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1. Political Internet: State and Politics in the Age of Social
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2. Intimate Speakers: Why Introverted and Socially Ostracized Citizens
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Biju
P R
Author,
Teacher, Blogger
Assistant
Professor of Political Science
Government
Brennen College
Thalassery
Kerala,
India
1. Political Internet: State and Politics in the Age of Social Media,
(Routledge 2017), Amazon https://www.amazon.in/
2. Intimate Speakers: Why Introverted and Socially Ostracized Citizens Use Social Media, (Fingerprint! 2017)
Amazon: http://www.amazon.in/dp/
Robert
Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is one of the works which dominate
contemporary debate in political philosophy. Drawing on traditional assumptions
associated with individualism and libertarianism, Nozick mounts a powerful
argument for a minimal "night-watchman" state and challenges the views
of many contemporary philosophers, most notably John Rawls.
Robert
Nozick (1938–2002) was a renowned American philosopher who first came to be
widely known through his 1974 book, Anarchy,
State, and Utopia
(1974),[1] which won the National Book Award
for Philosophy and Religion in 1975. Pressing further the anti-consequentialist
aspects of John Rawls' A
Theory of Justice,
Nozick argued that respect for individual rights is the key standard for
assessing state action and, hence, that the only legitimate state is a minimal
state that restricts its activities to the protection of the rights of life,
liberty, property, and contract. Despite his highly acclaimed work in many
other fields of philosophy, Nozick remained best known for the libertarian
doctrine advanced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Nozick
reject anarchist claim that no state, not even the minimal, night watchman,
state can be justified
Fundamental
question of political philosophy, viz., “whether there should be any state at
all”
Nozick
seeks to counter the anarchist's claim by showing how a minimal
state—essentially a state that is limited to the protection of the rights of
person, property, and contract—could arise without violating rights.
Nozick's
minimal state differs from common depictions of the minimal state because it
does not impose taxation to finance its services. In many other ways as well,
it is more like a business enterprise than a state. There are no rulers, no
legislative body, no political elections, no contending parties and citizens.
There is no sovereignty and no state territory. There are, instead, executives,
a board of directors, shareholders, clients, and the assets of the enterprise.
But the fly in the enterprise ointment is the absence of competitive market
constraints on the price or the quality of the services offered by this
monopoly. (If there is enough market competition to keep prices of protective
services down and their quality up, there will be too much competition for this
enterprise to count as a state.) It appears that the only other way to keep
this monopoly in check would be through some sort of political-constitutional
constraints. However, Nozick makes no mention of these. Of course, a protective
association in pursuit of customers might commit itself
to constitution-like constraints on its decisions and conduct as a way of
reassuring potential clients.
Justification of the minimal state
The main purpose of Anarchy,
State, and Utopia is to show that the minimal state, and only the minimal
state, is morally justified. By a minimal state Nozick means a state that
functions essentially as a “night watchman,” with powers limited to those
necessary to protect citizens against violence, theft, and fraud. By arguing
that the minimal state is justified, Nozick seeks to refute anarchism, which opposes
any state whatsoever; by arguing that no more than the minimal state
is justified, Nozick seeks to refute modern forms of liberalism, as well as socialism and other leftist ideologies, which contend that, in
addition to its powers as a night watchman, the state should have the powers to
regulate the economic activities of citizens, to redistribute wealth in the
direction of greater equality, and to provide social services such as education
and health care.
