RE: [PEN-L:27863] Re: RE: Re: variety in capitalist markets ----- Original Message ----- From: Devine, James
>> as long as we have differences of individual wills -- not to mention real-world subordination of classes, ethnic groups, etc. within "civil society" outside the state -- there is going to be subordination of people by other people. The best way to handle that subordination is democratically, especially since democratic principles tend to undermine subordination. ================= Well this seems very circular to me. There can be no best way to handle subordination if the one thing everyone might agree on is that subordination constitutes a public bad in many, many social contexts and we can't even agree democratically as to what are the contexts subordination consitutes a good or bad. Back to Condorcet..... Unlike the anarchists, I see no way to simply abolish the state and extra-statal subordination overnight. Or is there an alternative to democracy that I don't know about? Jim =============== The question for actually existing liberalism right now, it seems to me, is whether the State itself constitutes a barrier to democracy or if this is a logical impossibility? We face a paradox; no one wants to be subordinated to another person except, perhaps, in the context of certain erotic experiences. Yet in the very attempt to avoid being subordinate, people often end up drfting into dominating modes of cognition, communication and behavior. A quintessential zero-sum or negative-sum game. How can democratic "will" attenuate this problem at all? If I meet an elected "official" at a party and we begin to disagree on an issue of public importance am I being dominating if- when I point out to them that they are rather like employees of the citizens who voted [and didn't vote] for them and therefore he/she should not engage in patronizing me by appealing to their institutional role when communicating, or am I expressing a truth about the delegative theory of democracy? What if that person is Antonin Scalia? Can States be illegitimate even though their citizens don't try to overthrow them? What if we're at some quasi-surrealistic moment in the history of liberalism where lots of citizens are unwittingly feeling like Keirkegaard *and* Emma Goldmann regarding their government and it's policies? Even though we might agree that anarchism is unworkable in the 21st century, the fact that it hasn't been this popular in decades is "saying" something very important right now and it behooves us to try and understand that; at least it seems so to me. Ian
