‘CONSUMER’S FREEDOM IN RES PUBLICA’ Some Epistemological and Ethico-Political Presuppositions

Nicolas S. Stasinopoulos Scientific Collaborator, TEI of Western Macedonia, Kastoria, Greece

‘CONSUMER’S FREEDOM IN RES PUBLICA’ Some Epistemological and Ethico-Political Presuppositions

Abstract This paper is addressing one of the main topics of marketing agenda: the consumer’s free decisionmaking process as a major issue of marketing segmentation. First and foremost, we ought to consider the conditions of possibility of the constellation between citizen and the bourgeois as involved decisionmakers. We claim here that consumer preferences and interests are not enough to legitimate democratic procedures, that it is unavoidable for a republican consumer/citizen to have power but not authority or sovereignty. Our focus is on the asymmetrical relationship between consumer’s motives supplemented by the classical liberal and utilitarian view on the standard components of citizen’s status of preferences- and the republican view of public sphere. Notions of the republican conception of liberty and the free will formation, as analyzed in the writings of I. Kant and Ph. Pettit, will be used as tools to evaluate Philip Kotler’s ideas of consumer as political individual. This can be taken back to the thought of some mainstream philosophers of liberal, economic theory of democracy, whose ideas could be possibly considered as supportive to the aforementioned mainstream political marketer’s views. In our paper we stress the point that liberty, free will and good reason can be regarded methodologically as coextensive notions (as far as the voter is concerned) and as a constellation of principles that does not contradict the strategy of winning the elections (as far as the marketer is concerned). Accordingly, a “transcendental” aspect of freedom (freedom as the conditions of possibility of non-interference) will be advocated, for realistic and democratic reasons.

Keywords consumer sovereignty; republicanism; liberty; free will; methodology; Ph. Kotler.

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-Potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu -Things have value, but persons have dignity

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY Consumer is late modernism society’s sovereign. The modern conception of marketing1 is that the needs of the consumer are paramount; those of the producer, contingent. An expert in consumer decision making, G.R. Foxall, uses four dimensions of buying situations to classify the consumer behaviors for different types of product (Foxall,1999:123). Namely: complex buying behavior, dissonant buying behavior, habitual buying, and variety seeking behavior. The first two occur when the consumer is highly involved in the purchase process. On the other hand, complex buying and habitual buying has to do with consumers’ attachment to the specific brand or product which they do not wish to change. According to an other typology, consumers are categorized into brand-loyal users, new users, brand switchers and non users. Other analysts prefer to speak about rational consumers, emotional consumers, social consumers (the latter are defined by the combination of society’s different stereotypes which are operationalized by the social imagery) and situational consumers (which are driven by situations that might influence their decisions to switch to another candidate company). Segmentation is a classical marketing concept. It involves identifying homogeneous buying behavior within segments, so that each segment is considered as a target for a distinct marketing mix. According to analyst Martin Evans, the criteria of typifying

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the segments are identification (differentiation from other segments), measurability, homogeneity, stability, congruity (homogeneity within segments in terms of behavioral responses), accessibility by using the provided communicative media and substantiality (sufficient segment size to enable specific marketing actions and marketing mixes aimed at them) (Evans, 1999:211). The notion of marketing planning is an all inclusive umbrella. The commonly accepted marketing planning includes the development of marketing objectives, the identification of impacted publics, the target marketing selection, the development of ethical core values, the development of marketing mixes, the enculturation – integration of core values into the organizational culture, the implementation of marketing strategy, the monitoring and control of marketing and ethical effectiveness. Accordingly, political strategists first collect data on individual voting districts regarding voting registration, then conduct constituency market research into voters’ attitudes, opinions, hopes and desires to determine which voting districts are most liable to change their allegiance from one party candidate to another. Then they take into consideration the positioning of the competition and they identify the profiles of the different segments within each of the marginal voting districts, which are most likely to influence the overall result of the election campaign. This allows the candidate –the customer of the marketer- to specify and target the relevant supporter groups. Another characteristic case of the political marketing, which is homologous to a characteristic case of the business marketing, is that of the floating voter, the most important type of voter in elections, as it is very difficult to be targeted. Floating voter is an individual with no brand loyalty, less politically aware and therefore more difficult to communicate with.