Against anarchism, Nozick claims that a minimal state is justified because it
(or something very much like it) would arise spontaneously among people living
in a hypothetical “state of nature” through transactions that would not involve
the violation of anyone’s natural rights. Following the 17th-century English
philosopher John Locke,
Nozick assumes that everyone possesses the natural rights to life,
liberty, and property,
including the right to claim as property the fruits or products of one’s labour
and the right to dispose of one’s property as one sees fit (provided that in
doing so one does not violate the rights of anyone else). Everyone also has the
natural right to punish those who violate or attempt to violate one’s own
natural rights. Because defending one’s natural rights in a state of nature
would be difficult for anyone to do on his own, individuals would band together
to form “protection associations,” in which members would work together to
defend each other’s rights and to punish rights violators. Eventually, some of
these associations would develop into private businesses offering protection
and punishment services for a fee. The great importance that individuals would
attach to such services would give the largest protection firms a natural
competitive advantage, and eventually only one firm, or a confederation of
firms, would control all the protection and punishment business in the
community. Because this firm (or confederation of firms) would have a monopoly
of force in the territory of the community and because it would protect the
rights of everyone living there, it would constitute a minimal state in the
libertarian sense. And because the minimal state would come about without
violating anyone’s natural rights, a state with at least its powers is
justified.
Against liberalism and ideologies
farther left, Nozick claims that no more than the minimal state is justified,
because any state with more extensive powers would violate the natural rights
of its citizens. Thus the state should not have the power to control prices or
to set a minimum wage, because
doing so would violate the natural right of citizens to dispose of their
property, including their labour, as they see fit. For similar reasons, the
state should not have the power to establish public education or health care
through taxes
imposed on citizens who may wish to spend their money on private services
instead. Indeed, according to Nozick, any mandatory taxation used to fund
services or benefits other than those constitutive of the minimal state is
unjust, because such taxation amounts to a kind of “forced labour” for the
state by those who must pay the tax.
John Rawls
John
Rawls, a philosopher who held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship
at Harvard University, published several books and many articles. He is chiefly
known, however, for his book A
Theory of Justice,
an effort to define social justice. The work has greatly influenced modern
political thought.
A
Theory of Justice (1971)
Political
Liberalism (1993)
The
Law of Peoples (1993/1999)
Lectures
on the History of Moral Phil. (2000)
Justice
as Fairness (2001)
Rawls
was dissatisfied with the traditional philosophical arguments about what makes
a social institution just and about what justifies political or social actions
and policies. The utilitarian argument holds that societies should pursue the
greatest good for the greatest number. This argument has a number of problems,
including, especially, that it seems to be consistent with the idea of the
tyranny of majorities over minorities. The intuitionist argument holds that
humans intuit what is right or wrong by some innate moral sense. This is also
problematic because it simply explains away justice by saying that people “know
it when they see it,” and it fails to deal with the many conflicting human
intuitions.
Rawls
attempts to establish a reasoned account of social justice through the social
contract approach. This approach holds that a society is in some sense an
agreement among all those within that society. If a society were an agreement,
Rawls asks, what kind of arrangement would everyone agree to? He states that
the contract is a purely hypothetical one: He does not argue that people had
existed outside the social state or had made agreements to establish a
particular type of society.
Rawls
begins his work with the idea of justice as fairness. He identifies the basic
structure of society as the primary subject of justice and identifies justice
as the first virtue of social institutions. He considers justice a matter of
the organization and internal divisions of a society. The main idea of a theory
of justice asks, What kind of organization of society would rational persons
choose if they were in an initial position of independence and equality and
were setting up a system of cooperation? This is what Rawls sees as a
hypothetical original position: the state in which no one knows what place he
or she would occupy in the society to be created.
After
considering the main characteristics of justice as fairness and the theoretical
superiority of this approach to utilitarianism, intuitionism, or other
perspectives, Rawls looks at the principles of justice. He identifies two
principles: One, that each person should have equal rights to the most
extensive liberties consistent with other people enjoying the same liberties;
and two, that inequalities should be arranged so that they would be to
everyone’s advantage and arranged so that no one person would be blocked from
occupying any position. From these two principles Rawls derives an egalitarian
conception of justice that would allow the inequality of conditions implied by
equality of opportunity but would also give more attention to those born with
fewer assets and into less favorable social positions.
