Libertarian Socialism

The flag of the Palman Confederation of Work, a symbol of
the anarcho-syndicalist movement.

The absence of a master characterises anarchism (libertarian socialism) such that no human is a serf. It is a dialectic of mutual individualist anarchism and social collectivist anarchism. It advocates for federations, cooperatives, syndicates and communes for the progress of creative participation and liberation. The separation of labour from the person who executed it resulted in the technical distinction and hierarchy of authority of engineers from labourers, creators from operators, and humanists from scientists. To labour as an actor realises production and consumption in free (liberal, mutual and necessary) activity that exchanges goods and services in human solidarity. According to Avram Noam Chomsky, a linguist-cum-philosopher (influenced by Gallileo, Hume, Wittgenstein, and Alan Turning the father of artificial intelligence), a consistent libertarian "must oppose private ownership of the means of production and wage slavery, which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labour must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer". This summarises the ideology of libertarian socialism, and how it is not a contradiction of terms. The consequence of the emphasis of personal autonomy is a scepticism of the obsequious (subservient, obedient and servile) morality of serfs and servants with their coerced "voluntary" servitude. The modern transition from agrarian (agricultural, pastoral and venatorial) feudalism to commercial, imperial, industrial and financial capitalism has resulted in a resurgence of the feudal and tributary system of classes where persons are constrained by structures of control.

The libertarian socialist society is an alternative to both liberal capitalist and state socialist societies. The libertarian principles since the Enlightenment have been anti-capitalist. They advocate for equality and believe people should be free from subjection of all types, including wage labour, because it is destructive of their humanity. For Karl Marx, the control of aristocracy defines feudalism results in a class society based on exploitation. In this system and mode of production, serfs laboured for their masters. It is an illusion that in practice of capitalism that workers are free to voluntarily work for themselves or for others, as they have insignificant control in their experience. Influenced by Stirner, Marx and Friedrich Engels related labour to capital in a materialist conception of history and dialectics. Marx criticised the political economy with the concept of commodity fetishism. It is the reification (transformation) of a thing (an entity of a good and service in production and consumption) in a commercial market of products as something with economic value, a attribution of subjective importance in functions (social relations and interpersonal transactions) that are mediated, obscured and expressed as objective abstraction (a factitious figure fetish with inherent or intrinsic value, e.g. price, form, property, quality or anthropomorphic expectation).

Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations and mythic father of capitalism, said that it was imperative that the government in civilised society prevented the division of labour. This essence of industrialism, with the specialisation of capacity (physical force, ability, and cognisance), represented a substantial increase in productivity and its association of interdependent commerce. Smith criticised by predicting that is would transform people into creatures as stupid and as ignorant as possible for a human being. Alexis de Tocqueville agreed, saying "the art advances, the artisan recedes". Specialisation of industry was further described by David Ricardo with comparative advantage. The argument for markets that Smith advocated was that, under the conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. They will not force people to subject themselves to external orders, destroying their humanity. This mythical society was based on Enlightenment values. Contrast this to the state subsidised capitalism that developed the corporate system of civilised society with its total tyranny. Its institutions (heads and hands) of private power and wealth, unlike those of the state, are not responsible to the rule of the public. Property as an abstract concept is defined as a relation of subjects (individual persons) in a community (communal society, national entity or tribal family) with an object. It depends on the possession of a possessor and the expectation of the recognition of control in a legal, juridical and judicial right of interest. It is res privata, in contrast to the public domain of the commons in res publica.

Keynes, an English economist, described Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, a baron) as the French equivalent of the Scottish economist, Smith. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu characterised the powers of republican government as that of the sovereign and the administrative. Influenced by Polybius (an Hellenistic historian notable in telegraphy, steganography and cryptography), he proposed a trias politica (triad of organs of state) for political systems (institutions and constitutions) with the separation of powers, legality, and civil liberties. Administration included exercise of executive, legislative, and judiciary (legal, juridicial and judicial) functions. The history of Livy (Titus Livius as the author of Ab Urbe Condita Libri, who was friends with Augustus) referenced the historian Polybius for his chronology and narration (as a sequence of causes and effects in a critical examination of tradition). The historiography contains a principal example of alternative (hypothetical, counterfactual or virtual) history that ponders (speculates, contemplates and cogitates) in conjecture the eventual result and consequential victory of Rome in an attack from Alexander the Great. Niccolò Machiavelli discussed it in his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered (in addition to Istorie fiorentine) to be representative of the Machiavellian ideology.

Copernicus proposed that the general price level (inflation of value) of goods and services is directly (positively) proportional to the quantity of money (volume of the medium of exchange and transaction) in circulation. Jean Bodin and Martín de Azpilkueta (a scholastic Basque). Hume, John Locke and John Stuart Mill reiterated this quantitative theory of money. Smith and Ricardo criticised mercantilism, in an argument initiated by Hume, for the augmentation of prices and the reduction (diminution) of competitivity because of commercial excess (an affluent and abundant surplus in contrast to a deficit). Marx argued that the product of the total quantity of money in circulation and the velocity of money in transactions is equal to the summation of i scalar products of the price and quantity of a commodity in the ith transaction. Arthur Cecil Pigou, Alfred Marshall and Keynes formulated the quantity of money as the product of the portion (fraction) of nominal revenue, the price, and the real (national) income (an exogenous variable, in contrast to an endogenous variable that is determined by the model).

