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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1143 each other through a perpetual oscillation. Equilibrity alone reduces force to be nothing. If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale... (...) But we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’. (The meaning of the famous passage in the Georgias about geometry.) No unlimited development is possible in the nature of things; the world is entirely based on measure and equilibrium, and it is the same with the city." Finally, there is solid ground under our feet: back to Plato; back to Aristotle. What is there to see here, however? The proponents of freedom have been arguing for at least a hundred years over who can find more “repressive structures” in human relations: in the division of labour, culture, religion, regarding public power, between sexes and races and so on. ‘They tirelessly urge us to put an end to the violence, exclusion and expropriation that lie at the bottom of pre-existing conditions. They reproach us if we fail to do so and irritably deflect responsibility if their followers’ eagerness results in ever newer and more cruel repressive systems. Few among them have reached the point of recognising the necessity of the asymmetry of social conditions and the unavoidability of the compulsion present in institutions. Or, if they do, few forgo using this compulsion in service of the noble goal, the hammering of the asymmetries into symmetry; let it cost what it will. Weil reminds us that never in the course of human history has anyone managed to eliminate the institutions of compulsion standing in the way of an order based on mutual understanding and acceptance; at most, one can play them off against one another. ‘The closest we can get to the desirable state of a lack of compulsion is if these forces balance and cancel each other out and thus hinder the members of the political community from seeking the truth as little as possible — simply put, from communicating with each other and holding a fair, continuously renewing dialogue over their common goals — since this is the original raison d'etre of politics and the only thing which makes their coexistence bearable. It is now perhaps clear that this conviction demands significantly more from its proponents than the division of power or the limitation of the market. It requires the restoration of a third regulatory principle besides bureaucratic rationality and market competition (even in opposition to these two, if needs be), as the final source of legitimacy: 135 Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace. Routledge, London, 2002, p.171.