Rawls
concludes the first part of his book by looking at the idea of the original
position outside society. This hypothetical original position can be
approximated by using the thought experiment of the veil of ignorance. If no
one could know what place he or she would occupy in the society being formed,
what arrangement of the society would a rational person choose? Rawls maintains
that the choice would be for a social structure that would best benefit the
unknowing chooser if she or he happened to end up in the least desirable
position.
In
the second part of the work, Rawls considers the implications of his view of
justice for social institutions. He discusses in detail equal liberty, economic
distribution, and duties and obligations as well as the main characteristics of
each that would make up a just society. He does not, however, identify any
particular type of social or political system that would be consistent with his
theory. He deals only with the demands that his version of justice places on
institutions.
In
the third and final section, Rawls deals with ends or ultimate goals of
thinking about social justice. He argues for the need to have a theory of
goodness, and he makes a case for seeing goodness as rationality. Then, he
turns to moral psychology and considers how people acquire a sentiment of
justice. Finally, he examines the good of justice, or how justice is connected
to goodness. Rawls argues that in a well-ordered society, ideas of goodness and
justice must be consistent with each other.
A Theory of Justice is widely
recognized as an essential contribution to thought about the nature of justice.
However, even supporters of Rawls acknowledge that his work raises many
questions. One of the earliest major responses to the book came from his
Harvard colleague, philosopher Robert Nozick. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Nozick
offers a libertarian response to Rawls. The assumptions behind A Theory of Justice are essentially
redistributive: That is, Rawls posits equal distribution of resources as the desirable
state and then argues that inequality can be justified only by benefits for the
least advantaged. Nozick points out that resources are produced by people and
that people have rights to the things they produce. Thus, attempts to improve
the condition of the least advantaged through redistribution are unjust because
they make some people work involuntarily for others and deprive people of the
goods and opportunities they have created through time and effort.
Other
critics have focused on the idea of the original state and the veil of
ignorance used as a thought experiment to approximate the original state. The
claim that rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance would choose the
greatest possible equality has been challenged as arbitrary and unverifiable.
Rational individuals might well choose a social structure with large rewards
for the majority of people and small rewards for the minority on the grounds
that one is more likely to end up as part of a majority than a minority.
Moreover, the veil of ignorance of where one will be in a society also takes
away all knowledge of what one will do. Legal justice is generally considered a
matter of appropriate responses to actions: In the version offered by Rawls,
justice is detached from anything that anyone has done and thus may have
nothing to do with any idea of what people deserve.
The
reluctance of Rawls to identify any particular type of society as just,
especially in the second part of the book dealing with institutions, may leave
Rawls open to the charge that he offers no guidance for the actual content of
justice. For example, proponents of a highly unequal and competitive market
economy may argue that the abundance of wealth produced by their preferred
system contributes to the absolute standard of living of the poorest people in
society. On the other hand, advocates of a highly redistributionist economy can
maintain that radical redistribution of wealth will provide the greatest
support for the poorest. Because no one can know—behind a veil of
ignorance—which system would lead to the best possible lives for the poor,
there can be no way of deciding what kind of society should be preferred.
The
fundamental idea that justice is a matter of the basic structure of society is
also open to question. To say that the basic structure of society can be made
just or fair is to say that it can be designed both hypothetically and
actually. Some social thinkers argue that societies are not designed per se;
they are produced through history and by complex webs of interaction among
individuals and institutions. From this perspective, justice is a
characteristic of specific acts or processes within social systems, such as
legal actions or political mechanisms, and it is misleading to extend the
concept of justice to a society as a whole.
Supporters
of Rawls often look to revise parts of his argument, while opponents suggest
alternatives. Still, most political thinkers acknowledge that A Theory of Justice introduced a
new conceptual basis for debates about the core principles of social policy and
action.
