Status Updates From Het begrip politiek

HOW IS HE SO SMART????????

The pluralism of spiritual life and its central domain of spiritual existence cannot be a neutral domain, it is wrong to solve a political problem with the antithesis of organic and mechanistic, life and death.

Nobody has been able to construe a social order led by technicians. No significant technical invention can ever calculate its objective political truths. The inventions of the 15-16th centuries produces individualistic developments, the printing press led to freedom of the press. Today technical inventions are the means of the domination of masses on a large scale.

The neutral domain has found itself in technology. Technical problems are factual. It is something other than the neutrality of former domains. Technology is always only an instrument and weapon. No decision can be derived from it. It remains culturally blind. No conclusions which are usually drawn from the central domains of spiritual life can be derived from pure technology as nothing but technology.

Shift to natural science arose out of need to stifle theological conflict through neutral domain. One no longer argued Christian theology but instead a "natural" system of theology, metaphysics, morality and law. Europeans go from a conflictual to neutral domain, where the newly won neutral domain becomes new area of struggle. Religious wars turned into economically determined national wars of the 19th century.

State derives power from central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it. The succession of stages signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centres have shifted. The most consequential shift being from the traditional Christian theology to "natural" science.

The specific concepts of individual centuries derive their meaning from the central domain. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain. They are considered secondary problems. In an economic age, problems need only to be solved through production and technical progress.

THE AGE OF NEUTRALIZATIONS AND DEPOLITICALIZATIONS (1929)

There are four secular stages in European histories, starting from the theological to the metaphysical domain, from there to the humanitarian moral, and finally, to the economic domain. These changing central domains changed as the intellectual vanguard changed. The twentieth century began as an age of not just technology, but religious belief in technology.

State and politics cannot be exterminated as per the liberal ideal. Economic antagonisms can become political. Economic power positions could arise, proving the point of the political may be reached through this domain. It is erroneous to believe political positions founded on such is unwarlike. This is terminology based on liberal ideologies. Imperialism based on economic power requires force.

Under liberalism, society stands as a sphere of peaceful justice higher than the state. This is immoral. You could just as well define politics as honest and economics as deceptive. The connection of politics with force and thievery is no more precise than the connection of economics to cunning and deception. A domination of men based on pure economics, by remaining non-political, evade political responsibility.

The nineteenth century scheme:

Freedom, progress and reason] against [feudalism, reaction and force
in alliance with
economy, industry and technology] against [state, war and politics]
as as
parliamentarianism against dictatorship

In the eighteenth century the idea of progress was humanitarian-moral and intellectual. In the nineteenth it became economic-industrial-technological. It believed the economy the vehicle of development, freedom and rationality were allies.

Will to repel enemy becomes rationally constructed social ideal under liberalism. Power turns into propaganda at intellectual pole, and control at economic one. These aim at subjugating state and politics into the individualistic domain of private law and morality. They deprive state and politics of its meaning. Autonomy relies on the validity of norms. No abstract order/norms rule but human groupings over others.

Ethics and material economic realities under liberalism give political concepts a double face. The political concept of battle turns into competition in the domain of economics and discussion in the intellectual realm. The state turns into society, an ideological humanitarian conception of humanity and an economic-technical system of production.

There is no liberal politics only a liberal critique. It is an internal struggle against state, which is hindered through compromises and balances. The individualism of liberal thought cannot demand the sacrifice of life, as it would contradict the liberal pathos.

No political idea can be derived from the pure and consequential concept of individualistic liberalism. The negation of the political leads to distrust of all political forces while never producing its own positive theories of state. There exists in liberal policies a form of polemical antitheses against state, church or other institutions which restrict individual freedom.

Appealing to law can signify that a higher or better law is set against the law of the status quo. Sovereignty over this type of law signifies the rule of men who can appeal to this higher law and thereby decide its content and to whom it should apply. Hobbes states that the sovereignty of law is sovereignty of men who draw up and administer the law.

The law under a stable political state has its own relatively independent domain. It can be utilized to support or refute other domains. The rule of law is the legitimization of a specific status quo, the preservation of interests of those whose political power or economic advantage would stabilize itself.

Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism. This would dissolve the possibility of enmity.

Quantity turns into quality. This is when every domain the point of the political is reached and with it a new intensity of human groupings. This executes itself continuously in the autonomous neutral domain. The non-political now becomes political. When economic property, for example, reaches a certain quantity, it becomes social/political power.

Conception of man is big for presupposition of political considerations. Theories which say man is good are liberal. Belief man is good is closely tied to radical denial of state/government. Society determines own order. Liberals negate the state and political. They haven't formed a theory of state but only tie political to ethical and subjugate it to economics. Genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.

Power grows with its sphere of influence, this relates to a phenomenon which is rooted in the sphere of the political and can therefore be understood only politically. The weight of the political is determined by the intensity of alignments according to which the decisive associations and disassociations adjust themselves. There exists no philosophy or anthropology that is not politically relevant.