The new 2023 Social Science Files Project
An introduction to the political π, by Michael G. Heller
The new 2023 Social Science Files Project
Introduction to the political π
If ‘society’ has always been a governed unit with borders, bonding, and binding there must always have existed the same political formula for sustaining society, and we should find it in the ways in which society decides its means and priorities for long term governance. Above all a cohesive social unit strives by its mode of governance to maintain a proportionality between the impersonal interest-in-common of the whole and the person-limited interests of individuals and groups. This is the calculation of a non-numerical ratio between the relative valuations given to personal as to impersonal interests in governance decisions. The formula of the calculation is universal, but the ingredients are unique to every society given their different geography and resource base, social structures, belief systems, and developmental trajectories. We find the calculation in two forms: (a) spontaneously and continuously in diffuse political and economic intra-society interactional processes, and (b) deliberated discretely in practical decision making by those who act to govern.
We can detect the calculation in the recorded histories of the earliest states and empires of the ancient Near East, where writing and mathematics combined with decision making about land use, production, storage, distribution, consumption, administration, and taxation. We will see explicit reference to such a calculation in the writings of the political philosophers of ancient Greece. It was assuredly most evident in the constitutional reforms of early modern Europe. It remains a part of the political process of welfare states in today’s capitalist democracies. Indeed, it may be assumed that there existed cognitive capacities and structural requirements for an equivalent political calculation in pre-state societies; certainly in the chiefdoms but equally in the simplest societies of prehistory which relied so greatly on rituals, myths and symbols to border, bond, and bind peoples.
I call this political calculation the pi (π) of the ratio of personal (‘p’) to impersonal (‘i’) political preferences. The symbol π serves the present purpose in four ways. It reduces our theory and principal concept to a sign that can be easily recognised and repeated. The Greek π symbol is semantically, linguistically and historically appropriate for all of the related ‘political’ concepts. In addition, there is a productive analogy to explore between the political calculation of π and the mathematical calculation of π. Finally, the mathematical analogy elicits visual geometric associations that were familiar to cognitive elites of mid-ancient societies after the birth of science and philosophy.
The π symbol serves as a reminder of our background assumptions about the calculative mentality and potential of humans living long before modern revolutions in science, politics, law, and political philosophy. We will treat this distinction between personalistic and impersonal governance normatively and analytically without recourse to diagrams or mathematical analogies. The empirical personal-impersonal distinctions are especially sharply drawn in histories of early modern Europe and modern capitalist democracies, but the standard language and application of social science concepts are adequate enough to detect and describe much earlier manifestations of π in every society’s governance.
Notwithstanding, it is worth introducing the pi (π) distinction initially in visual symbolic forms with geometric dimensions so that we may have clear pictures in mind whenever the subject arises, and thus focus attention on formulaic factors of calculation.
by Michael G. Heller
To be continued ….
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science.