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However, it is here that the differences begin to show up. The segmentation and positioning involved in political campaigning differ considerably to segmentation and positioning in the commercial marketing process. The following factors are involved here: firstly, the voters are less informed but more (ideologically) attached to the product than the consumers. Most voters select parties only on the basis of their general propositions and do not expend too much effort in learning about parties’ and candidates’ policies. Secondly, product positioning has a more certain, consistent, credible, competitive and clear image than the diffused and influenced, by lobbying policies, image of the political candidate. Also, the intangible nature of political marketing process and the voter’s choice in the political process is more emotional, and thus, restricts the capacity of image recreation by the analysts (Baines,1999:406). It is not unimportant that on this specific point there is a shift of meaning when we try to conceive the political field as a sheer market place: -Party members ought to be more disciplined than business executives; -The practice of negative and comparative advertising is practiced only in politics; -Electoral marketing is analogous to a negative purchase. Voters may vote for a candidate other than their favorite one so as to defeat their least favorite candidate; -To campaign is to touch public opinion and to be governed by it. As frequently said, contemporary leaders campaign not to govern; they govern to campaign. That may cause an unsustainable, and for the republicans, undemocratic condition of governing through endless campaigning; -Acting on marketing criteria differs from acting on ideological criteria. For example, credibility is verified by winning, by staying in power. In that case, legitimacy is confused with popularity;

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-For a party to maximize voter support –following the rules of the market- must align itself closer to its principal opponents’ position. That is called ‘center ground thesis’. In that way, consumer sovereignty is opposed to -the necessary for democracyopinion pluralism. That is the reason why some traditional theorists do not accept as a postulate that political and electoral behavior are interchangeable terms with consumption. This assumption comprises a main ideological constellation, which includes the following assertions of anti-consumerist oriented theorists2: -Mass consumption causes global cultural and political homogenisation or global heterogenisation and diffusion. The world of commodities has destroyed significant political differences between people. Consumer culture is an aspect of an overall erosion of culture per se; -Consumption is premised on materialism as an unreasonable desire for goods, which replaces previous concern for people. Consumption is an act of absolutely free and uncommitted action, with unexpected consequences in political choice; -Rise of consumption represents a loss of authenticity. The rise in mass consumption is opposed to involvement in production. Consumption is more superficial and against work, endeavor or performance; -Consumers tend naturally towards emulation as their main mode of social relation. They also tend naturally towards competition over status as their main mode of social relation. Consumer societies are necessarily more individualistic and hedonistic oriented.

Consumption

is

an

inegalitarian

disempowerment;

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process

that

creates

relative

But this, often simplistic and mythological, populist view, is not the dominant trend in consumption studies and the economical theory of Democracy. On the contrary, that theory (Downs,1957:295) has as its starting point the methodological individualism, which means that social structures and procedures are to be interpreted only on the basis of individual motives and actions. Also, as far as the consumer/citizen is concerned, the following premises are a priori accepted: -Citizens are interested in politics; -Citizens’ political participation is based on costs and benefits calculation (Schmidt, 2000:237,240); -They are fully informed about all the alternatives of their decisions and consequences. They are also interested only for the next elections; -The voters are not embedded in an institutional, ethical, and cultural environment. Political history or progress does not influence the voters, and their preferences are external and invariable causes to the above procedures; As far as the political parties are concerned, the following premises are a priori accepted: -Parties are companies that generate products as a means for gaining political profits and returns. They try to obtain public offices and not to realize their ideological programs; -The crucial criterion of parties’ political programmes is the maximization of votes, so that parties converge on identical goods with small differences; -The plans of the parties are fully transparent and known to every citizen, and the promised policies are to be followed under any circumstances. In the rest of the paper we intend to advocate the view that, even if homo economicus is an appropriate sociological model for the interpretation of consumption, it is

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inadequate to explain and justify political actions (Schmidt, 2000:249), to analyze the indispensable consensus about the ‘rules of the game’ in democracy. Before reaching the conclusion that economical actors of the aforementioned type have not enough reasons to accept the rules of democracy (Habermas, 1992:358), we first choose to focus on the argument of Philip Kotler, one of the most representative, classical, advocates of the marketing orientation and expansion in all societal sectors. In our analysis we accept his standpoint as one of the “mainstream marketing points of view”, the standpoint of a “textbook guru” as David Carson regards him (Carson et al.,2001: 41, 24), although we take into consideration that contemporary marketing methodologies that

there are other

keep their distance from his

epistemological perspective .

