U N IV E RS IT AT I S MARIAE CURIE-SKŁODOWSKA
LUBLIN — POLONIA
VOL. XXXVI, 25 SECTIO О 1989
Studio Legale Civile c Rotate Université di Modena
Luigi VANNICELLI
Political Participation, Pluralist Democracy and Freedom in the Constitutional State
Polityczne uczestnictwo, demokracja pluralistyczna i wolność w państwie konstytucyjnym
Inan essayonthe totalitarianisms of the right, writtenwithprecisereferences to the modernmass democratic societies as well, Erich Fromm wrote in 1941:
’’Freedom has adual meaning for modern man: thathe has been freed from thetraditional authorities and has becomean «individual», butatthe same time, he has become isolated, impotent, an instrumentof purposes outside himself, alienated from himself and from others; and furthermore, thisfact is an attack upon his I, weakens it and cuts it down, disposinghim to submit to yet other, new, forms of servitude.”
The situation of man’s alienation from ’’himself and from others” in the societies running on the principles of advanced capitalism, the ’’new forms of servitude”that oppress him, to say it in a word, the radical dearth of freedom in which he lives are at the center of contemporary sociological analysis, whose results —from the criticism of Marx’s ’apparent freedom’ to the subsequent contributionsmade by western Marxism (Lukacs,Korsch, etc.), and onup to the mostrecent ’’critical theory of society” (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) surely cannot be summarized here.1
Itissignificantto bring out how the topic offreedom has taken on aleading role in the theory and practice of the recent countercurrent phenomena and movements thathave emerged in theadvanced-capital ism western societies, and, although under different perspectives, even in the area of the most highly- -industrialized socialist countries. From thisstandpoint,the problem of freedom
— which at some times has appeared, or has been presented as, a residueof eighteenthcentury aspirationsand strivings(especially withinthe perspective of
1 N. Luhmann: Rechtssoziologie, Hamburg 1977.
a mystificatory definition of freedom according to bourgeois legal-formal principlesas the absolute model,or,anyway, as theonly form for comparison)
— has come up once again today as the preeminent subject ofsociopolitical thought,asthediscriminantof progressivemovements, asthe privileged subject of criticism and of the struggle going on within existing social systems.
It is not by chance that, for example, the students' movement has been characterized by, and took its point of departurefrom, a topicthat, at least in its initial phase,identified in authoritarianism the essential featureof the so-called
"high-capitalist”society, and, thus,the summarizing term of the very logic that presides over this kind of society. Authoritarianism— we read in anexcellent essay on the students’ movement:
[...] ’’refers firstly to the power structure in social institutions and or
ganizations, that is not made functionally legitimate, andisjustifiableonly with positions of material interest. In the second place, reference is made on the passive sideto themore orlessmediated violence exercised on subaltern subjects acting in their several social roles, including the particularly family-type, internalized repression. Finally, reference is made to the general political and cultural climate of the societythat is going through a phase of becoming more rational and efficient, which is not ready to tolerate the satisfaction of needs other than those that it itself imposes.”
On theotherhand, theproblem of freedom is posed in no less dramatic terms, even ifat a differentandhigher level, in thesocialistcountries of EasternEurope.
Thehigher level consists in the fact that, with the destruction of the material bases of bourgeoisdomination, certain structural premises for socialist freedom have been laid down. The dramatic lies in the fact that the confiscation of economic power has been historically realized to the advantage of bureau cracy that hassubstituted for themanagement ofpower for the profit of a class the management of power for the "domination”of an élite that has taken onthe task ofsafeguarding the community at all levels, thus reproducing within the heart of the greatest revolution of the modern age historical situations that should have beenleft behind.