Inspired by Smith, Ricardo defined rent as equal to the comparative advantage obtained by using a property (e.g., terrestrial land) in its most productive use, relative to the marginal advantage of the equivalent utilisation and factors of production (labour and capital). It is the price of natural monopoly (e.g., of a location). The value of benefit is the total income of economic rent (independent of opportunity cost, distinct from that of a contract) and economic profit (from a good or service). Mill (an empirical and utilitarian consequentialist) referred to the conception of rent by Ricardo as the pons asinorum of economics. The capital (material, financial and technical) combination with the subjects and objects (media, means, medians and middles) of labour creates the value of wealth as a method to capture rent. This wealth, the economic rent generated or produced from the improvement of equity or capital, is dependent of property. In this capitalism, property is enforced and the operation of markets presumes an efficient allocation of factors of production for goods and services. Smith criticised the effects of property for its correlation with inequality. The legal institutions and social conventions of civil government are structured for the protection, preservation and security of property. They are a defence in society and the law of the wealthy and prosperous rich with property in their conflict with the impoverished and arm pauper in poverty.

Classical liberalism supports (subscribes or advocates) a theory or principle that property originates from the exertion and action of labour upon natural resources in appropriation. The world is a possession of all humanity in common, and an object of scarcity that is not used becomes a property of an individual person through work. Locke articulated a proviso where this solely may be the case if there is sufficient and abandoned (leased and ceded) in common for others. Rousseau criticised the extension of natural right to resources that a person did not create. Libertarian socialism accepts rights of property but with the requisite of continuous use or else the perdition of the right. This possession system of property maintains solely usufruct is legitimate. Social gains are optimal with global and local free trade (commerce, markets and exchange of imports and exports without the protection of tariffs and subsidies) of goods and services in the economic ideal of this liberalism. The economic (imperial, social and commercial) industrial complex with the government, military and academy as corporations (institutions and organisations) of coercive power and control erodes common human liberties and democratic political processes. Corporate subvention (cronyism and protectionism) poses this risk.

The political economist Joseph Schumpeter (of the social, methodical and historical school of economics) argued in History of Economic Analysis that the origins of modern capitalism is in the commercial centres and merchant city-states of the 110th century HE and the Italian Renaissance, not the market exchanges of the 112th century and the Industrial Revolution of the 114th and 115th centuries. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and similar to Marx, Schumpter argued that socialism would supplant capitalism. Dissimilar to Marx, he argued that the transition would not occur by revolution of the proletariat but by a gradual and eventual collapse. The ideology of capital would develop into one of corporate syndicates with social and industrial democracy (e.g., organisation of labour unions) as regulation that would exacerbate and aggravate "creative destruction". He defined it as an internal "process of industrial mutation" and technical innovation as a continuous revolution of the economic system (order). In the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 11548 HE, Marx refers to the creation (accumulation) and destruction (annihilation) of capital (wealth). Marx described it as the "enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces" in the relations of bourgeois society and property that, as a condition of its self-preservation (without the commission of suicide), are not external. The connection of this destruction (cataclysmic strife and crisis of depreciation and devaluation, as articulated in Das Kapital) and the creative (generative and productive) forces of production are a result of the inherent tendencies and systemic contradictions of capitalism and its enterprises. Nietzsche argued, with the figure of Dionysus, of the existence of a universal cycle where each creative action corresponds to a destructive consequence. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated for the passive confidence of agents in the active "eternal Spirit" that "destroys and annihilates" because it is the incomprehensible and original creation of the vital totality and plurality, asserted "[t]he passion for destruction is a creative passion, too." Cybernetic space of information and communication accelerated the process of creative destruction with its electric visual (optic and photic), aural (sonic and phonic) and electronic (virtual and digital) circuits and the physical and social contradiction of global connection and local isolation (see Manuel Castells Oliván).

Markets without Capitalism

All societies have markets. Markets, as exchanges of goods and services, are essential to the benefit created by commerce that humanity realises. They define the importation and exportation of commodities in commerce (mercantile, merchant and commercial exchange facilitated by money as the current, unit, metre and medium of value in circulation). However, the separation of the owners of capital shares from the labour of the workers generates disjunct affairs and coercion that is against individual autonomy of the natural, human person. When James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism, it permitted the transfer of electromagnetic energy and its media (e.g., transportation, transmigration, and telecommunications), facilitating the connected enterprise that commands oppressive force. With economic models limited by the complexity and responsivity of the economy of society, economists are actually ignorant to the veritable "when" and "why" of market failure. For these reasons, the party envisions a society with the "spontaneous order" of Hume and Smith where:

1. Enterprises are cooperative corporations without a head or chief. Workers are hired by a committee (commission) and are granted non-transferable shares of the capital of the enterprise such that one worker equals one share and one vote in the organisation. When a worker as a person departs (ceases to associate in work, labour or travail), they leave with that share of the capital with enterprise's accrued revenue.

2. Control of production and distribution for consumption is by the workers of labour councils (deliberative assemblies of representative delegates in syndical corporation, communion and association) in a democratic and economic organisation of social, communal and municipal cooperation and local, regional and political administration (which is similar to those of the infrastructure in Kelssek, Abbagagania and Genesis Fifteen). This industrial democracy is an anarchism and syndicalism where the codetermination or participation of workers (collective, inclusive and decisive organisation in labour unions or syndicates) determines the administration and direction of corporate governance with mutual and common responsibility and authority.

3. Each municipality or community of a state, with a popular assembly, divides land into a commercial zone and a residential zone. The former zone has markets for private occupation (work) and residence (housing) whilst the latter has public housing. The rents of the commercial property is taxed by the value of the land under the stipulation that anyone can bid in an annual auction for the land to me mandatorily be transferred.