The debate over political marketing’s proper domain were initiated by Philip Kotler and S.L. Levy, when they contended that marketing was an all-pervasive activity which applied as much to the selling of politicians and charities as it did to toothpaste and soap” (Kotler and Levy, 1969:15 ; Also, Brown, 1995:35). It is commonly accepted that, as a consequence of the post war social changes, it had become necessary to broaden the concept of marketing. Traditional notions of the ‘product’, ‘consumer’ had to be redefined in non business terms as attempts to transfer the principle of effective marketing management –generic production definition, target groups identification, consumer behavior analysis, integrated marketing planning, continuous feedback and so on- to the marketing of services and ideas. According to Kotler’s view “The choice facing those who manage non business organizations is not whether to 1market or not to market, for no organization can avoid marketing. The choice is whether to do it well or poorly” (Kotler and Levy, 1969:15).

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If marketing is as ubiquitous as Kotler thinks, then the following question must be asked, what is the common denominator, what makes marketing different to other areas of intellectual endeavor? Marketing is concerned with everything from the study of memory effects to the globalization tendencies in the world economy (Brown, 1995:35). For Kotler, the consumer behaves as a formal rationalist and his buying process consists of the following sequence of events: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior. As an individualist utilitarian who is searching only for the satisfaction of his fully conscious, private good, the consumer –‘if satisfied’- will continue to purchase (Kotler, 1988:184). In recent years, says Kotler, there is a shift from sales to marketing orientation in business sector, which must be welcomed. “A sales orientation considers the job as one of finding customers for existing products and convincing them to buy these products….The marketing concept, on the other hand, calls for most of the effort to be spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and then creating the goods and services to satisfy them” (Kotler & Zaltman,1971:5 ; Also Kotler u.a., 1999:65). With that phrase, Kotler proposes to relinquish the authority or the sovereignty of the producer and follow the trends of the consumer. But, what if the product is democracy itself? Let’s follow the mainstream marketers’ argument for the field of politics: “Political marketing is the making of successful candidates and causes”(Kotler & Kotler, 1999:3). And how? By researching who constitutes the market (occupants), what the market buys (objects), why the market buys (objectives), who participates in the buying (organizations), how the market buys (operations), when the market buys (occasions) and where the market buys (outlets) (Kotler,1988:184).

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But here, the

consumers’ needs and the market process are represented as facts that just happen, one next to the other and detached from a general view of the whole system of the market and politics (according to D. Hume’s epistemological type of ‘external’ causality), but without their inner logic to be explained and without a prescriptive or normative claim from the part of the market analyst to be articulated (according to I. Kant’s epistemological type of ‘teleological’ causality). Explanation by principles, which grasps the particular item of inquiry under one universal maxim and derives it from a first axiom, this deductive mode of explanation (Kantian causality in his ‘First Critique’) breaks with the methodological priority of the concrete, of a worldview in which the particular is immediately enmeshed with the particular, one is mirrored in the other, and everything forms an extensive flat weave of oppositions and similarities (Hume). The mainstream marketing’s methodological claim is relativistic. For that view, ‘truth’ denotes what we hold to be justified according to our standards in a given casecontext. For those marketers, truth does not signify the correspondence between statements and some X prior to all interpretations; truth is simply an expression of commendation, with which we advise those who speak our language to accept the conceptions that we hold to be justified. The ‘objectivity’ of their vision of knowledge is based on terms of ‘as much intersubjective agreement and persuasion as possible’ and not on an idealized acceptability grounded and validated on reasons (according to the contemporary Kantian theorist, J. Habermas; see bellow). The above thesis means that the practical solutions that the marketer provides the company/party, face the party’s final objective as unquestioned, as the one and only – the winning of the elections-, as a black box not to be criticized on ethicopoliticaluniversalizable inner rational causes.

