthings of external force in politics and economics. The consistent thread in my own work over two decades now is precisely this recovery of the political and the dignity of government as something citizens constitute as a condition of their own freedom and happiness. True freedom is based on the recognition of limits, restraints on individual appetites - I will carry on arguing, through philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Rousseau, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all individuals. I call it "rational freedom", but it is public happiness in the classical sense. It is also central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Habermas puts it very well in "Autonomy and Solidarity": Freedom, even personal freedom, can be conceived only in ‘internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships’, in the context of the communicative structures of a community, so that ‘the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others’. There is a need, then, to ‘analyse the conditions of collective freedom’ so as to remove the ‘potential for Social Darwinist menace’ inherent in individualist liberal philosophies. ‘The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions’ (Habermas 1992: 146).
I'm currently trying to develop this tradition of politics, happiness and freedom in terms of a biospheric or planetary politics, hence 'the Earth's commonwealth of virtue.' A politics that recognises planetary boundaries and sees constraints as essential to freedom. An authentic freedom that gets us off the hedonistic treadmill and starts to nourish the parts of human being untouched by endless accumulation and consumption of material quantities. Governments have been practising the anti-politics of 'jobs, growth and investment' - handing control over to economics. We need to understand the forces that have removed control and power from us. Politics is us, it is not an external coercive force inimical to individual liberty - only within certain social relations does it become so. The problem is one of social relations, not politics.
The state is at the heart of the concept of 'rational freedom' that is the central thread in my work. I go to the principle and am agnostic on the institutional form. But it could be called a state. ('When is a state not a state?' my Director of Studies asked. 'When it's ajar' I responded. He looked uncomprehending and somewhat less than amused, the kind of look someone gets when someone he thought was a philosopher suddenly reveals himself to be an idiot.)
I sought to identify the principle of the state, the principle of a democratically constituted authority that obligates but unites each and all as citizens, as something distinct from historical incarnations of the state as an institution presiding over and rationalising an iniquitous society based on asymmetrical relations of power. A rational freedom as a lawful freedom but, further, looking at the bonds of commonality behind that, bonds between individuals - a rebuilding that proceeds from below based on the allegiance we owe to each other, and not some fetishised form. We can build political order through the interimbrication of social bodies and associations, a civic public as I called it, based on the associational space of civil society, powered from the base upwards. NOT a top-down authoritarian state at all.
I shall keep plugging away at my "rational freedom" - it's actually a public happiness. And, here and there, interesting people read it and incorporate it into their own work. I even get a mention in this from San Diego in March!!
The Pursuit of Happiness Prof. Ryan Rynbrandt, Collin College Paper Prepared for the Western Political Science Association 2016 Annual Conference in San Diego, CA March 25, 2016 https://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/papers/docs/rynbrandt.pdf