Perhapsthe most surprising aspect comesjust out of theobservation that the identification and the denouncement of thecondition ofnon-freedom involves, evenatdifferent levels, socio-economic systems and institutional setups based on structures that are profoundly different one fromanother or,atleast,that appear so to be according to the reference categories or values habitually used in the analysisand comparisonof social systems. Thus, and with all due differences taken accountof(theconditionofslavery of the peoples of Latin America, or of thosealreadysubject to Greek or SpanishFascism, is evidently quite a different thing with respect that have reached a high level ofindustrialization and of technological development),it may be stated that the theoretical and practical coming toawareness of theradicaldearthoffreedom can beprospected today at
the universal level,whether as the effective universality of theconcretecondition of contemporaryman’s existence, whether as the absence, withintoday’s historic horizon, of and adequate reference model, whether, finally, as a coming to awareness —thatis gradually being disseminated and generalized—of boththe one and the other situation. In otherwords,it hascomeout that thecomingto awareness that we arenotliving in freedom istaking on todaythe characteristics, and itmaybeexpected that itwill more and moretake them on, of a historical awareness: it tends to take shape, on the level of the community or social consciousness, as atrue coming toawareness, in themostcomplete senseof the term,which is to saynolonger and notonlyas anindividual moral concern, but rathertrulyas a practical criticism ofthe existing state ofaffairs set going by collective movements.2
Intheperspective in which wehavebeenplaced here, it is of no interest either toreconstruct theitineraryand the conclusionsof the critical theory ofsociety,or to identify the effectiveconditions ofthis dearthof freedom, rather, what is of interest isthe fact ofthis diffusion of the comingto awareness of the currentlack of freedom, of course taking the term ’’coming to awareness” in the sense of a practical criticism of the existing state of affairsatthe community level.When this comes about we are in the presence of a situation inwhich the theory-practice circuit has the potential to release all its effects: should this happen, the theoretical results of the social or political search, coming together with the reality of the concrete contradictions that doexist and are experienced within the socialsystem,become politically operational values, that is, which are capable of contributing to establishing a political practice that, while alwayscoming into beingfromthe presence of an effectivecondition of social conflict, finds in those theoretical results the starting lines orientatingits motion, making possible then, in its turn, within theconcrete context ofsocial struggle, the creation of new ethical and political values, and of new lines ofoperation. It is thus that the coming to awareness ofthe dearth of freedom represents the politically most meaningfulaspect of the matterathand, sinceitis de factotranslated,according to its most coherent manifestation,just in the criticismofthe existingfreedoms and in the search for new dimensions offreedom.
A thesis has been put forth here: we areinthepresence of an orientation,one still in its initial and minority phases, of thesocial or community awareness that is tending to bring back to the center of social andpoliticalpractice theproblem of freedom,as theconsequenceofacoming to awareness(that isbecoming ever moregeneralized) as tothecurrent radical lack of freedom. Thesalientaspectof thiscoming to awarenessisits practical-operational characteristic, that is, the translating of it, even if according to procedures that are still vague andconfused, into the inventionof and the experimentwith new liberating practices and new
2 R. A. Dahl: Modern Political Analysis, Bologna 1967 (Italian translation).
dimensions of freedom, which represent as many proposals and conquests, however as yet limited and unorganically conceived, that are objectively alternatives to the existing social and institutional order. Thus, the coming to awareness mentioned represents, more than a moral or cultural datum, a ’’politicalphenomenon”, since— asregardsthat little of it that exists — it takes onthede facto characteristics of a ’’practical criticism of theexisting situation.”
Man has always stayedat the center ofcultural and scientificresearch andof any discovery. However, it is only in modern times, owing to the confluence of a number ofbranches of learning (consider the extraordinary developmentsof a series of sectors ofscience: from biology to psychoanalysis, to etiology, to sociology, to socialpsychology, to anthropology, and,then, theeconomic and political sciences themselves) that we have arrived atthe commencement of an overallscientific knowledge of man in his physico-naturalrealityhistorically and sociallysituated, to the pointthat a new course in scienceisbeing spoken of,as wellas ofa scientific ’’rediscovery” of man. And it is particularlyinthese most recenttimesthat the dissemination of this knowledge and of this viewof man, the dissemination of itinto the common consciousness so as to have become by now an elementconstituting it, has beenexertingits effect not only on the cultural apparatus ofthe individual, on hisbeliefs, on his ideal options,butquite as well on community customsand orientations.3
It may be observed, in particular, that the development of scientific cognitions has led to shedding light on the complex of conditionings (bio-psychic, physico- -natural, ethnic, historic-cultural, socio-economic, and so on) operating onman, on his operating choices, onhisvery ways of knowing things — thusdeterminingthe collapse of an ingenuous myth offreedom taken, at itslimit, as theabsolute absence ofconditionings—this having led at thesame time to identifying with greater clarity what thehistoric, contingent, andfunctional characteristicofa dominion or power structure—ittoo onlyhistorically given—may be of awhole seriesofconditionings deemed earlieras being ’’natural” and for thatsamereasonnot to be eliminatedand impossible to get past. The demonstrated historicity of a whole complex of conditionings that imprison man is the equivalent, at the level of the collective consciousness, totheaffirmation of itsbeing possible to free oneself from them: the momentwhen there isintroduced into the common consciousness the coming to awareness of the historicity and of the consequent susceptibility of being overcome, at least potentially, of certain conditionings, which coming to awareness that perhaps represents atits starttheguiding ideaof the action of onlya minority group and a fact that is still onlyconfusedlydivined by growing areas of the collective consciousness, at this time there opens up a usually unstoppable historic process (even if itis one whose outcome cannot be foreseen, consideringthe multifarious factors flowing togetherto bring itabout).
