State Model: Authority, Freedom, and Individual Liberties

Authority as a Necessary Condition

The authority of the State is more than a necessary tool of guardianship; it is the necessary condition for freedoms. Individuals are born into and are legitimized by the State as authentic situations and subjective individuals. This model dispenses with any reference to a natural law of individuals preceding the law imposed by states. There is no freedom nor any individual before the State, only the binding force and authoritative standards of the State capable of ordering society and establishing the subjective positions of individuals.

The Disappearance of the Distinction Between Societas and Pactum Subiectionis

In this model, the distinction between pactum societatis and pactum subiectionis disappears. A pact becomes a unilateral act of subordination, non-negotiable, irreversible, and complete, with all individuals simultaneously subject to the subject invested with the monopoly of the imperium. In contrast, a contract involves parties giving reciprocal advantages and assuming mutual commitments.

The State and Constitutional Power

The State model cannot support a constitutional power understood as a guarantee agreement between parties. We must be wary of a constituent power understood primarily as a guarantee! It acknowledges the presence of a serious threat to the political unity of the State. The State is born from the will of individuals, but it will not be represented with the pattern of bargaining and the private nature of the contract. The State is understood as a composition of different individual interests.

The State's Authority and the Social Contract

For the State to be strong and authoritative, its origins must depend on the agreement! Only with the release agreement achieved on the exercise of constituent power from the influence of private character can the full focus be placed on the plane of political decision. Individuals who choose to submit to the authority of the State are no longer a decomposed crowd but become people or nation, which is not thinkable before or outside of the State. This model denies the existence of an autonomous and original constituent power and interprets the whole doctrine of liberal policies in the direction of civil liberties.

Civil Liberties in the State Model

Excluding the reference of a society that precedes the State, individuals could not dispose of civil liberties precisely because they are incapable of recognizing them, let alone creating them. Civil liberties are what the law of the State wants them to be (before this law, it is absurd to speak of freedom). Freedom and power are born together in the statist reconstruction. The statist model is reluctant to submit the sovereign (whether a monarch or a legislative assembly) to higher-order ties, such as a force of habit, rights established in history, or a written constitution that seeks to impose itself as a fundamental rule above the sovereign. The great argument of statist culture is that it may be just to fear the discretion of the sovereign, but we must not forget that no sovereign is bound to succumb to a fatal outcome. Sovereign authority and individual liberties are born together, and therefore, they are destined to prosper or decline together.