4. Revenue from this LVT funds the social dividend of an UBI where all citizens have a public resource for income and saving. Henry George, a San Francesco and New York journalist, first proposed the LVT. This tax on land is non-distortionary and raises sufficient revenue to finance the (optimally selected) level of government expenditure.

Civil Society

Rousseau opens On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Rights (Du contrat social; ou Principes du droit politique) with "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." He continues to state those who think of themselves as active masters of passive others are more similar to submissive serfs than those who they dominate. In the epigraph, Rousseau quotes Book XI of the Aeneid by Virgil where a promise of amity and association of a region and realm with the Trojans in equal and legal federation. The objective of his tract to respond to what defines political legitimacy (legitimate political order, authority and administration). To Rousseau, the primitive condition of the original state of nature is one absent of legal norms, morals or ethics that benefit cooperation in necessity. The adoption of the regime of legal institutions in political community or civil society is a consequence of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour that resulted in dependency, inequality, violence and conflict. It was an accidental transition from nature to society, the natural to the social condition of liberty and contract. It cedes to the "right of might" whose reign destroys the natural state of felicity and liberty, and alienates humanity. The individual and natural person requires an alternative perspective (the subjectivity of the other) to realise their ego (self). The desire to value opinions of differences of existence as essential to self-esteem subverts or corrupts personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, hierarchy, and coercion. To obsess (preoccupy oneself with these false situations, circumstances, states of affairs) is a dishonesty that creates an anxiety whereby society judges and considers one "mad" (disordered, dysphoric or insane). In this philosophy, society is prejudicial to humanity in its transformation of amour de soi (self-love, a natural and innate instinctive desire for self-preservation) into amour-propre (an artificial vanity where humans compare themselves to others that creates unjustified insecurity and permits them to derive pleasure from the pain of others, which can be referred to as the evil eye). Emotional compassion, piety and empathy is the animal and primal origin of reluctance (in the human disposition, temperament or sentiment) to presence or assist sufferance.

Influenced by Avicenna, the philosophical and allegorical novel by the Andalusian Ibn Tufail or ابن طفيل—Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān or حي بن يقظان‎, for "Alive, son of Awake", about a feral boy that creates autodidactic cognisance from the experience (observation) of Nature whilst isolated in existence—influenced Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Islamic philosophy and The Guide for the Perplexed (דלאל̈ת אלחאירין‎, دلالة الحائرين‎ or Dalālat al-ḥā’irīn) of Maimonides. The symbolism is similar to Victor de l'Aveyron (a toponym from the Celtic garw for "gross, rough, rude, crude, brute" as in "rudimentary, elementary, fundamental, primitive, basic", "beast, savage, barbarian, monster", "frenetic, manic, energetic, ferocious, furious, tumultuous, turbulent, violent, cruel", and a cognate of the Romance "horror, horrid, horrific, horrible" and "horripilate, horripilation") who, to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, demonstrated that humans were not special animals but were characteristic of their State (location, situation, position, condition and circumstance) in Nature where the ideas they conceive originate from the experience they perceive (i.e., Locke). The natural association of language (communication, cultivation, education and instruction) is a reciprocity of liberal and equal respect in artificial civilisation (i.e., Rousseau). The autism demonstrated as an admiration of the conscious self (auto, which is related to schizophrenia as a schizoid symptom, not a diagnosis, of psychiatry with its dubious reputation and suspicious validity) and dementia as a phrenic, psychic and stereotypic disturbance of associations is a dissonant ambivalence in conscience that is cognitive, motive, active, passive and reactive. Its types are rational (intellectual and sceptical), emotional (emotive and affective), and volitional (determinative and decisive, as a desirous and ambitious contradiction of mind and spirit described by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in his essais or essays). In Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Amongst Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes), Rousseau argues humanity (the human species) with an innate and egalitarian virtue evolved (emerged and progressed) from a State of Nature possessing a faculté de se perfectionner (capacity of intelligence and faculty for potential perfectibility). He argues the remedy is a reorganisation of civil society with its errors and vices, and arts and sciences.

The social evolution of humanity to modern and contemporary society commenced as the formed groups, tribes and families. Population pressures forced additional association in conjunctive intimacy and familiarity. Families are the natural and primal social communities of humanity. Progeny are attached to their parents for so long as the require them for preservation. At that point of discretion, they are released (liberated) in independence. Relations extended beyond are voluntary and solely sustained by convention and practice. Families are governed by a contract (pact or convention) of reciprocal obligation, similar to all relations. Social (tribal and familial) obligations are determined by the natal and national relations (contingent associations of mutual and reciprocal interactions and transactions) of domestic company and comradery united by a narrative history of ideas. Locke, one of the first empiricists of the Enlightenment, distinguished ideas as simplex and complex. Experience is either successive or consecutive (i.e., simultaneous and synchronous or sequential and serial) impressions. These sensations and reflections are the origins of ideas. Hume argued the association of ideas were defined by similarity (resemblance, affinity, not contrary opposition) and continuity (proximity and contiguity in the connection of space or time and cause or effect). Locke defined the self, which would be referenced by Rousseau and Hume, as a continuity of conscience. The self, as subjectivity and the ego, is of animal substance (mental and corporal, or spiritual and material) that is sensible, capable or conscious of pleasure and dolour, and felicity or misery. The qualities, characteristics and personality (a model of expression, reflection and distinction of conduct) of an individual self is self-identity, which is related to the concepts of self-image and self-esteem. The identity of an individual is a personal narrative constructed by the self from others: society, ethnicity, nationality, and community, which are collective organisations (associations and congregations, and tribes and families) with history, politic and culture. Its expression is public, and its conception is private. Experience (perception and action) inform the mental picture in a reflective projection by a perspective of subjectivity that integrates and differentiates multiple dimensions (of natural substance and artificial construction) and for a comparative and relative connection of ideas (concepts). Locke posited the tabula rasa, in rejection of Cartesian insistence of the preexistence of logical concepts (propositions and conceptions) as innate ideas at nascence. The conception of cognisance, in his empiricism, is uniquely determined by experience of sense perception.

