The power interplay among many individual centres of power is not to be subdued or made calculable for an outcome that fulfils external criteria, but is to be recognized and protected as the historical form of human sociation that corresponds to individualized, plural, human freedom per se. The individuality of individuals is only made possible by an abstract form of sociation mediated by a reified social relation, money, that allows many degrees of freedom for individuals to shape their own selves and their own lives shared with chosen others. Individuals struggle against and with one another to become who they are and to gain what they desire to enjoy and individually shape their lives. On the fair side of the medal, the everyday interchanges among individuals enable them to exercise their individual powers and abilities for each other's benefit, and that in often unforeseeable ways. Each individual comes to show who he or she is and to validate their powers in the interchanges with others, and also to acquire goods of living that make their lives comfortable. Such freedom of interplay concerns powers and potentials, and not any outcomes that could be specified as 'the good' or 'well-being' of all, and therefore there is always risk of failure in the play of free individuality. The gambit to be esteemed as somewho and to gain the material wherewithal for good living carries no guarantees of assured outcomes, but is already the very realization of social freedom.
The justice pertaining to the interplay among individuals vieing for who-status and gain is the commutativejustice of fair play, and not the distributive ('social') justice of assured, secure outcomes. The superior instance called for by the power interplay of individuals has first of all to fulfil a judicial role to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise, and secondly a rule-setting role to ensure that the interplay overall is played out according to fair rules. This latter is the translation of the Hobbesian criterion of "peaceable living" among the players, above all by preventing unfair concentrations of power in the striving for monetary gain and in the employment of money as an accumulated, reified social power. The adjudicating and rule-setting roles of government are its core determinations. The power interplay among individuals is not to be quelled but allowed to play out, with unforeseen and often surprising outcomes. A third role for government is to develop, through education and training, the powers and abilities of individuals so that they can play as well as they possibly can in the power plays of daily life to gain esteem and income.
A conception of social living and its government in terms of fair power play is antithetical to the traditional conception of power that posits a principal having dominion over the movements to bring forth an envisaged outcome. Such a principal is required by conceptions of distributive (social) justice that are bent on guaranteeing actual outcomes deemed as good, e.g. (the maximization of) the happiness of society as a whole.(15) To guarantee such actual outcomes, free interplay must be quelled or at least constrained and confined. The individual players in the power interplay who value their own individual freedom affirm a superior instance of power only insofar as it exercises judicial and rule-setting powers, for such powers are in accordance with the interplay of individual freedom and necessary for it. Such a free society is necessarily pluralist, for there can be no unified truth for a way of living in it, but only a plurality of different ways of living mediated with one another by abstract, reified social relations of interchange that leave each other in peace, and indeed, in a guaranteed, but benevolent indifference to each other. The preservation of freedom demands conceding thepowerlessness of government to bring about certain envisaged outcomes of the power interplay at the heart of social living.
The power play among individuals and associations therefore contains many contradictory possibilities, including the following: rivalry and teamwork, competition and co-operation, appreciation and depreciation of abilities, vanity and self-esteem, flattery and esteem, winning and losing, greed and moderation, mutual benefit and one-sided advantage, uplifting exhilaration and downcasting disappointment. The power interplay cannot be governed, controlled to produce certain desirable outcomes rather than others, nor can it be quelled to prevent the savage struggle over who-status among the players (over standing presence in the mirroring shine of public or private estimation) that rages everywhere and everyday, mostly covertly. Political power is not cybernetic, but can only arbitrate conflicts and right wrong through a judiciary and seek to maintain fair boundary conditions of the game as a whole. Fairness cannot be calculably set up. When the power play among individuals and their associations is fair, it is beautiful like a fleeting, mild summer's day, but, more often than not, it is unfair and ugly. The government is only one instance mandated to fight for fairness by laying down rules of play. Fairness, however, is not so much a matter of implementable government policy; rather fair play is an ethos in which the players are immersed that imbues the power interplay with a certain attunement. An ethos is an aether which the players breathe habitually like a fairer, higher atmosphere; it is not a higher power.
Elena:
I'm a little tired to take all this texts on but it is worth looking at it some.
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