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For the mainstream marketer, the analysis of the market segmentation (demographics, psychographics e.t.c.) is related only to the descriptive sociological, and not to the political identity of people, which is connected to different conditions and notions, as we will see below. The researcher must be reminded here the analogy with the ‘reliability-validity dilemma’, while he interprets the data and faces the problem that “the reliability of a measurement instrument…may be associated with low validity of his material” ( Gaskel & Bauer, 2000: 341). Here, it is clear enough that the main marketing category of segmentation has nothing to do with the political element in politics (but presumably relates only to policies). This marketing strategy, also understands the state as nothing more than an apparatus for accommodating individuals in the pursuit of their atomized concerns3. Even if the product to be promoted by the marketer is a social product, the ‘company’/ the party, or the State does not need to cultivate the values of that product (the common good or whatever promotes a more just society) but the individual consumer is left alone to estimate his private utility from the acquisition of the product. “The marketer’s approach to selling a social product is to consider how the rewards for buying the product can be increased relative to costs.”4 According to one strategy, a product concept can be used loosely and discriminatingly. By pursuing this policy of concept diffuseness, the candidate might be appropriate for the majority party candidate. The candidate can also assume a secondary concept as well as a primary one as long as they are not boldly inconsistent. Unlike firms that concentrate on winning the biggest share of a highly profitable but relatively small market segment the candidates’ ultimate task is, for the mainstream marketer, to attract the broadest possible voter coalition. He must find the umbrella concept that encompasses the voting intentions and motives of different groups.

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II. FROM MERE INTENTION TO RATIONAL INTERPETED MOTIVE Before we turn to the terms relative to the political theory of freedom and democracy, we stress the necessity of understanding the motives which impelled people to engage in economic activities in a more elaborated way than that of the above mentioned mainstream marketing point of view. We juxtapose the aforementioned mainstream marketing’s theoretical and methodological assumptions on the concept of motive and its role in constructing explanations of human conduct. In order to do that we will have to specify both how the nature and content of motives are established, and how these are related to those encompassing systems of subjective meaning which are constituted as values and beliefs, influenced by Max Weber’s5 work. First, it is generally agreed that some considerable portion of human conduct cannot be understood by reference to subjective meanings. According to this view, there is a merely reactive behavior to which no subjective meaning is attached, and action in which subjective meaning precedes or accompanies the act in question. There is always some inherent rationality that represents the quintessential form of action. The direct observational understanding of behavior is a process in which the observer draws upon an existing stock of knowledge in order to interpret conducts, a stock of knowledge in which familiarity with already existing rules plays the central part. Thus, the consumer sovereignty and the free market may indeed be understood in this manner. To that extent, free market society could be described meaningfully without recourse to either motives in particular or subjective meaning in general. For many forms of economic conduct, essential to the workings of free market society, do not logically require the presence of any particular set of motives. What is central to the

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system is conduct which is characterized by certain specific intentions, such as profitseeking, or utility maximization rather than any specific motives. As long as an observer focuses upon social patterns of behavior what is under discussion is the ‘embodied intentionality’ which they contain and this can be described independently of the purposes (motives) of individuals. But M. Weber would contrast such a mainstream marketer’s ‘observational understanding’ with ‘explanatory understanding’. The second is a process which does not involve comprehending the meaning an actor attaches to his propositions only in terms of mere instrumental (and profit maximizing) intention. Understanding then is attained if we know that the actor is engaged in some other tasks, of which this particular act would be just an appropriate part. This is a Weberian rational understanding of motivation, which consists in placing the act in a reflective and more inclusive context of meaning. But the important feature of Weber’s concept does not lie simply in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning, but rather in the fact that this context is personal and psychological in character. It is not enough for our comprehension to be merely intentionalist, it must also be motivational. We must not only be aware of the intentions of the actor but also of his motives. It is not enough to perceive the significance of a behavior in terms of its position in a means-ends chain but it is crucial to show how that chain connects to the actor’s pattern of reflected and personal utilities6. Motivational understanding thus involves connecting conduct to psychological states and patterns of gratification. We have to deal with what the action in question signifies for the actor, how it relates to the hopes, fears and wishes of the individual. Unfortunately, it is too often assumed that explanations which are couched in terms of motivational ‘forces’ or which make reference to ‘energy’ are necessarily indicative of a behaviorist mode of analysis and

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are hence not assimilable to a psychoanalytical or transcendental philosophical concern with subjective –and not private and atomized- meaning. Here we need to draw some parallels between the aforementioned mainstream marketing’s presumptions of methodology with the philosophy of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism represents individual preferences as differences in utility levels. The equality is well exhibited by the equality of marginal utilities in the allocation of a divisible and transferable quantity. According to the utilitarians, every person acts in order to maximize his sum of utilities. In their view, man is more or less an isolated individual who takes his private needs and interests for granted while trying only to satisfy them –concerned with means rather than with ends. But utilitarianism has played also a progressive role in liberal capitalism, because –among others-