Rousseau proposes the concept of volonté générale ("general volunty" or a universal and rational will similar to mens una or "one mind" of Spinoza as a supreme criterion of liberal equality) as a form of association in which individuals alienate themselves to maintain their liberty in a social and political organisation. Rousseau defends popular sovereignty with the social contract of the people as a collective group (a contractual and consensual institution) and the origin of the legitimate sovereign (territory, realm and jurisdiction of government). Legitimate social order appears with liberties and obligations in cooperation (not violence and rapine). He describes joining in the union of civil society as a social contract where individuals abandon rights to natural liberties as a concession to preserve themselves in survival and liberty. The submission to the domination of the republican authority of the sovereign people (a communal loyalty, fidelity, identity and nationality) is a warranty, assurance and covenant of autonomy that prevents subordination of the individual. The legal unity of the state requires the renunciation of license and permission for political liberty and personality. Sovereignty is the collective authority to legislate and determine the laws. The government is composed of magistrates charged with the execution (implementation and application) of the will of common good or public interest (incorporated in legal tradition to transcend or surpass the collective aggregation or congregation of private interest of individuals). The imperial sovereign is the consequence of obligation and responsibility. It is a legal state of rights that limits, restricts or constrains individual and institutional conduct that exercises sovereignty in a council (the ideal being a popular assembly of a direct democracy, whilst the a representative assembly of delegates elected by citizens) of a state (nation-state or city-state).

The dialectic that Rousseau proposed unites the oppositions of nature with society to produce the resolution and transformation of alienation. It navigates between the voluntarism of the Leviathan (autocratic monarchy, with a monarch as a dominant potentate and regnant sovereign, in contrast to an anarch or individual sovereign of an anarchy) and the liberalism of Locke (social protection of inalienable rights). Hobbes in his Leviathan would state that "it is authority, not verity, which makes the law" (auctoritas non veritas facit legem). Hobbes, who was an amanuensis for Francis Bacon, stated in the Leviathan or The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (the precedent to Behemoth, respectively named for the beasts of the serpentine לִוְיָתָן‎ or liwyāṯān and the animal בְּהֵמוֹת‎ or bəhēmōṯ that is related to the فَلَك or falak for "ouroboros, orb, orbit, curve, course, sphere, astronomy") that scientia potentia est ("science is power"). This aphorism is from the expression of Bacon, ipsa scientia potestas est ("science itself is power") to refer to sapience and cognisance. The political realism of Machiavelli (with his republican and principal "prince") influenced Rousseau, Hobbes, Bacon and Antonio Gramsci. Thucydides, who is noted for his historiography and historical method, founded political realism. He was a historian of antiquity whose successors include Xenophon, Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabon and Roman historians. History (an authority of an antiquary and antique narrative) became a professional and academic study with the evolution of universities.

In the epistemological philosophy of perception and cognition (mind and conscience), the empiricism (contrary to idealism) of Bacon influenced the direct (immediate) realism of Spinoza and indirect realism (where the ideas of conception are the mental interpretation of the senses in the representative or representational interior with respect to the exterior reality of objects as the qualities of subjective experience, or the qualia of phenomena) of Locke and Hume. In the ontology of metaphysics, the conceptualism of Spinoza, Locke and Hume stated that universals exist as concepts (ideas or notions) within the conception of conscience as cognitive reflections, semiotic representations and intellectual intentions, not in reality or as inventions of similarities of individual particulars or special instances. This evolved from the nominalism (universalia post res) of the Stoic Chrysippus, Ibn Khaldun (بن خلدون), Occam, and Hobbes that asserted solely particulars exist, with entities predicated with the construction or representation of an identical property of a common name that is absent of real quality. Gilles Deleuze argued predication is not attribution because substance is not a subject of an attribute. The immanent realism (universalia in rebus) of Aristotle postulated universals as real entities with an existence dependent on exemplar particulars. It is more moderate than the realism (universalia ante res) of Plato where universals (eternal forms and ideal terms, or abstract objects) are real entities with an existence independent of particulars. By asserting universals are not mental artefacts, this metaphysics differs from transcendent idealism (where a conscious subject cognises a universal or object in the categories or predicates of mental cognition). It was criticised by the Cynic Diogenes. The mediaeval philosopher Boëthius moderated these realist positions in the maintenance that the structure of language corresponds as concrete constructs to the structure of reality (entities of Nature).