3 E. W. Böckenforde: Staat und Gesellschaft, Darmstadt 1976.
It mayanyway be brought outthatthestartof such a process already marks, and byitself,aqualitative turning point in theway freedom is representedand in intuitions of it, since it demonstrates the widening out of thesphere of freedom as historically proposable,at least ’’freedom” in its senseof "freedom from”,that is, the liberation from a set of conditionings that are not coessential with the
’’structural” or ’’natural” reality of man as historically situated.
I believe thatthere canbe no doubtthat oneof the fundamentalelements of today’s incipient awareness ofthe dearth of freedom consists just in this gap, one evermore felt, betweenthe freedomsthat exist today, that is,between the space given, socially and institutionally, to freedom, and the freedoms intuited as historicallypossible within theframework ofa restructuring of thesocial system, or — in other words — in the gapbetween the complex of conditioningsthat appear, at present, to be uneliminatable, and the amount over that of conditioningsimposed by society and institutions relative to which, then, the possiblityof getting past them, ofleaving them behind, is in itself historically proposable.
The phenomenon of the ever more frequent withdrawal of consent by individuals and groupsfrom existing ideologies and institutions (parties, trade unions, churches, etc.)andthecontingent phenomenon, even if smaller inextent, of the search for new ethical values and for new political procedures, can be connected to another conquest made by modern culture that begins itself to become part of the heritageof the common consciousness,which is to say, the factof the historicity ofideologies and ofsocio-political systems. The debunking ofideologies, thatis,thedemonstration— being done morethanby anyone else by the sociology of knowledge and by anthropology — of their functioningas instruments of a power structure historically given to us, andof their essential character as instruments of domination, marks a datum of incalculable importance to the maturation of the contemporary consciousness, which, ’’freed from the justification in absolute termsof the existing ideologies, ’’discovers how, within thehistorical order, novalues aregiven butrelative values and it isgiven usto identifythe nexus thatnormally connects values toa given power setup, therefore we now finding ourselves thusly having available a potential of criticism and offreedom that were, up till now, unknown.
It is withinthis wider context that the social awareness begins todiscovernot onlythe reality ofpower andthe concrete conditionsof sevitude, or, if you prefer, of alienation thatin fact underlie the great myths of democratic freedoms, but still morethe essential historicity of therepresentativedemocraticsystem,of the valuesthatitaims to incarnate, and — what is of mostinterest here, of theforms and of the very concept of modern freedom.*
4 H. D. Lasswell, A. Kaplan: Power and Society, Л Framework for Political Enquiry, Milano 1969 (Italian translation).
It is not possible to go further into the argument: let a few remarks suffice to clarify the burden ofwhat has been asserted above.
Modern freedom, as it has been being affirmed since the Renaissance, is embraced ina dual process, ontheone hand bythe progressive restrictionof the sphere of the state, denuded of its ethical and sacral duties and reduced to essentially lay tasks,and —on theother — by anincreasing ’’autonomization”
(that is,by theconquest of a relative independence and self-sufficiency — of the sphereof the individual.
