The Age of Enlightenment in the world history pertaining to Europe brought various changes in the society.
Relating to the time of French Revolution, we saw the emergence of idea of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity which changed the power-liberty-polity equations regarding the functioning of estates as well as their governing citizenry. This made the society saw interlining of concepts like Equality, Power, Liberty, which impacted the public as well as their ruling authority or estates.
As per the Social Contract Theory, we saw the rise of state in link with the end of authoritarian natural law based societies. As a result, people came in contract with each other to pool their powers to a lot representative state devised with the responsibility of bringing equality and liberty in the society.
Equality of estates leading to equality of power in this sense is understood as:
• Decline of authoritarian state brought the democratic liberal principles like freedom of speech, right to vote, etc. This made ways for people for form representative government as seen in Locke’s and Rousseau’s works. Rousseau’s General Will and Social Contract work even changed the course of French states during French Revolution.
• People now found the feudal notions of state-society relations, ie the hierarchical state-citizen class equations redundant and thereby felt empowered by increased access to estates.
Meaning, they found the ruling elite as a misnomer and now got themselves empowered to form the state itself, through republican and representative democratic setup under a Social Contract as seen in works like Two Treatises of Civil Government (John Locke)
The moving away of highly feudal societies in Europe as well as in Russia paved the way for more power centric equality where people can come together to yield power in the form of government machinery. The creation of Duma and Russian Revolution of 1917 is an example,
• As per Marxists, thetheme of equality of opportunity bringing equality of power brings everyone equal and reduces the bourgeoisie –proletariat division into a more power diffused society. This can also be linked to “Foucault’s Power is everywhere” concept.
Equality of Power as Liberty:
• In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), John Locke linked the Equality of Power with that of Liberty where people under a social contract come together to form a liberal state where everywhere gets agreed to enjoy equality of life, liberty and property.
• Liberty’s dependence on political equality in this sense suggests that the balance of power i.e. presence of equality of power will lead to presence of liberty so that people enjoy liberty in true sense.
• We can see examples in the elements of a republic, democratic and sovereign states like US, India, etc where people enjoy liberty in consonance with the political liberty (where quality of power seems to be a foundational principle)
Thus, all these concepts of equality, power and liberty seems to be inter-related in the arena of politicalt heory where under a social contract, citizens enjoy the ultimate freedom. As John Locke rightly argued, “in this state of perfect freedom, every person was free to enjoy rights of life, liberty and property.”
Comments
Post a Comment