CHAPTER II
How Politics Realigns

Choices and Decisions: Individual and Collective

All people, everywhere and in any period of history, have constantly made choices and decisions about what to do, what action to take. Making choices is one of the defining features of the human condition, in other words. Entire disciplines are built around the study of this kind of human activity; economists study decision making under conditions of scarcity, sociologists look at the social context of those decisions and the two-way relationship between them. Many of these decisions are, or appear to be, purely private and personal, of concern only to the individual making them. For example, the decision as to what clothes to wear on a particular day, what to eat, or what time to retire to bed might seem to be decisions of that personal kind. By contrast there are other choices or decisions that are clearly and explicitly collective, they are taken through an often-formalized collective process and, most importantly, once taken, they bind all, including in some cases even people who did not participate in the process.

In reality the distinction just made is not so clear cut. Between the purely private and the explicitly collective is another large realm. This is emergent and unintended collective choice. Here, the choices made on a personal basis by large numbers of individual men and women are merged or aggregated by social processes. These produce outcomes that affect or restrain everyone to some degree but which are unintended - they do not derive from conscious intention or design. They are, as Friedrich Hayek was fond of saying, 'the result of human action but not of human design'. The example he focused on was that of markets, where choices and decisions made by individual economic actors (buyers, sellers, investors) produced outcomes via the mechanism of exchange in the form of prices, which in turn transmitted information to those actors and gave them incentives and so led them to act in certain ways.1 Another example is language, where the communicative interactions of people generate things such as vocabulary (commonly agreed and understood words and meanings) and grammar. Yet another is the way complex social interactions produce norms or mores and conventions, which are not designed or deliberately chosen but which nonetheless constrain people's choices. More generally, human choices, over time when combined with memory, generate the emergent phenomenon of tradition, which then serves as a source of knowledge and guide to action. Further cases are fashions, fads and manias.2

By contrast, we have a much smaller but equally significant kind of collective choice where the choices between different options are arrived at via much more explicit rules (even if informal understandings also play a part) and where the outcome (the decision) is consciously intended and aimed at. Moreover, the rules and processes through which the choices are made are also to a great degree consciously and explicitly designed. This is the realm of overt collective choice and the main example is politics. This can happen at the level of institutions that are not coterminous with the entire society, such as the firm or workplace or the club (hence the term 'office politics') but can also happen at the level of the entire community. Indeed, it is being collectively subject to the process of explicit collective choice that defines a certain kind of society - the political community or polity. In addition to conscious explicitness, decisions of this kind have another distinctive quality: they are coercively enforced, with force being used against any who dissent once the choice has been made. For example, if a political community decides through the collective process of politics to impose a certain tax, refusal to pay the tax is a swift route to punishment.

One way of thinking about the political form of collective decision making is as a spectrum defined by the number of people involved in making the decision relative to the number on whom it is enforced. At one extreme the decision is made by just one person, a true autocrat. At the other there is a truly unanimous rule, where every single person has to consent for the decision to be binding. Both of these have severe costs, which is why they exist only as theoretical ideal types to which actual processes approximate to some degree.3 If just one person (or a very small number) decides, then their preferences are imposed on the majority, who may well dissent because their actual or perceived material interests are harmed. If there is a unanimity requirement, then it becomes almost impossible to take any decision and a large amount of resources (not least time) is spent on the decision-making process to no effect. In actual political communities, the process and institutions for political collective decision making fall somewhere between those two extremes, ideally in a way that minimizes both imposed and decision-making costs.

Historically there are two main variables. The first is the size of the 'political nation' - those entitled to participate in the decision-making process - relative to the population as a whole. The two are historically never identical. No political community has yet given children (defined as those beneath a certain age) a say. Historically, women were not part of the decision-making body, nor those without a certain amount of property. In many polities now, resident foreigners or convicted criminals have no say. A common challenge for analysis is the situation where a large number of people have the right to participate in the decision-making process but this is purely formal, with the actual decision-making body much smaller. The second variable is the degree of discussion involved, that is the extent to which a simple majority of those participating is sufficient for a decision. These two are independent - so for example in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, political participation was restricted to the gentry but there was a requirement of unanimity (the Liberum Veto) for any binding decision.

All of this is why the extent and range of collective choice through politics is one of the constant debates in the modern world. A persistent argument is that the sphere or extent of political choice should be strictly limited, perhaps by explicitly ruling certain matters to be outside the scope of political choice. An example is the first amendment to the US Constitution, which removes questions of public speech and religion from the scope of politics (at least in theory). Generally speaking, it is liberals of all kinds who have been most associated with the argument that the scope of politics should be limited. The liberal argument, as made by authors such as J.S. Mill, is that most matters should be left to private decision making aggregated by social mechanisms such as markets or convention. This makes the decisions and the process non-political, while still social and collective. Conservatives have historically been more ambivalent, with some arguing for a more extensive politics of the 'common good' while others prefer to restrict self-conscious political choice and rely more on tradition. The contemporary version adhered to by most kinds of politics is to argue that some decisions should be removed from politics but not decided by impersonal mechanisms. Instead, they should be determined either by law or by professional experts. This is a prominent feature of the current political settlement that the new politics is reacting against, as noted earlier. In reality what this does is to leave some decisions as political but to remove them from democratic choice: the group responsible for the collective and coercive decision is no longer a large electorate but a narrow class of experts.

Over time specific areas of life move in or out of the range of matters subject to political choice. An example is religious belief and observance, at one point one of the most important and contentious matters subject to political choice but now almost entirely a private matter in Western countries. As already noted, political choice has an essential and inevitable coercive quality, because it generates decisions that are binding on all, even those in the minority or who did not participate, and is enforced by recourse to physical force. This means in turn that politics is concerned with matters regarded by those subjected to the process as important or relevant to an important interest they have. Consequently, it has an inevitable agonistic quality; it reflects competition between groups with interests that are in conflict or at least tension. Lenin captured this in characteristically clear and cynical form when he said that the basic question in politics was 'Who-Whom' - who was doing something and to whom was it being done. Where a group that is bound by the decisions the process produces has no say in the process - or feels it does not - then the result is unrest and ultimately a legitimacy crisis for the entire process.

None of this is to say that collective choice through politics is bad. Unless one is an anarchist (or even then), it is an inevitable feature of a complex society. As long as the coercive power of government exists, there will be politics, a decision-making process that decides how and where that coercive power will be used. The alternative to politics as a way of resolving conflicts of interest is for those conflicts to be settled by open violence. This is why the complete failure of politics is a catastrophe that most would wish to...