History of the State

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

* Book: Michael Oakeshott. History of the state.

URL =

Description

Mark Frazier:

" Michael Oakeshott's history of the state and how it has been influenced by technological progress? Here's a summary from Wikipedia.

Oakeshott suggests that there had been two major modes or understandings of human social organization.

In the first, which he calls "enterprise association" (or universitas), the state is understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects. By contrast, "civil association" (or societas) is primarily a legal relationship in which laws impose obligatory conditions of action but do not require choosing one action rather than another.

>>In his posthumously published The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism Oakeshott describes enterprise associations and civil associations in different terms.

An enterprise association is based on a fundamental faith in human ability to ascertain and grasp some universal "good" (leading to the Politics of Faith), and civil association is based on a fundamental skepticism about human ability to either ascertain or achieve this good (leading to the Politics of Skepticism).

Oakeshott considers power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because it allows people to believe that they can achieve something great and to implement the policies necessary to achieve their goal.

The Politics of Skepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening, rather than enabling ambiguously good events. Oakeshott employs the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint that law involves. Laws prescribe "adverbial conditions": they condition our actions, but they do not determine the substantive ends of our choices.

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott does recognize the hybrids. The explosive growth of HOAs and condo associations – which typically engage their members in both civil and enterprise association modes – shows also the ability of some organizations to keep polarities in balance. A deeper question is whether organizations can keep both modes in consilience, in the absence of an ultimate "ground truth" such as whether the organization is changing the community's land values for the better." (https://www.facebook.com/groups/322508360006/permalink/10164129777370007/?)