it

provided a free exchange of goods and services, formal equality and efficient instrumental rational behavior in public and private life. According to Lincoln Allison (Allison,1990:76), the original utilitarian doctrine can be analyzed into three components: 1) consequentalism- judging actions or policies in terms of their consequences for individual human beings. 2) welfare – judging states of affairs or policies in terms of the level of satisfaction achieved, which is identified with utility. 3) sum-ranking – the technical term for the summation of everyone’s satisfaction to give a global utility total. The newer type of utilitarianism treats people as if they are the best judges of their own interest. Also the individual utility maximizing axiom can be used by an economist without any commitment to any particular normative (prescriptive) doctrine7. We think that it is fair to reproach the aforementioned mainstream marketing point of view with the presumption that the individuals do not actually act with an autonomous and rational-normative will, but in reality ‘they are determined’ by a non political

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maximization of profits and utilities and the sociological necessities of marketing segmentation, can not be posited as a self-evident axiom, but have to be shown valid in each case.

Quentin Skinner in his study of the functions of the political thought (Skinner,1978:xii) stresses that although it is usual for people to believe that a political agent first decides upon a course of action and then subsequently professes that some principles serve best to describe what he is doing in morally acceptable terms, this misconceives the role of the normative vocabulary which any society employs for the description and appraisal of its political life. One course of action is to be followed only after it meets the preexisting criteria for the application of the term (Kant would call this ‘transcendental conditions of possibility’). The process of motivation and justification should not be seen as inextricably intertwined. There are not two processes, separated in time, with the action first motivated and only then justified, but one process, in which individuals have an inner need to formulate plans which engage ‘justifiable actions’. Actors have an equally powerful need to ‘justify’ their actions to themselves, to tailor them to the expectations of others, and to engage in what they themselves see as ‘legitimate actions’. The well known communication theorist Juergen Habermas’ has a view that is significative here: “Without the spur of a transcendent truth claim, objectifying science is swallowed up by its contingent contexts in the very same way that everyday practices are. In the laboratory as in life, the same culture of multivalence prevails once all standards of rationality and practices of justification claim to be nothing more than actually exercised conventions-nothing more ‘than just such practices’ ” (Habermas, 1992b:134). Let’s bring an example here. Voting is not a simple matter of

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learning what political code is publicly endorsed, but rather a matter of discovering what might and ought to be the predominant and practical political concerns of individuals. In the light of this knowledge political action is motivationally understood. The analyst cannot proceed by first choosing a segment of conduct and then attaching to it its supposedly ‘subjective meaning’ (as the aforementioned mainstream marketer does, using strict methods of segmentation and investigation of desires). In that case there is a danger for every conduct to be identified as behavior, and such an externally based comprehension can only amount to a description of action in intentionalist form and cannot provide explanation.

However, according to our view, it is not enough for the political researcher to form systematic assumptions about actions that are understandable (mere intentionalist in a manner of interpretative epistemologies), or even explainable (in a manner of pure scientific observation), but irrational in relation to ends which further the public interest and just political institutions. It is not enough for the consultant of a political party to divide absolutely between facts and values in politics, even in the subtle Weberian manner. Even Weber himself, who is careful to distinguish between purposive-rational intention and mere behavior, considers values and ethical claims as methodologically unavoidable but not objectively binding. Habermas stresses the point that Weber does not consistently clarify the difference between the understanding of motivation, which reconstructs the subjectively intended meaning (Sinn) of a social action, and the specific kind of understanding that appropriates the significance (Bedeutung) objectivated in events or works (Habermas, 1988:13-14).

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According to our view, the distinction between the methodological framework of research and the pragmatic function of applying the results of research is analytically useful but in real life of politics it is blurred and can lead to wrong political choices. There is always a factual, unavoidable (and often emancipatory) transition from the explication of the self-understanding of citizens to the prescriptive (normative) knowledge of political processes. There is also a transition from this explication to predictions (the understanding of marketers) and to the administrative control of the political system (by the parties). Furthermore, in addition to this aforementioned factual remark, we support the following methodological assumption: the marketer as a political consultant does not only pursue the intention of instrumentally operating for unquestionable purposes of the party-client, but also ought to pursue the interest of enlightenment, of justice and non domination. It is unavoidable to accept an idealizing (deontological) conceptual construction because if the distinction between the idealizing concept and a conception that is held to be true here and now -in this concrete circumstance- collapses, then we can not explain why we are able to learn reflexively, that is to improve our own standards of rationality. This deontological structure is not based on arbitrariness but is reasonably grounded ( and according to our preposition, in the work of Immanuel Kant and some contemporary republican political theorists). The aforementioned ‘idealization’ that leads to the improvement of the marketers standards of rationality is a realistic argument.

