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What is the modern political method?
Humans naturally use two methods for decision-making:
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the statutory method: the group entrusts one of its members with the responsibility of making decisions in certain areas (which does not preclude this person from consulting before making their decision)
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the voting method: the final decision is the proposal that, after deliberation, receives the most votes
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The old regime and dictatorships correspond to the global statutory form: the king decides.
Direct democracy corresponds to the voting method.
Between the two, there exists a whole series of intermediate or mixed methods. For example, one can have a government (which applies the statutory method) accountable to a parliament (which applies the voting method).
It can be assumed that hunter-gatherer groups, even before the Neolithic revolution, used these two methods: either choosing (or having a leader imposed by the law of the strongest) or deciding through deliberation. Democracies arising from Enlightenment philosophy are merely refinements of intermediate methods.
Unsuccessful attempts to reform the two natural decision-making methods
When the modern scientific method leads to the technological progress of the 19th century, the archaism of social organization, which leads to shocking inequalities (see Émile Zola), becomes more visible. Again, in the 21st century, the problem arises identically, only a few decades after the end of the two World Wars of the 20th century, which had caused a massive redistribution (see Thomas Piketty).
Yet all attempts in the 19th century to define new social organizations (Saint-Simonism, Positivism, Fourierism, Anarchism, Communism) failed because they could not reform beyond a new mixture the natural system of decision-making (statutory or voting). They all inevitably fell into one, or even several, of the following three pitfalls:
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Denying the problem, by considering inequalities as natural.
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Calling for more morality, that is, the emergence of a new man.
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Proposing a new convoluted combination of the two traditional decision-making methods (statutory and voting), which proves ineffective when implemented.
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At the beginning of the 21st century, the Yellow Vests movement in France confronts the same problem of inability to propose a profound reform of the decision-making method.
Definition of the modern political method
The modern political method consists in stating that a decision holds only as long as the reasoning leading to it is not invalidated. It can be invalidated by not being in conformity with the modern scientific method, meaning not taking into account all known facts. It can also be invalidated by no longer being recognized as conforming to the common interest.
Why this term 'modern political method'?
Parallel with the modern scientific method
Please read beforehand the question 'What is the modern scientific method?'.
With the modern scientific method, knowledge no longer depends on social support. This distinguishes it from a dogma. It holds as long as the reasoning that produced it is not proven wrong. This is exactly the same concerning a decision made in conformity with the modern political method.
Utility of the modern political method
The modern scientific method has enabled the technological progress of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the same way, the modern political method must enable a qualitative improvement at the level of social organization.
Why only now?
One may wonder why antiquity practiced science without leading to the modern scientific method? One may also ask why two millennia of political practice, and its many revision attempts during the 18th and 19th centuries, did not lead to the modern political method? Finally, one may ask why the discovery of the modern scientific method, followed by the associated mathematical formalism at the end of the 19th century, did not lead to the discovery or formalization of the modern political method before the 21st century? Because, on one hand, neither of these two methods is intuitive, and on the other hand, the modern political method is not simply the entry of politics into the field of the modern scientific method, as modern medicine was.
Deepening
Continue to the question 'What social organization would allow living in harmony?'.
Consult the second part of the book From Capital to Reason, which presents, in more detail, a method of implementing the modern political method.
Read (or listen, as available on litteratureaudio.com) Paris by Émile Zola, especially Book 2, chapters 4 and 5, to understand that the problem of social injustice arose at the end of the 19th century in terms practically identical to those of today, with at its core a relationship to the truth of facts, and thus a challenge to science, which poses a problem.