Within the typical context of modern individualism freeedom becomesmore and more the obtaining, relative to the political community (the State) ofan autonomousindividual spherewhose aimis the conquestof private happiness:
the state’s functionis limited — whetherwithin the classical liberal viewpoint, whether within themore recent social democratic viewpoint — to the aim of guaranteeing, inthe first case,thelegal and formal conditionsof existence and of independence in the individual sphere, and inthe secondthe so-called substantial conditions for this. In the one and the other version a splitting offreedom is effected — coessentialto the veryconcept of modernfreedom —into political freedom and civil freedom, in which Constant saw the basic premiss of representative democracy asan authentically modern conquest. If theroleplayed by political freedom is theguarantee of the one true freedom,civil freedom (as an autonomous individual sphere: independent of the State, that is to say) the institution of politicalrepresentation is posedas thetypical functional procedure guaranteeing freedom to modern folk, for whom having themselvesrepresented in thegovernmentof the respublica is the same thingassayingthe freedcmto delegate to a few representatives the exercise of the power of government (politicalfreedom),isacondition of the freedom to be able todevote oneself to the — essentially private, individualand independent — sphere of theconquest ofhappiness (civil liberty). Whathasbeen effected with this, both inlawand in fact, is anet andradical scission between ’’seeing tothehousehold”, the activity thatisof the economic,professional and social spheres— ina word, the sphereof civilsociety — and the public sphere properly so-called, the policy of the curarei publicae given over tothe management of whoever has beendelegated (elected) to dojust this by thecitizenry. Of significance from thisstandpoint is the classical distinction — received in all liberal-democratic constitutions — between the holdingof sovereignity, this being acknowledged thepeople’s,andthe exercise of sovereignity, given to thedelegates (representatives)of the people.
The most recent versions of representative democracy (so-called ’’social democracy” of whichthe Italian constitution is a typical model) introduce no qualitative innovationsin the picturedelineated: universal suffrage, theadmis sion into the context of the institutions of such great mass organizations as parties, trade unions, pressure groups, etc., the acknowledgement of social autonomies(intermediategroups of various kinds) and theacknowledgement of
local autonomies represent no morethanhistorically more sufficientprocedures, in that they are more categorized, for theassignment of the proxy powerto the representatives, which is and remainsthe typical institution for legitimizing the oligarchies holding power in thevarious spheres andat the various levelsof social life that the citizen has. Similar considerations hold good too for other characteristicsof the democratic Stateof modern times, suchastheemergence, in the State sphere, of social and socializingdemands,the assumption of ever vaster competences by theStateinthe social and economic fields, that is, in the area that wastraditionally ’’private”, the growing importanceof the public authority as regardsthepromotion and disssemination ofcertain services (education,social welfare, social security, etc.). Thesearecharacteristicsthat are in part due tothe deeplying modifications of the economic-production activity itself, and in part due to the pressure of the intermediate mass groups (parties, trade unions, companies): butnot eventhey, if one looks at thematter properly, reallyeffect a jumpinquality— from thestandpoint of freedom — relative to theessential
’’guarantist” function ofthe liberal democratic model, since their aimsremain those of guaranteeing, using updated procedures, the autonomous individual sphere within the line of the splittingbetween political liberty and civil liberty, and of the primacyof the latterovertheformer.Thus themyth(the authentic flag of allthedemocratic left-leaning movements)of’’socialdemocracy” as opposed to’’liberaldemocracy”, of’’substantial liberties”asthequalitativesurpassing of the ’’formal” freedoms, liesrevealed inall itsmystificatoriness, basedas itison acontrapositionthattoa good extent is notexistent:the’’substantial”freedoms, theinstitutions and characteristics of social democracy, all moveexactly within the conceptual and institutional framework ofmodern freedom, constituting the attemptto safeguard — using tools able to meet the complexity ofsocial and economic reality—the private autonomous sphere,thatis, civil freedom as the sphere reserved from and torn from the political sphere, relative to which political freedom carries out the function of means by which one may remove oneself from the res publica, it being delegated to others.5 The logic does not change: what remainsis thelogicofgivingagrant of powers to a few citizens for the exercise — on a defacto permanent basis —of the political power (or the cultural power, or the trade union, or the economic, etc.); the logic of the separationbetween thesocial role (economic-professional) and thepoliticalrole of the individual (with the subordination of thelatter to the former); thelogic of the dominant oligarchies, they in practice not being subject toany controlor to anychangeof executive structures (consider only the stabilityof the power, of government or of opposition, in Italy and consider, too, the non-existent renovation of the political executive class).