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III. INTEREST, FREE WILL FORMATION

AND PUBLIC OPINION IN

REPUBLICAN THEORY.8 Benjamin Constant (in his Ancient and Modern Liberty) is one of the first liberal thinkers of modernity who distinguishes between liberty as a quaranteed sphere of personal independence and liberty as the entitlement to take part in government. Liberty of independence, or negative liberty, (everyman’s right to be subjected to the law alone and not by the caprice of other individuals) versus positive – which we now address as communitarian- liberty of participation in collective decision making. But the negative conception of liberty is not restricted in its uses to liberals9. There seems to be no necessary connection between holding to a negative view of liberty and espousing liberal principles, even if advocacy of the positive view has often gone with the opposition to liberalism. Hegel’s positive view is that individual freedom in the full sense involves having the opportunity for self –realisation. If powers or abilities are needed for self realisation to be effectively achivable, then having these resources must be considered part of freedom itself (see wellfare state as a freedomenhancing istitution). Hegel shares the view that positive liberty involves more than having the legal right to act (see: having the resources and opportunities to act). The political philosopher I. Berlin criticized this hegelian conception of liberty. Liberty and self realization is, for him, not one thing but two: a man may freely choose to sacrifice his chances of self realization for the sake of a goal that he values more highly. Furthermore, it is far from clear in any given case what self realization involves. Hayek rejects the hegelian concept of liberty because in the end results in the equation of liberty with the power to act – an equation inimical to the liberal ideal of equal freedom because power cannot by its nature be distributed equally. (positive freedom versus liberal values of diversity and equality). Hayek believes that

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all other liberal theorists of justice are making a basic mistake ,because they assume that there is no such a thing as society that can be held responsible for the overall distribution of power and resources. And society, Hayek10 argues, can not be ascribed as an agent, or a single entity with a will of its own. Freedom as autonomy has also been criticized by liberals such as Berlin because, supposedly, it involves mistaken bifurcation of the self in two parts, the higher (essential,rational) and the lower (empirical, desirious). Moreover, for Hayek, the idea of autonomy involves

the conditions of individual freedom

(obedience to

conventional and inherited norms of life) as threats (see propaganda, media manipulation, tyranny of fashion). Freedom has to do with each person’s ability to govern and fulfill oneself according to some kind of private happiness. In that way, the individualistic oriented voters are the best judges of their own interests.

Though most of the classical conceptions of freedom as autonomy

are closed

conceptions, it may be possible to construct (like Kant11 or some recent republicans like Philip Pettit) an account of freedom which does not have the feature of requiring access to a single body of objective moral truths or mere behaviors of an individual addressed as a segment, but instead demands the free exercise of the human ratio. Contemporary republicans are in agreement with Kant, in distinguishing between civil liberty and natural liberty. The second is not regarded as proper liberty and it is allowed to be restricted by the law. According to one contemporary interpreter of Kant, Henry Allison: “If self preservation or self-interest is the principle of my behavior, if it dictates my maxims, it is I –and not nature in me- that gives it this authority. At least this is the case under the presupposition that I am free in the transcendental sense” (H. Allison, 1990: 208). The significant thing for the republican

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view of freedom is not just the real absence of interference but the requirement of the security against the possibility of bad interference. Republicans have a different conception from the liberals about autonomy. According to republicans, the will is autonomous if it is not under the threat to be suppressed, while for the liberals, the actual non-suppression is enough for living in freedom. For republicans, to live under a regime of potential interference is already a suppression of civil rights because that makes people dependent upon the potential good will of the sovereign (Skinner,1998:85). According to the republican aspect, liberty can be lost and domination may be caused without actual interference. This is the scenario of living under the mercy and arbitrary will of a non-interfering master. But we must be meticulous in the choice of our words here. We must not think of the republican tradition as populist, and conceptualizing liberty as self rule as the only alternative to the liberal tradition of liberty as non interference. We must not, because in that way we sustain the very dichotomy that has rendered the republican ideal of liberty as non domination and mastery as invisible (Pettit, 1998:51-79). An answer to that confusion is that the republican thinkers in general regarded democratic participation as a safeguard of liberty, not as its defining core, but that emphasis led some individuals towards the full populist position that liberty consists in nothing more than democratic self- rule. The constituted law, that answers to people’s general interests and ideas represents a form of interference that does not compromise people’s liberty. As the law creates the authority that the rulers enjoy, so the law creates the freedom that citizens share as long as it is not the instrument of any group’s arbitrary will. Good law protects people from domination. The political authorities recognized by the law represent potential dominators, but the republican

