A government of thieves

Originally posted by Melanerpes
My point was that this quest for the legitimate society is going to be a very daunting one if the only examples of it ever existing are limited to certain hunter-gather societies.

So how do reconcile consent to laws with autonomy? It may well be impossible to organize a society of any size with having some sort of coercive authority to maintain "order uld be used to make current government less intrusive without compromising living standards.

Thinking about it from a personal perspective, i.e. I'm not going to play devil's advocate and defend the absolute premise that autonomy must be preserved, merely that it should be strived to be preserved as far as is reasonable possible, only some sort of comprimise would work.

A most interesting idea that might have reconciled the impasse between state political authority and individual autonomy was by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he had argued that the general will, the will for the good of society as a whole, would be what everyone had. As such, with majoritarian democracy, where the majority, assuming they were pursuing the general will, would always be correct in pursuing it. Those of the minority would still be wanting to pursue the general will, they would just be incorrect in their pursuit of it, i.e. they just chose the wrong methods.
This would reconcile the problem because everyone who would want the general will, they just willed the wrong method, they would be forced to be free as such.

The main problem though is that the majority isn't always correct, especially with unpredictable consequences.

Originally posted by DrKF
You're not offering a legitimate solution: might that be because there cannot be one, that what you seek is utopian?

If every hitherto existing society has been illegitimate, might not the search for what you call autonomy be that which is illegitimate?

Government at its best is a trade-off between order and freedom: it's unfair to take one of the ...[text shortened]... that ensures promises are kept is 'unfortunate'. It's part and parcel of the deal!

I actually like the idea of questioning everything we all just "assume" to be true.

I like the idea of asking the question "how much government do we actually need?" and setting out to see if there's an alternative approach that uses a lot less government or a very different type of government. The problem is that it's very hard to take any existing system and change it very much.

One major blessing was that in the past, a whole new hemisphere was discovered - allowing this whole new experiment of democracy to be set up in America, without having to undo centuries of ancient and medieval traditions and institutions. It would be great if a new landmass could be discovered that would allow another grand experiment of this sort.