Rational Secular State -- Introcution Continued

In at least one sense, this gap between liberty and agency was the problem Marx confronted.  Unless the gap were narrowed, even closed, the problem of liberty was not solved, even with the state-sanctioned guarantee of rights -- perhaps especially with a guarantee of rights, particularly property rights.  State-sanctioned liberty, insofar as it guaranteed the rights to property and agency in the use of that property, allowed the continued oppression of those without.  In some respects, or so it appeared in the early days of the Marxist experiment that came to dominate the latter half of the twentieth century, the Marxist state seemed to hold the potential for the first fully rational state, a fully justified state.  It promised, at one level, to recreate all men as equal, not in some metaphysical sense, but in the only sense that mattered -- in the material conditions of their existence -- and insofar as the material conditions of one's existence determined one's potential as a human qua human, the project to recreate all men as equal was, in effect, a moral project aimed ultimately at the redemption of mankind.  Marx, in effect, addressed the gap between liberty and agency by reducing the wholly public condition of the former to the latter, and he did so by subsuming what had hitherto been the private condition of agency, a matter of individual will, into the public concerns of the state, a matter of collective will represented by the fully communist state.  The initial strength of the Marxist argument was its apparent scientific rationalism -- an argument based on the minute and perceptive examination of the inherent contradictions of the capitalist state -- an argument that specifically repudiated as well the theocentrism that historically had at once provided public justification for economic disparities and a palliative for private despair in the presumptive moral superiority of and the next-life rewards for those who suffer the indignities of this life.  The communist state promised a fully just state, and that moral promise fully justified the actions of the existing state.  That the actions of the Soviet state were no less brutal than the actions of the inquisition should have been no surprise.  While the brutality of the emergent police state bespeaks the Machiavellian desire of those in power to remain in power, it also bespeaks the power of any state sanctioned purpose, any governing intentionality that would subject the individual subjectivity to a collective and ultimately utopian imperative, to justify the most horrific acts.  As Aron put it, "ministers, commissars, theorists and interrogators," all those engaged in effectuating the purpose of the state, "will try to make men what they would spontaneously be if the official philosophy were true."