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idea is that they will be suitably constrained under a proper constitution. Liberty in the proper sense is liberty by the laws, liberty in the sense of citizenship. The law makes a citizen free by making sure that no one has arbitrary power over him. For Kant, freedom in the negative sense is freedom from nature and not freedom from social constrains as it is usually meant by political liberalism. If we are free, we are not determined solely by our desires and needs. But freedom is more than the absence of determination. A will wholly undetermined would be random and chaotic, and it would not allow for responsibility. The only viable way to think of free will, Kant suggests, is to think of it as a will whose choices are determined by a law that is internal to its nature. That means, for Kant, that a rational will is free only when it acts on univesalizable rational maxims, which the will itself sets. So, we do not betray the spirit of Kant if we admit that in our postmodern political consumerism the egoistically oriented- interested voter tends to dispense with the moral element in democratic decision making. When the aforementioned mainstream marketing point of view reflects on the -contingent- needs and desires of the consumers, this view conceives them as ‘pathological’ inclined interests in the Kantian sense, which means that it considers them as the instrumentally aimed and egoistically oriented actions of the consumers/citizens. These interests are private in the sense that they cannot be justified in public, that they cannot be universally advocated, in sum that they are not interests of reason.

Freedom as non domination is not only freedom of actual interference but also freedom of the conditions of possibility of interference. That means that republican

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freedom is also transcendental freedom in the Kantian sense, freedom from all determining causes in the sensible world. The concept ‘freedom of the will’12 is not the direct determiner of action but the lawgiver to the maxims which will determine action. Law here does not determine behavior directly, but has to do with the real use –and not just a logical use- of reason. Here, the term ‘real use’ is referred to the establishment of an a priori synthetic proposition and the term ‘logical use’ is referred merely to the inferring of actions from a rule. That means that practical reason has nothing to do with the logical derivation of actions from given rules. Our actions are not just conditions in a well ordered geometrical space, but are oriented to the –unknown- future. For Kant, there is not a theoretical purpose but only a practical purpose that makes the application of the concepts beyond the limits of empirical knowledge necessary (Kant,1913:121). In man there is a power of self-determination which is independent of ‘nature’, from coercion through sensuous interests. This is called a transcendental idea of freedom, based on an interest of ‘pure reason’, in Kant’s understanding.

The sensuous

impulses, which are caused by the law of nature cannot give rise to an ethical ‘ought’ which entails a concept of free, and simultaneously rational, causation. Only the existence of an ‘ought’ can imply a free ‘I can’, a responsible decision to act morally. In that sense, Kant’s political philosophy is for the freedom of public speech and public opinion but against every ‘pathological’ interest. One agent dominates another only if he has a certain power over the other, and in particular if he has power of interference on an arbitrary basis (Pettit,1998:52). The interferer worsen the agent’s choice situation by reducing the range of options available, by altering the expected pay-offs assigned to these options, or by assuming control over the outcomes which will result from these options.

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This point of view can not even be thought in the context of Kotlerian theoretical constellation. Furthermore, the aforementioned mainstream marketer can not protect his client party from such political decisions. Interference is the attempt to worsen an agent’s situation, it is not always needed to be an illegal or immoral act. I interfere with you if I destroy your custom by deliberately undercutting your prices whenever you try to sell your wares, even if the market culture tolerates my behavior.

IV. CONCLUSIONS The aforementioned mainstream (Kotlerian type of) marketers seem to accept as a postulate that prescriptive knowledge of the market and political system as a whole is not possible. They hold as unacceptable to reckon on an -independent from the social actors- reality, toward which our interpretations finally converge, in the sense intended by a correspondence theory of truth. We give our consent when they do not leave intact the idea of reason which holds that, in the long run, exactly one true and complete theory would have to correspond to the objective world. But in our opinion, they tend to oversimplify the situation if they hold, in a relativistic way, a contextual theory of truth. Which means that they are of the opinion that every possible description of the political market only mirrors a particular construction of reality that inheres in one of various discursive worldviews. If they a priori accept the promotion of

every program of their

political clients (without to question the program’s

prescriptive/normative objectives, and not only it’s efficient profitability), they seem to support the view that there are no standards of a common accepted rationality which point beyond the local commitments of the various universes of discourse made by parties or voters.