The sceptic Marcus Tullius Cicero (whose cognomen means "chickpea") was assassinated by decapitation with the proscription for animosity to the state by Mark Anthony of the Second Triumvirate (the political, legal, official and imperial institution, constitution and jurisdiction of the Roman Republic with administrative and executive authority sovereign to the magistrates of emperors, dictators, (pro)consuls, praetors, censors, governors, (cor)rectors, moderators, procurators, quaestors, praefects, senators, tribunes, legates, aediles and consular, official, legal, provincial, magisterial, senatorial, imperial or presidential praesides who individually were a praeses of a praesidium as a gubernatorial hegemon of a praetorian castrum or praetorium) in vengeance. Cicero originated from the equestrian family (an eligible social status, order or class of aristocratic hierarchy, civil property and military calvary comprised of noble patricians and common plebeians) gens Tullia. He was a philosopher, jurist, orator, author, senator (in the senate that was the legislative, judicial, juridicial and electoral assembly principal to the comitia and councils of the people and tribes), consul (elected by citizens of Rome) and governor (of a province). He advocated for the Commonwealth (republican government) and introduced Hellenic philosophy into the Latin language and culture. He supported the Stoic politician Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger (Uticensis for Phoenician Utica, a Latinisation of the Punic ʿtq that is a cognate with עַתִּיק or ʿattīq and عَتِيق or ʿatīq for "old, antique, ancient" in contrast Carthage or qrtḥdšt for "new, novel city") of the aristocratic or patrician optimates (a senatorial, eligible and oligarchic faction, of which Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus of the Prime Triumvirate was a defender) notable for his conservative republican opposition of Caesar in a tenacious and obstinate integrity that opposed corruption and who died by suicide (in spite of this, Dante includes him for his virtues in Divina commedia: Purgatorio as an administrator of the realm of purification). Caesar was a member of the populist or plebeian populares appointed dictator perpetuo prior to his assassination in the Senate by Gaius Cassius Longinus, an ultimus romanorum and conspirator with Marcus Junius Brutus and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus (a name that references natal order, including the deadborn, similar to Quintus, Sextus, Septimus and Octavius), on 24 Pisces 9656 HE as a monarchic predecessor to the imperial, principal, central, tyrannical and authoritarian august emperor. Cicero influenced Hume and Locke. Depending on Stoicism, he writes in De officiis ("Of Offices [Obligations, Devoirs, Dues]") of summum bonum (the ultimate and supreme good in ethical, moral, ideal, fundamental and principal value). He discusses the efficacy of justice in the augmentation of the firm operation of the judicial and public affairs in a constitutional republic comparable to the indispensable (necessary and requisite) honour among thieves. Rousseau argues the social structure of antiquity that valued the civic and municipal obligation of citizens as a characteristic honour demonstrates the social contract. The political foundation or constitution of this society is a contract between the people of the state and the government. With the two principles—mutual needs and differences in aptitude—the four virtues of a polis (i.e., a just city-state and society), according to Plato in the Politeia, include: (1) φρόνησῐς or phrónēsis and σοφῐ́ᾱ or sophíā (prudence and sapience); (2) ανδρεία or andreía (fortitude); (3) δῐκαιοσῠ́νη or dikaiosúnē (justice); (4) σωφροσῠ́νη or sōphrosúnē (temperance). (See also Politics by Aristotle, a response of a pupil to the aforementioned Socratic dialogue by Plato.)

The corporate groups or classes of the guardians (with their auxiliaries) and producers, however, ignore the subordinating hegemony exercised by superior social strata over their inferiors. Hannah Arendt criticises Plato's description of the reality of human affairs as appearances of shadows, where truth is discovered in the divine contemplation of clear ideas and eternal essence such that theory precedes action, episteme (cognisance and scientific paradigm) over doxa (expectation and common sense). Barthes categorised modes of language as doxa and para-doxa. Arendt distinguishes the activities (labour, art, and action) of the human condition as vita activa (active life) from vita contemplativa (contemplative life). She contrasts the realm of a praxis (practice and action) from poiesis (fabrication and creation). The activity of labour corresponds to the biological (vital and animal) processes of Nature necessary for human existence and sustenance (production, consumption and reproduction). It is impermanent in its nature as a mortal state of servitude, a recognition that it is contrary to distinctive human liberty. A human being in this active mode is a subject or serf, an animal laborans. It is a property of the private realm (sphere) of the oikos (economic domicile), not the public realm of the polis (civic community) that is the society of the zoon politikon (human being, the liberal and political animal). Art (techne and work of poiesis, not physis or Nature) is the artificial world of things (instruments and objects). It is characterised as a human realm of permanence (sovereignty, stability, and durability) and maintenance. It is constructed by homo faber (artisan, artist, architect, smith, wright, and creator), in a technical, artificial, legal and scientific transformation as a means to interrupt and surpass the natural human condition, as a common habitat separate from Nature. It is a public construction of spaces, institutions, and structures that envisions, remodels and controls the world in the measure of the human image and utility (value and use). The victory of the animal laborans in the potential extinction of homo faber results in the mundane alienation of the modernity.

Action is the principal realm of liberty, plurality, and solidarity. It is the ability to realise the identity of the agent and capacity to actualise the liberty of the actor. Liberty in human existence is natality, or the initiation and commencement of the original. Its faculty is public and active, not private and contemplative. Humanity represents the nascent solar and singular dawn. The novelty (liberal innovation) of action (as opposed to habituated and regulated conduct of causal antecedents, consequences, conditions and determinations), as a manifestation of irreversible and uncontrollable process, counters practical certainty, statistical probability, and inferential predictability. Acts of pardon mitigate the irreversibility in the absolution of the actor from unintended consequences (power), and promise moderate the unpredictability of consequences by obliges (contracts) actors to courses of action. These actors, as agents or beings of agency, adapt or respond to contingent conditions and obligations of mutual interest of consequences. Their adaptations and responses are processed in the interdependent, irreversible, unidirectional, and decisive states of passive sensation (subjective senses and passion) and active motion (objective acts and action). This cognition of perception and conception is an egocentric (egoist determination and volition) realisation of self-interest, esteem and value. The states of others are only inferred from observable public conduct (the formal and basic regularity of transmitted acts received by senses).

