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What is modern political method?

Humans naturally use two methods for decision making:

The old regime, and dictatorships, correspond to the overall statutory form: the king decides.Direct democracy corresponds to the voting method.Between these two, there are a whole series of intermediate or mixed methods. For example, one could have a government (which applies the statutory method) that is accountable to a parliament (which applies the voting method).

One can assume that hunter-gatherer groups, even before the Neolithic Revolution, used these two methods: either choosing (or being imposed with a leader by the law of the strongest), or deciding by deliberation. Democracies stemming from the philosophy of the Enlightenment are only refinements of intermediate methods.

Unsuccessful attempts at reforming the two natural decision-making methods

When the modern scientific method leads to the technological progress of the 19th century, the archaism of the social organization, which leads to shocking inequalities (see Émile Zola), becomes more visible. Again, in the 21st century, the same problem arises, only a few decades after the end of the two world wars of the 20th century, which had provoked a massive redistribution (see Thomas Piketty).

However, all the 19th-century attempts at defining a new social organization (Saint-Simonism, Positivism, Fourierism, Anarchism, Communism) fail because they do not manage to reform the natural decision-making system (statutory or voting) beyond a new mixture. In fact, they all fall into one, or even several, of the three following flaws:

At the beginning of the 21st century, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France encounters the same problem of inability to propose a deep reform of the decision-making method.

Definition of the modern political method

The modern political method consists in saying that a decision stands only as long as the reasoning leading to it is not invalidated. It can be invalidated by not conforming to the modern scientific method, that is, by not taking into account all the known facts. It can also be invalidated by no longer being recognized as in line with the common interest.

Why the term 'modern political method'?Parallel with the modern scientific method

Read in advance the question 'What is the modern scientific method?'.

With the modern scientific method, knowledge no longer depends on social support. This differentiates it from a dogma. It holds as long as the reasoning which produced it is not faulted. It is exactly the same thing regarding a decision taken in accordance with the modern political method.

Utility of the modern political method

The modern scientific method enabled the technological progress of the 19th and 20th centuries.In the same way, the modern political method should enable a qualitative improvement in the level of social organization.

Why only now?

One can ask why Antiquity practiced science without leading to the modern scientific method? One can also ask why two millennia of political practice, and its many revisions in the 18th and 19th centuries, did not lead to the modern political method? Finally, one can ask why the discovery of the modern scientific method, then the mathematical formalism associated with it 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 the 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 has done.

Go deeper

Continue to the question 'What social organization would allow us to live in harmony?'

Read the second part of the book From Capital to Reason, which presents, in more detail, a method of implementation of the modern political method.

Read (or listen, since it is available on litteratureaudio.com) Paris by Émile Zola, particularly Book 2, chapters 4 and 5, to understand that the problem of social injustice was already at the end of the 19th century posed in terms practically identical to those of today, with at the center a relationship to the truth of facts, and therefore a challenge to science, which is problematic.