O que queremos do estado? As limitações das abordagens atuais

• Autor(a) principal: Colen, José
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Baião, António, Nelson, Scott
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/gaudiumsciendi.2015.2766

Robert Nozick finishes Anarchy, State and Utopia with the idea of a utopia where a minimal state would allow the social organization of the most different ways of life. Even if the framework is libertarian, the individual communities could reject laissez-faire market transactions or liberal democracy. Different people have different desires and some would valorize security instead of liberty, or socialism instead of capitalism. Nozick holds that the minimal state, as a framework for utopia, is an inspiring view because it guarantees that the individuals' rights would remain inviolable, allowing them to choose freely what they want to do with their lives. Should this libertarian idea be exported to the organization of different communities? Or does a larger state have some kind of importance to preserve its members' rights? Also, is it possible to understand political liberalism without the state? This is the starting point for our reflection on the role of the state in ensuring pluralism and liberty among individuals and groups. One common assumption is that pluralism or liberalism is incompatible with “perfectionism” i.e. that the state avoiding to support any particular conception of the good life is the only or the best guarantee of liberalism. Tolerance for different ways of grasping the truth or the respect for the lights in others minds is not enough but the liberal State must be grounded in the absence of any belief or truth in both the moral and political realms. Max Weber’s sociological work long ago defined the modern state as necessarily coercive. It was defined by the monopoly of violence inside a country. Even now his definition of the state is widely shared among sociologists and political theorists. But Max Weber’s conception also carried, or went hand-in-hand with the threat of relativism, and fell victim to or was inspired by an epistemological conception that ends with equal treatment for both good and bad people. In this paper we intend to explore the connection between truth and politics and return to a more ancient alternative account of the legitimacy of coercion that goes back to Aristotle’s idea of the polis as a collective venture, and question its applicability to the modern world. Our main contention is that the polis’s purpose to provide for human excellence and not just as an arena offering political protection to free market capitalists should not be lightly discarded.