So you know this is basically a thumbnail sketch of the history of representative government. Historians have long understood the transition from violence and civil war (and intrastate violence) to modern states (Westphalia treaties, for example) and representative governments as being a process of ritualising and sublimating violence into various political systems. Following French Revolution, for example, there are even posters showing a person dropping a saber from one hand while the other hand is putting a voting slip into a ballot box, to make the point more explicit.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I didn't want to be too explicit about it because there's a long history of philosophers describing a *conceptual progression* in historical terms, and that distorting history because people apply the conceptual progression too literally- for example, people who took Hobbes state of nature too literally. So even though what I outline has some similarities with the way it actually happened, I thought it was best to think of it as a conceptual rather than historical progression.
Another example- my understanding is that Marx describes a conceptual progression to higher stages of capitalism- a progression that definitely was not intended to recap the historical progression- in parts of capital. Some Marxist historians got themselves tied up in knots by taking this description of a conceptual progression and applying it history.
My source for this claim re: Marx and different levels of abstraction in his analysis of capitalism being equated with historical stages of the development of capitalism is Heinrich's "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital".
I first encountered this idea in nrx discussions, as a point against extending the franchise. The idea being, if voting is meant to measure war readiness, adding people who cant be bothered to show up, children, women etc deligitinizes it.
So you know this is basically a thumbnail sketch of the history of representative government. Historians have long understood the transition from violence and civil war (and intrastate violence) to modern states (Westphalia treaties, for example) and representative governments as being a process of ritualising and sublimating violence into various political systems. Following French Revolution, for example, there are even posters showing a person dropping a saber from one hand while the other hand is putting a voting slip into a ballot box, to make the point more explicit.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I didn't want to be too explicit about it because there's a long history of philosophers describing a *conceptual progression* in historical terms, and that distorting history because people apply the conceptual progression too literally- for example, people who took Hobbes state of nature too literally. So even though what I outline has some similarities with the way it actually happened, I thought it was best to think of it as a conceptual rather than historical progression.
Another example- my understanding is that Marx describes a conceptual progression to higher stages of capitalism- a progression that definitely was not intended to recap the historical progression- in parts of capital. Some Marxist historians got themselves tied up in knots by taking this description of a conceptual progression and applying it history.
My source for this claim re: Marx and different levels of abstraction in his analysis of capitalism being equated with historical stages of the development of capitalism is Heinrich's "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital".
Okay, sorry, I just panicked. Like when a guy comes up to you in a bar and tells you he invented the internet, but he calls it something else.
Interesting. I'm building an intuition that many social systems have at their root being a form of violence reduction.
I appreciate the implication that wealth / consumption capability, weighted by interest in it, should be included as a weighting factor.
I first encountered this idea in nrx discussions, as a point against extending the franchise. The idea being, if voting is meant to measure war readiness, adding people who cant be bothered to show up, children, women etc deligitinizes it.