Theoretical and Applied Economics
No. 1 / 2008 (518)
Instantia Crucis
A dramatical simplification of man's relation with the world uncovers a functional dichotomy: human condition founds the economy, while human nature determines the politics.
The pre-moderns had hoped to save themselves from living the duality by relegating the economy to the empire of necessity and assigning politics to the empire of liberty. They would approximate the disjunctions with the specific ingenuity of beings destined to evolve beyond good and bad, within the framework of the world allowed this side of Olympus. In the end it was about escaping the context, a sort of excusable inconsequence on the basis of the ideal of happiness, in the pursuit of which anything could be useful, even the reductions of sense. Private and public life, be it under different rules of order, were, in the end, for the ancients the faces of the same coin of human existence.
Rationalization, as a function of the validity of the thoughts and actions, assumed by the moderns, instead of diluting the dilemma, it increased its degree of complexity: the necessity was placed at the fundaments of wealth, while liberty has legitimized the instrumentalization of power. The new Atlantis of the Enlightenment's modernity was formed on the assumption that wealth is a natural part of property while power has the sacred mission of organizing liberty as the gendarme of property. Liberty now moves around the halls of the right of ownership on the same vehicles which would have benefited the slave of ancient Greece, when he was seen as a natural part of his owner's family.
Through property, liberty takes an individual face, though losing its social front. From public order, natural to its substance, it turns into private order.
The conclusion, which strives only for logic and not morality, is that happiness proves to be a consequence of property. Government, as an active expression of politics, was fully rationalized because it deals with something ponderable: the human condition. That which was its prime destination, the human nature, as a sum of Hobbesian imponderables, remains at most in filigree.
For the moderns the perception is blurred when they hesitate to moderate the explicative heresies as to the sources wealth and property. On the conceptual path of property as theft and of wealth as human completion, the dilemmas were ideologically sulfurized. The private order was centered on the individual and this has become the battlefield between the human condition and human nature. The trajectories of necessity and liberty were projected on a Möbius strip. The natural individual-society and private-public complementarities were temporally
positioned in a principle of conflictual order. On one side the social prevalence over the individual, and, on the other, the extension of the private in the area of public goods.
The estrangement of human nature from the human condition is the original sin of the Enlightenment from which the modern fratricide between capitalism and communism has resulted. In fact, it was the tragedy, brought to life by the modern ideology of fragmenting the unity of human life, of functionalizing some autarchic patterns of the evolution of the complementary components of life. Life is not judged in terms of the prevalence of its imponderables which define the private zone and the public area. It is about an order of relevance and not of prevalence. The territory of necessity and the territory of liberty have an infallible relative essence pertaining to the anthropic principle of the universe. Drawing limits to them in order to legitimize the ideas of political action is counter to nature, life being a unique and unitary process. Any attempt of making one of its facets absolute not only creates monsters set to dominate the world but also undermines the basis of life along with the extinction of civilization as an expression of human nature.
The modern overlaying of the wealth-property relation over the natural relation between necessity and liberty is more than just a change of context; it really is the alteration of the natural context of life. Coming out from under the empire of necessity through property and conquering the empire of liberty through wealth, as well as any other combination attained through the substitution of the terms of reference, sustain the illusion of transgressing the borders between human condition and human nature. Only that the result is, in the modern interval, a falsification of the objective-functions: with politics taking care of the economy, the economy produces and distributes power. An impossible phase is arrived at in which freedom predefines the necessities - with the limit to which the liberty of necessities exists, perhaps in the manner of political correctness - while the necessities of life are substituted by political liberties, which would mean than the human nature would actually be the human condition.
The Marxist dream of liberating work is fulfilled under the guise of the alteration of life: the necessity is made absolute, while liberty is made relative.
The empire of necessity is organized around the principle of absolute freedom, while the empire of liberty becomes the accidental phenomenon of fulfilling the necessities. Their coexistence signifies the apocalyptic exit from the context. Which is the context of life.
Vitae veritas non sequitur.
Contents
- Interest Rate Risk Management using Duration Gap Methodology
Dan Armeanu
Florentina-Olivia Balu
Carmen Obreja
- The Organic Products in the Green Marketing Laboratory
Victor Danciu
- Considerations on the Role of Foreign Banks in the Improvement of Romanian Bank System’s Performance
Daniel Badulescu
- Contributions to the Definition of the Managerial Profiles
Dan Constantinescu
- The Regime of Contracts under Execution within the Insolvency Procedure
Cornelia Lefter
Ana Maria Lupulescu
- Major Trends in the Development of the Marketing Information System
Gheorghe Orzan
Iuliana Cetina
Nora Mihail