Thetruth is that notions such as ’’participation in power”, ’’decision-making
’ C. Mortati: islituzioni di diritto pubblico, Padova 1969.
intervention at the base”, ’’direct democracy", and soon, are not only wholly extraneousand abnormal relative to the structures and institutions of represen
tative democracy, but are even incompatible with the veryconcept of modern freedom with which those structures and institutions hook up: and it is exactly this concept offreedom, up to thispoint ideologically presentedas an "ethical absolute”, or as a perenial value, that becomes extraneous to the collective consciousness.6 What rather comesoutofthiscontextwhen,owingtothe effect of the socio-cultural factors that we arelisting, onebegins tofeel inthe common awareness the radicalinadequacy ofa freedom exactly understoodas freedom from taking partin power;whenthesuspicion begins tobe introduced that this is notthe only nor the mostcomprehensivemodalityof being of freedom; when, especially, one becomes aware that even such amodality is reduced — in the societiesofadvanced capitalism — to very smallmargins inrelation to the new forms ofslavery ofman as consumer-worker and ascitizen (his political role beinglimited to ratifyinghis representatives, whether these be theexecutives of great laborunions, parties or economic organizations, or those governing the res publica at the national or local levels); when, finally, one begins to acquire the cultural-practical capability to think differently about freedom and to feel it accordingto modalities that, to date, have not been known.
The very rapid process of concentrationof companies, which have bynow risen to thelevelof authentic protagonists nationally andsupranational^, with de facto powers not inferior to those traditionallythe property of governments and States; the reality that follows from this on the level of international relations, which are moreandmore conditionedbythe solidarityand interdepen
dencethat are determined — quitebeyond the traditional ideological-political differentiations— between States belonging to homogeneousareasofeconomic and technological development; the veryfunction that the statehas beentaking on within the socio-economic and production spheres: these, together with numerous others, are the factors that have led to the fallingapart of classical distinctions — uponwhichthe modern concept of freedomis based — between thepublicsphereand the privatesphere,between political power and economic power. The identification between the two domains,just as between the two powers, appears today to be very nearlycomplete, so much so that thepoint is reached that it is not mistaken to consider today’s phase of capitalism as the phase of’’monopolistic State capitalism” (where the very term ’’State” indicates akindofreality,offunctions and of structures that areverydifferent from those of the past).
Relative to such a situation, in which the traditional private sphere of economic-production relations is absorbed in the public sphere, and in which private organisms (such as for example companies) exercise (withouteven the
• R. Nozick: Anarchy, Stale and Utopia, Firenze 1981 (Italian translation).
formal controlof a delegation of democraticrepresentation) a power that is de facto public, the classical structures of representative democracy reveal their
incapacity to safeguardmodern freedom,even in its peculiar current acceptance of being freedomfrom thepublicsphere for theenjoyment of aprivateautonomous sphere in which to exercise one’s freedom to ’’pursue happiness”. It is in fact obvious how, ina social system tending toward the total integration into itof the individual, and that has availablemeans that have been scientifically identified and abundantly furnished by technology (instruments of mass communications, advertising, partyandtrade union indoctrination channels, schools, social services etc.)in order to arriveat the progressive placement on the marginof any residue of autonomy, of reservedspace, ofspace not invaded by thepublic sphere (as a social and political production sphere) the distinction between public sphereand private sphere is being nullified, and how, then, an institutional trim modelled on a conceptionof freedom that derived from that distinctionand thatfound in itthe distinctivecharacteristics relative to otherhistoric forms of freedom, cannot help butbe radically turned upside down. Certainly — asisbynow documentedbynot a few studies and researches — we are in the presenceof a socialsystem that has the potentialto realize themost systematic and the most radical formof totalitaria
nism that human history has ever known, in that it is favoured by the inevitable implications of an irreversible process ofgrowing socialization, and founded on current scientific knowledge of social behaviour, with, more, the abundance of meansfurnished by a technology that has never been so perfectbefore.7 Recent researchesdemonstrate, for example, how eventhe erotic-sexual phase(one of the most ’’private” aspects of interpersonal relations) is not only being evermore intensely conditioned —like every other aspectof individual life — bythe modes od existence imposed bythedynamics of the socio-economic system,but is tending on the other hand to be invaded bythe ”public”sphere, and taken on, its own self, asone more element of integration into the social system. Relativeto the picture sketched out, the current institutions and forms of freedom inevitably resolve downinto instruments of consensusinduced from above and of the systematic placing on the margin ofanyresidual dissent, that is essentially an instrument of freedom. We are faced then by the absurd fact of aconceptual apparatus and institutional trim setup forfreedom that are being transformed, by the reality of thechanged socialrelationsthemselves in which they find themselveshaving to endure,into instrumentsof oppression and of freedom: this isthe typical process
— already discovered as in being in other historical epochs — of thesurvival of institutionsas facts in themselves, of theirpersistence in time as the’’accumulated and petrified waste” ofthe past, of their consequent conversion into historically arbitrary realities.
