One of the more important 'philosophies of ...' is political philosophy, which is the philosophical study of government.The first and most important subject that this deals with is political order: whether we should choose, say, a republican government, or a constitutional monarchy, a gerontocracy, or an autocracy, and so on.
Next to this, perhaps the one major aspect of political philosophy is the issue of the powers of political agents and institutions: how these powers are granted, how they are circumscribed, what relationships exist between them, and so on.
Today we have developed a distribution or balance of powers, which is crucial to the maintenance of the political order. In some cases, this is overt--for instance, in the USA. In other cases, it may be more subtle--as in the UK. Whatever the case may be, there will be few countries where there is no balance at all.
Now in our common thinking, the balance of powers refers to the three great powers of state: the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, called the trias politica. Each has separate, independent powers, and each keeps the others in check.
Now when one asks what these powers really are, our thoughts often turn to stereotypes: the houses or parliament or halls of congress, stately courts of law and robed judges, rows of smartly dressed riot police, typically holding cudgels, and many other things which seem characteristic of these powers.
I propose, however, that in the tumult of our daily lives, and in the function of these powers from week to week, it comes down to something far simpler than this--namely, scraps of information which we deal with from day to day: receipts and signatures, sheets of paper, or words exchanged in telephone calls and side rooms.
Assume, by way of example, that a local regulator has refused to entertain a complaint against one of its members. Say, a local Law Society has received a complaint against a solicitor--an esteemed solicitor--and suppressed it. This is quite common in fact, throughout the world. We call it regulatory capture.
By way of analysis, an executive function (the regulator) has failed. The matter is therefore handed to a judicial body (say, the Public Protector) to set the case to rights. It is, in fact, just one of many ordinary instances of the separation of powers--and with that, of checks and balances.
In the process, the Public Protector produces certain rules--say, numbered from 1 to 10, and explains how these rules apply in this case. All things considered, the Protector then makes a judgement, and states how the situation should be remedied.
Power has checked power--and here we see the system of the separation of powers working at a more basic level. In order to understand what is really happening here, we may say that it all works at the level of information.
Each step of our example rests on the disclosure of information. A citizen shares information about a problem. The Public Protector's rules represent information, too. The application of these rules demands information, and so, too, does remedial action.
In fact it goes further back than this, to the regulator itself. The Law Society, like the Public Protector, has certain rules, say again numbered from 1 to 10. But rule 11, they say (which does not exist) precludes the citizen's complaint. Or the complaint, they say, changed in an interview (which did not take place).
Again it comes down to information--often enough, simple information, too. And so the information which is required, in order to know that the crucial separation of the powers of state is working, may often be undermined or suppressed in quite ordinary ways.
The significance of this is that if citizens do not know the importance of each small item of information, and if this is multiplied hundreds, even thousands of times across the nation, the abuse of power creeps into the system while citizens mistakenly believe that the separation of powers is about the usual stereotypes.
In fact the separation of powers is about many things which may easily escape one’s attention: the denial of a receipt, the omission of a signature, a few lost pages, or the misrepresentation of a conversation. Such things may conceal a world of trouble, and are often critical to the system as a whole.
Wherever information is concealed or distorted, power may go unchecked—which is to say, people may be able to gain unfair personal and political advantage. Regulators are captured, crimes are swept under the carpet, the poor are exploited, foodstuffs are unsafe—and a thousand, ten thousand ills besides.