The
Principles of Justice as Fairness
“Justice as Fairness” is Rawls’s
name for the set of principles he defends in TJ. He refers to “the two
principles of Justice as Fairness,” but the second has two parts. These
principles address two different aspects of the basic structure of society: the
“First Principle” addresses the essentials of the constitutional structure. It
holds that society must assure each citizen “an equal claim to a fully adequate
scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the
same scheme for all.” PL at 5. The second principle addresses instead
those aspects of the basic structure that shape the distribution of
opportunities, offices, income, wealth, and in general social advantages. The
first part of the second principle holds that the social structures that shape
this distribution must satisfy the requirements of “fair equality of
opportunity.” The second part of the second principle is the famous—or
infamous—“Difference Principle.” It holds that ”social and economic
inequalities … are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged
members of society.” PL at 6. Each of these three centrally addresses a
different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights and
liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns
opportunities; and the Difference Principle primarily concerns income and wealth.
(That the view adequately secures the social basis of self-respect is something
that Rawls argues more holistically). TJ at 477-8.
Mao and Cultural Revolution
In 1966, China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong
launched what became known as the Cultural Revolution in order to reassert his
authority over the Chinese government. Believing that current Communist leaders
were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on
the nation’s youth to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society and revive
the revolutionary spirit that had led to victory in the civil war 20 decades
earlier and the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural
Revolution continued in various phases until Mao’s death in 1976, and its
tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for
decades to come.
The Cultural Revolution Begins
In the 1960s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union, was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on expertise rather than on ideological purity. Mao’s own position in government had weakened after the failure of his “Great Leap Forward” (1958-60) and the economic crisis that followed. Mao gathered a group of radicals, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao, to help him attack current party leadership and reassert his authority.To encourage the personality cult that sprang up around Mao Zedong during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Defense Minister Lin Biao saw that the now-famous "Little Red Book" of Mao's quotations was printed and distributed by the millions throughout China.
Mao launched the so-called Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) in August 1966, at a meeting of the Plenum of the Central Committee. He shut down the nation’s schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit. In the months that followed, the movement escalated quickly as the students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards and attacked and harassed members of China’s elderly and intellectual population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to that which existed for Josef Stalin, with different factions of the movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought.
Lin Biao’s Role in the Cultural Revolution
During this early phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966-68), President Liu Shaoqi and other Communist leaders were removed from power. (Beaten and imprisoned, Liu died in prison in 1969.) With different factions of the Red Guard movement battling for dominance, many Chinese cities reached the brink of anarchy by September 1967, when Mao had Lin send army troops in to restore order. The army soon forced many urban members of the Red Guards into rural areas, where the movement declined. Amid the chaos, the Chinese economy plummeted, with industrial production for 1968 dropping 12 percent below that of 1966.In 1969, Lin was officially designated Mao’s successor. He soon used the excuse of border clashes with Soviet troops to institute martial law. Disturbed by Lin’s premature power grab, Mao began to maneuver against him with the help of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, splitting the ranks of power atop the Chinese government. In September 1971, Lin died in an airplane crash in Mongolia, apparently while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union. Members of his high military command were subsequently purged, and Zhou took over greater control of the government. Lin’s brutal end led many Chinese citizens to feel disillusioned over the course of Mao’s high-minded “revolution,” which seemed to have dissolved in favor of ordinary power struggles.
Cultural Revolution Comes to an End
Zhou acted to stabilize China by reviving educational system and restoring numerous former officials to power. In 1972, however, Mao suffered a stroke; in the same year, Zhou learned he had cancer. The two leaders threw their support to Deng Xiaoping (who had been purged during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution), a development opposed by the more radical Jiang and her allies, who became known as the Gang of Four. In the next several years, Chinese politics teetered between the two sides. The radicals finally convinced Mao to purge Deng in April 1976, a few months after Zhou’s death, but after Mao died that September, a civil, police and military coalition pushed the Gang of Four out. Deng regained power in 1977, and would maintain control over Chinese government for the next 20 years.Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation. The Cultural Revolution’s short-term effects may have been felt mainly in China’s cities, but its long-term effects would impact the entire country for decades to come. Mao’s large-scale attack on the party and system he had created would eventually produce a result opposite to what he intended, leading many Chinese to lose faith in their government altogether.
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