1 J. Habermas: Öffentlichkeit, [in:] Fisher-Lexikon: Staat und Politik, Torino 1980 (Italian translation).
The last elementthat it is wished to indicate hereasa factor, perhapsthe most relevant among those indicated, that has intervened in and is intervening in determining the process of historical coming-to-awarenessof the radical dearth of freedom and of the proponibility of new dimensions of freedom, is just this observation — that the common awareness has by now been led tomakedaily
— of the possibilities that science and technology provide man today; an observedfact experienced —and this is the newest andmostsignificantfact—no longer in terms of the nineteenth century myth ofscience as the magical and exclusivedispenser of happiness forman, butintheawareness of thesubstantial ambiguityofscience(that can lead to life as it can to destruction), and,more especially, of the fact that theutilization ofit accordingtothe one orthe other of itspotentialities belongs to a choice that is political in nature. Andthisisthesame as saying that the process with which the collective consciousness has been investedfollowing scientific andtechnological progress, isa dual one:on theone hand it is aware that spheres of the real and of the hypothetical,which up till yesterdaywere deemed subject tothe dominion of natural laws or ofsuperhuman forces(fate) or fell anywaywithinthe sphere ofthe historically impossible and of dream (utopia) have today beengiven back to man’s control andfall within the sphere of the historicallypossible(andthis determines, just by itself—consider, for example, the implications, on the religious level, or the philosophical and ideological level —avery importantcultural leap, one such as to putthe whole knowledge-gathering apparatus and ail the values inherited from the past in crisis); andonthe other hand, consequently,the common awarenesshasbecome awareof the fact that the choice between thehistorically possible alternatives, so far from beingthe fruitof uncontrollableand unknown forces, is itself givenback tothesphereofthehuman, that is, tobeing an object ofcollective choices,and thushas become an essentially and exclusively political fact.8
What at one time was the most important thing,to save one’s soul,has been thus structurallyconvertedinto a political fact acquired bysocialization, inserted in the psychic metabolism ofthe manof this civilization: ”[...] takepart in the decisions concerning one’s own destiny in as much as they are tied to the collective destiny of yourspecies and of the cosmos.”
The redefinition of politicsmeans, finally,the re-inventionof the object of doing politics and of the modalities ofdoing politics, within the context of a historically new reality such as the one existing in the societies of advanced capitalism;itmeanstheunderstandingthat one is nottotackle and one is notto attack aunidimensional and integratedsocial system liketheonewehavebefore us except by the start-up of enormous collective processes of coming to awareness relative to the reality of the contradictions insociety, that is, unless there is ageneralized ”[...] capacityfor thepractical criticism of the contradic-
• A. Rosmini-Serbat: Filosofia del diritto, 2 vol., Padova 1967-1969.
tion, which includes both political-theoretical analysisand organized practical experience.” From this standpointthefirst act of true liberation that is required of theforces that intend to make themselvesthe protagonists of a new liberating practice, which is first of all a practice of the repoliticization and of the self-management of struggle, is the elimination of the nineteenth-century residuesthat lead us to conceive of revolutionary social change as the immediate fruitof minority vanguards, of thebarricades in the streets, of theexplosionof dynamite bombs and, finally, of an elite management of the political struggle.
STRESZCZENIE
Na początku XVI wieku w dwóch znakomitych dziełach: Ksiąif i Utopia zostały ujawnione sprzeczności natury ludzkiej w jej wymiarze powszechnym. W modelowej postaci im bardziej dochodzi do głosu społeczeństwo mieszczańskie, im swobodniej się ono rozwija, tym bardziej obojętnie i wrogo odnoszą się do siebie ludzie jako jednostki, grupy, narody i klasy. Na tym tle ukazany został odwieczny problem wolności oraz wynikający zeń wniosek, iż wszystkie instynkty, każde bezwarunkowe i absolutne pożądanie szczęścia tłumi się na rzecz starań o „dobro ogółu”.
W czasach nam współczesnych ekonomia ukrywa rzeczywisty obraz władzy pod pozorem niezależności podmiotów gospodarczych, a filozofia pod ideal stycznym pojęciem absolutnej wolności człowieka.
