Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

18 Individual Initiative, Entry and Economic Democracy
matters affecting them. In the state of misery, we find the extreme case
of a dictator who not only does not allow members of society such
determination or decisions, but may also arbitrarily imprison or even
destroy members of society. On the other side of the spectrum we find
the case of a democratic society respecting basic human rights.
But there are so many possible aspects, forms, intensities, social
domains and so on, such a tremendous dimensionality, of this ‘space’
of social conditions, that it is difficult to make any more precise conclusions
about which states are to be preferred – and who, if anyone,
should make such conclusions or judgments, and how. The differentiation
between Hitler’s Germany and a Swiss canton may be clear, but
there are trillions of intermediate as well as more extreme situations
that are hard to evaluate.
The purpose of this analysis is to offer some degree of greater order
in these matters and perhaps indicate forms of optimality, not as ‘optimal
prescriptions’ but rather as indications of the breadth or ‘fullness’ of
the dimensionality at hand and of procedures and methods of finding,
for any given nation or society, its own optimum.
The full discussion of this subject, too extensive to be undertaken
here, falls under three distinct headings: (1) the structure – or static
general rules; (2) the social dynamics, procedure and process of finding
solutions; and (3) the actual method or technique through which a
society composed of many members arrives at solutions and decisions.
The first of the three is the most important when it comes to the determination
of optimal states of society.
It is this first subject heading that we will discuss here. Because it has
been presented several times in both published 1 and unpublished
papers of mine, I will restrict myself here to a compact summary statement,
often relying on common sense, intuition or analogy, with the
intention of presenting to the reader a certain whole which can be
evaluated and accepted or rejected.
All the ‘static’ states of society can be thought of as an all-inclusive
set represented by an oval or ellipse, where the optimum is somewhere
at the center, and the least desirable states such as Hitler’s or Somosa’s
are at or near the outer edge, as indicated in the sketch of Figure 2.1.
What is relevant and what determines the degree of optimality
or misery is the relationship between two indexes, or quanta – I and
P – the degree of involvement and participation in a given society or
social group and participation by members of the society or group in
determination and decisions concerning the group respectively. The
case of the two mentioned and many other dictatorial states is that