The publicity of action corresponds to the human condition of plurality. The significance of action and the identity of the actor depends on human plurality (a subjective-objective context of being, an individual simultaneously of equality and distinction) of the spectators. The absence of privacy and communicative quality of action is connected to speech. Speech, an articulation of language, reveals action. Narrative history is a retrospective articulation of the significance of the actions of individuals. The impermanence of actions, dissimilar to the facticity of products of art, is caused by the fragility of memory to temporal (mortal) oblivion. The polis is an organisation and community of memory, a political preservation of the actions of its citizens. The political, social and critical theory of derived from libertarian Marxism and the Surreal and Dada argued that the construction of situations (conditions, circumstances and moments of authentic desire and expression through experience) provides a liberation from alienation that occurs with the spectacle. Guy-Ernest Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (La société du spectacle) defines the spectacle as "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality" of the associated methods of government, discipline and control. The mass media are a "superficial manifestation" of the spectacle. The concept applies the colonisation, commodification and reification in representation and identification where the fetish of commodities govern the passive individual spectators stupefied by the spectacular images (the construction of situations) that mediate the social relation.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss emphasised the ways human experience, activity, and conduct is determined by social systems (real structures of organisation and construction). Politics is the civic activity of solidarity to exercise the capacity for agency and to conduct life in parliament. The civic foundation is the polis—that is, the just city, where the regime (system, scheme, or regimen of government) of the state is for the common good of the people, the citizens, or the public. The social and tribal confederation (from the Latin foederatus meaning "alliance, league, union") is the origin of the city-states of fort colonies. The Burg or the Latin civitas, with civitatem the progenitor of cividad(e), cidad(e), çibdad(e), cibdat, ciutat, ciudad(e), cittade, citânia, città, citet, and cité, was the population nucleus of an urban territory. As the sovereign and independent community, the civitas (civil society) is the body of cives (citizens) enrolled in the census. The polis becomes a state (status) by its common interests and civil affairs: res publica ("public thing", i.e. the republic or commonwealth) versus res privata ("private thing", i.e. private life and property). A third and related legal fiction is res nullius, which means a natural or artificial "thing, object, matter, material, substance, affair, good, property, sovereignty, or territory of nobody". Sociological historians categorise the state as a political entity with a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force" as an exclusive authorisation within a geographical territory. Maximilian "Max" Weber classified the nation-state as an institution of charismatic (Narcissistic), traditional (coercive, not consensual), and rational-legal authority. The latter is official administration by bureaucracy as an organisation or regime with its authority of rational and legal legitimacy (rationality and legality).

Weber defined the organisation or system of an institutional religion as an organised or systematic hierarchy with ecclesiastical cults and rites (i.e., a cultural and ritual catechism as religious and superstitious code of conduct and creed for normal practice and theory in obligation, devotion, divination, veneration, profession, confession, revelation, reverence, credence, morality, augury, ceremony, prophecy, discipline and sacrifice). According to philosophy, anthropology and sociology, states include or constitute religions as structural institutions of theology. (The methodical, polemical, rhetorical, ironic, sceptic gnomic, caustic, sarcastic and aphoristic volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, a liberal, rational and humanist historian of civilisation, criticised this cultivation of tradition and superstition as a conservative and libertarian in opposition to the progressive and egalitarian radicals.) The state is defined by its apparatus—e.g., coercive violence—controlled by the government that rules the manufactured consensual realm. The legitimacy of the coercion of the state as a political authority creates a compulsion and obligation of obedience that depends on the security of consent from its interdependent persons.

As articulated by Gramsci rather than contra, civil society (consent) and political society (coercion) forms the state, or the organisation of hegemony (domination and direction). Cultural hegemony imposes the values and norms of the ruling class (of dominant directors) as the sensus communis (common sense) of society to control the masses. This wisdom of nations maintains the status quo (de facto and which de jure maintains) and represses dissent, and therefore impedes revolution. Sensible and sapient "taste" as aesthetic discernment and cultural judgement, according to Pierre Bourdieu formed by cultural hegemony that is determined by social class through cultural capital as distinction, demarcates the low culture of "the many" (hoi polloi or οἱ πολλοί) from the high culture of "the few" (hoi oligoi or οἱ ὀλίγοι). Howard Scott Gordon (an economist of common property, and the history and philosophy of political economy) discussed the theory and practice of constitutionalism as a institutional system that controls the coercion of the state by a pluralistic separation (distribution and dispersion) of power. The idea of counteraction or compensation is fundamental and foundational to the institutions of social organisations and relations. The doctrine of absolute and perpetual sovereignty of imperial principalities (i.e., the sovereign of Hobbes and Jean Bodin) was substituted for the relative authority of popular and parliamentary sovereignties of the systems (models, types and forms) of government that evolved as the republican constitutional democracy of the nation-state and the city-state. To Rousseau, sovereignty was indivisible (general) and inalienable (common). With opportunity and capacity (as conditions articulated by John Kenneth Galbraith), competitive and cooperative markets for economic commerce in society demonstrate this functional principle with the communities of centres, groups and unions (e.g., corporations and organisations).

