Ok, so I’ve been playing with this idea of tension between control and command as an paradigm of societies and it occurs to me, while reading Cass Sunstein’s republic.com that there is more depth to that than I recognized initially. Sunstein’s argument in the opening chapters is that the liberty to not encounter ideas, people, or images that you do not choose to isn’t encompassed by the Freedom of Speech principle, and that there is furthermore a duty as a citizen to engage in some deliberation when those chance encounters occur.
He frames that duty in a relationship of tension with the right to choose what we want. These two forces he abstracts as independent sovereigns – the political sovereignty, with its duties of citizenship; and the consumer sovereignty, with its choices in the marketplace.
My take, so far, is that the republic is not a market and political rights are or they are not, (i.e., not analog – they are digital and non-transferable) and you can’t have the government responding without deliberation to the hew and cry of political consumers. By allowing politics to behave like the consumer marketplace the citizenry is consenting to the destruction of political sovereignty.
Pretty interesting.