John Gray (a political philosopher and intellectual historian who provided an interpretation of the liberal Isaiah Berlin who argued that Johann Georg Hamann recognised the "fornim" of human mental cognition as language or "speech" between noumena and phenomena similar to Wittgenstein, who promoted the differentiation of positive and negative liberties, and who proposed the distinction of the hedgehog and the fox) in a Gedankenexperiment writes that "Posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy." He argues that liberal volition, and its resultant morality, is an illusion with physical and metaphysical limitations. The Sceptics, Epicureans and Stoics expressed the alleviation and amelioration of anxiety as the objection of philosophy in the equilibrium condition of ataraxia. Montaigne argues philosophy (and religion) cannot (and will not) attain this state because the reason of argumentation is insufficient to vanquish the malcontent (discomfort, disquiet, dissatisfaction, frustration irritation, agitation and molestation) of the human condition. The human animal conceives this as a temporal image in their recurrent conception of and preoccupation with mortality. This anxious terror of mortality was proposed by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (influenced by Thomas Szasz, an opponent of coercive psychology and psychiatry in his critique of it as an inadequate metaphoric myth for the control of personal conduct similar to Foucault's history Folie et Déraison where "la santé a remplacé le salut" and Giorgio Antonucci who questioned their scientific basis in I pregiudizi e la conoscenza critica alla psichiatria), who argued humanity necessitates confidence, esteem and value of the ego to survive. Humans presume or presuppose a unique (simplex) solution to the dilemmata of situations (distractions, diversions and inattentions) of complex circumstances and significances.

The philosophy of Wittgenstein that emphasised a precedence of use over significance in a pragmatism that favours function over form, connotation over denotation, and practice over theory. Language, as a linguistic speech act, was conceived as a vehicle for social activity. The production of an actual enunciation with an apparent significance is a locutionary act. An illocutionary act is the active result of the implication of the locutionary act. The actual effect of these is a perlocutionary act. Language does not merely assert states of facts. Its inherent terminal objective (τέλος or télos as a raison d'être or "reason to be, exist(ence)") is to communicate mutual comprehension (forstanding of intelligibility and recognition) where a common conformity (normative expectation) exists between social actors. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued the location of rationality is in the structures of interpersonal communication (i.e., communicative reason) not that structure of the Cosmos. The creation of illumination and common confidence and norms serve as a pro-social benefit for society in the intersubjective coordination (cooperative, collaborative and communicative action from consensus, or the mutual consent and the absence of influential coercion) of communal and individual objectives. The construction of social formation is by the differentiation of the vital ambient and social system. Systemic social integration is facilitated through the functional integration of the consequences of social actions that results in interdependence of interaction and orientations by technical rationality. The dynamic paradigm of the lifeworld (the immediate and evident state of affairs, experiences, competences, capacities, practices, activities, contacts and phenomena of the coherent universe for the cognitive horizon of a conscious ego) depends on the communicative rationality that coordinates communicative actions. Rationality manifests in the human capacity for language. The mode of conflict (competition not cooperation) and strategic (instrumental or technical) action is to attain isolated interests (values, intentions or motivations), not by the theoretical and practical discourse for the consensus of validity facts and norms as presuppositions (the propositional interpretation and explication of states of affairs).

The concept of desert (a thing, object, motive, affair, chose or cause deserved in virtue of a basis of merit) is distinct of right. It is a normative concept, not a contract of a social, legal or empirical institution (a structural system) that codifies and defines the formal facts (regulations, legislations, justifications, qualifications and conditions). Deserts, as a functional consequence from a distributor, include a positive plus (rights, love, welfare, well-being, benefits, profits, gains, (ad)vantages, liberties, premium, prize, honour, grace, respect, appreciation, satisfaction, concession, permission, salary, pay, pleasure and felicity), in addition to a negative minus (rights, penalties, responsibilities, dishonour, disgrace, disdain, punition, condemnation, obligation, perdition, depreciation, despect, sufferance, pain and onus) and a neutral value of mediocrity. A right is not sufficient for desert of a treatment or conduct. The bases of a desert include moral merit, productive effort of labour or travail, contribution of social value, and possession of aptitude or capacity. Its theory of distributive justice proposes that justice obtains when goods and evils are distributed in a society conforming to desert. The validity of the virtue of merits has been rejected as arbitrary because a human being does not deserve the "fruits" of personal character (natural facts or natal existence and situational circumstance determined by the potential possibilities of lot in actual and material reality) in the absence of responsibility for them. This distinguishes deserts from legitimate expectations (the presumption that an actual or apparent authority of an administration or institution will provide procedural or substantial incentives from the superordinate norms of justice and the representation made). Possessed natural aptitude is a common value. The institution of possessions as property precedes the legal and social concept of thievery (illegal capture). The same is the case for the sanction of conjugal union and cohabitation in relation to natural (illegitimate, improper or inappropriate) sexual reproduction. By analogy, moral desert is the consequence of the organisation of society.

Communicative action as a deliberative process intersects in the subjective, objective, and intersubjective (social) domains. From the political and civil societies as the social domains (institutions, dominions and organisations) of authority (the government of the state and the police) and commerce (the market of production and consumption), Habermas defined the public sphere, an open realm of publicity (the absence of privacy), as composed of private actors or agents. This "ideosphere" and "doxosphere" of public opinion and religion (publica vox et fama and vox et fama communis; cf., the chronotope of the logosphere as an analogue to the noosphere, ecosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and geosphere) has a structural function in societies and communities. It is a reflective and discursive space of private individuals in critical dialogue (conversation and discussion of affairs of mutual interest as a common preoccupation or attention) in a public (general association, collection, inclusion, deliberation and participation) to formulate ideas in communication (transmission and reception of information). It differs from representative culture with an active party and passive party. The influence of salons (e.g., coffee houses and tea houses) emerged as a public sphere with a political culture and an intellectual community (an illuminated "literary republic" that, dissimilar to academies, solely existed in the minds of is erudite members as a common institution of communication and education) in contrast to court society. The private sphere contrasts with the communal and social realms of economics, politics and ecology as the public spheres where collective exercise is possible. Others add that multiple separate public spheres exist as counter publics, which are subordinate to a dominant. Inspired by the biopolitics of Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri proposed that the distinction of private and public spheres presupposes a separation of property in an economy of scarcity. The concept of the common mediates in the centre of the dimension. Foucault and Habermas diverge on multiple points. Foucault argues that the social contract contributes to the diffusion of power in social order, which is constituted of institutional relations of power (conformity, normalisation and discipline). Habermas argues that consensus of communicative action is the foundation. Power produces individuality according to Foucault, whilst it coerces the lifeworld according to Habermas.

The structural functionalism of David Émile Durkheim focused upon "social facts" (structures, values, cultures and norms) as representations, constructions, institutions and actions of conduct and discipline. The politeia (from πολῑτείᾱ or polīteíā as in the constitution of a political community) is the rights of citizenship that serves as the social contract between these structural groups of social, political, cultural, and economic relations. In democracy, the popular community and the government are virtually identical and the most adapted to secure peace, which is the principal affair of the state. The state, an organised community, secures humanity from continual fear, liberating them from a solitary and brief existence created by temporal uncertainty and mortality. Ideology represents the imaginary relations of individual persons in their real conditions of existence with material apparatuses and actual conduct (neither mental nor ideal representations). It is constituted by the processes of interpellation and recognition. Social formation in politics and economics is constituted by the infrastructure of forces, relations, operations, instruments, implements and equipment that interact with the cultural, ritual, legal, social, communal and artificial superstructure.

Foucault introduces the concept of the political regime as a separation of verity and error. He argues that each society possesses a "regime of truth", where verity is a political and social process for production, regulation, distribution, circulation and function. As an institution, it is connected "by a circular relation to systems of power which produce it and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which redirect it". The regime includes the types of discourse in politics and society, the mechanisms (authorities, cases and causes) for the distinction of verity and falsity by sanction (alienation and authorisation), the procedures of evaluation and valorisation, and the state (status) of the actors charged with the verification and falsification (decision, interpretation, determination, resolution, formation, affirmation, legitimation and justification). Verisimilitude (probability in contrast to the model of correspondence of fact to an actual event, or the relation of mimetic picture to an object in an internal coherence and an external reference) recognises and qualifies information with respect to its subjective credibility and correct (legitimate, adequate, appropriate, competent, ​sufficient, proficient, pertinent, valiant and relevant) criteria of validity, which is judged relative to constructions (structural norms) in a dependence of the exercise of power. The penal and carceral police-prison system as a political (social, communal, legal and cultural) and economic (commercial) apparatus creates delinquency (i.e., deviation, variation and perversion of order) in its institutional supervision. The isolation and alienation of condemned criminal exercises a potent condition of solitude for total submission and the domination of autonomy. Foucault introduced savoir-pouvoir (sapience-power, not cognisance) as a concept to illustrate an inextricable mutuality created by the exploitation of information and communication (the volume, or its diversity and quantity) with the control of the interaction of personalisation and popularisation. He connected this to biopolitics (cf. geopolitics with its geography, demography, and economic and organic states) and "governmentality" (the mentality of governance).

No longer controlled by timid and pavid emotion, the society and culture produced provides sufficient necessity (time and energy) and commodity (value and property) for citizens to augment the human powers of physical (corporal and mental) ability. The state depends on the implicit social contract that its members of the sovereignty and territory to obey the authority of government, the rule of law, and the general will. The appearance of the perdition of liberty is compensated by the advantages of the state that salvage its citizens from the distress of misery and adversity caused by impulses, passions and others in life. The responsibility (social obligation and communal dependence) is in exchange (mutual and reciprocal transaction) for the natural liberty of the individual person. Foucault compared the the state's governmentality (i.e., machine of power and mechanism of social control) to the institutional panopticon—the social discipline created the personal self-regulation of behaviour in the regard of the "eye" of institutional supervision and surveillance formulated Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of liberal and consequential utilitarianism (and a radical ally and political companion of James Mill né Milne). A docile (submissive or passive) body may be subjected, used, transformed and improved by dominant or active power. Discipline creates obedience in these bodies. To Foucault, power or authority depends on the ignorance of its agents. It is distributed through the apparatus or machine, which no single actor controls. Foucault distinguishes sapience and cognisance. Sapience is a process of sagacity that creates subjects to become objects. Cognisance is the conscience (cognition and recognition) of these subjects. Sapience is a creation of the paradigm of common sense by power. This power compares individuals (persons) and measures their difference to institutionalise (institute, intern, establish or found) a norm as an internal and omnipresent force that projects unto ordinary (popular and vulgar) subjects by institutions. The control of society consists of the reflection of this power. The social context (ambient and ambiance, either artificial or natural space) is an objective of intervention for power. In this conception of force relations, power is a structural expression of the complex strategic situation in a social context. Power constrains social actions, equally in permission and prevention. Deleuze expands on Foucault's description of the society of discipline to posit that modern society is modifying its structure and mechanisms of control. The social coercion and discipline of society now has extended beyond physical institutions to technology where the life and existence of an individual is considered to be a datum and specimen of the masses and markets. Yet, it continues to alienate persons and suppress difference.