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However, a crucial benefit for the politicians obtained from marketing theory is that not everything in the field of politics is political: there also social, economical, cultural factors that play their role, too (Kotler u.a.,1999:301). For a classical marketer like Kotler, similar procedures are followed both when we are engaged in the marketing of companies and the marketing of ideas or politics. Let’s take into account the following formation: in the first place we have the company or the party. Then we have the needs of the consumers or the voters, which is to be followed by the price of the product/voting and at the end of the process is the maximizing of the merit in the market/ the take over of power by the winning party. Though, there is a difference between the function of the selected party and the structure referred to the role of the government which exists independently of the particular party. The party never possesses the structure upon which it depends. The governing of a country is not just a merit in the market, a possession which can be used according to private goals and objectives. Government is not a possession but something like a ‘loan’. Furthermore, it is not the end of the process but just the start, the ‘innitio’, an initiative. Accordingly, every party program is not just a black box to be promoted. If marketers define the objectives of the political parties, and try to transcribe consumer needs directly in political terms, then political marketing will not be just a tool, a method to make smooth the progress of democracy, but a version of democracy itself. Is political will formation just the empirical sum of the consumer needs? No, and we think it is necessary for the marketers to accept an –constitutive for the political- impervious gap between the statistical of customers’ needs and the justification ‘development of marketing strategy’. The ‘unique selling proposition’ ought to be a pragmatic demand, justified by a rational public –not general, not infinite- deliberation.

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The possibility of reaching understanding about what is to be done in a concrete political situation, and to be able to exchange perspectives either as participant (voter or party) or as observer (marketer) of our object of inquiry are deduced from a concept of reason that gives voice to validity claims that are both context-dependent and transcendent. Reason in this sense, is both immanent (not to be found outside of concrete

political

discourses

and

institutions)

and

transcendent

(a

prescriptive/regulative idea that we use to justify the conduct of all activities and institutions). The political agenda of a party should not be a liberum arbitrium, a choice between already constituted objects or services. The party is not only dealing with already constituted choices –the supposed explicitly articulated needs of

‘stimulus and

response’ oriented, utilitarian consumers-, but in the first place, it has a part in the formation of the conditions of possibility of these objectified choices/opinions based on free will. If perceived as a consumer, the voter will never be a partner, a cooperator, and the party will not realize its role as a responsible representative of the citizens’ free will in the public sphere. According to the mainstream

Kotlerian philosophy of political marketing,

the

consumer/citizen has not only the power and potention to elect the governing party (potestas) but is addressed as a dominator who has the one and only authority over right and wrong, just and unjust (auctoritas) in the political field. By using ‘power’ here we mean having an opinion in accordance to the ethical law, and articulating it in public. But according to our view, the authority that garantees for the proposals of a just government belongs to the State and the party which –obedient but not submissive to the opinions of civil society- takes the responsibility to make just decisions. Which means that we can not avoid some decisionistic –not open to public

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deliberation- element in the party program, which addresses the vote of the consumers/supporters. Not everything in a party’s program ought to be transparent and easy to please the voters. The formatting of public opinion and political will differs from a –not private but irrelevant for the public rational deliberationindividual or group interest. Free to govern in a direct manner is not the citizen/consumer himself, but his elected representative to the extent that he is a just representative of the public will. According to our view, the citizen’s/consumer’s opinion ought to have an element of self restriction of his private interests, in order to enter the public sphere and open the space for the will of the Other, something that, if transcribed to the jargon of freudian psychoanalysis, would be called ‘sublimation’. As Hannah Arendt once said in Ueber die Revolution, the hidden wish of poor men is not to ‘each according to his needs’ but ‘to each according to his desire’. And as Zygmunt Bauman complements, we must not forget that “not just the ‘repressed’ but also the seduced are ‘poor’….”(Bauman, 1988). The will of the seduced is a dominated but uncommitted will.

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NOTES 1

There is an increasing expansion of the applications field concerning the concept of marketing (services marketing, green marketing, non-profit organizations marketing, social marketing e.t.c.). At this point, it worth’s making a clear distinction: social marketing is not to be confused with non profit organizations marketing. Non profit marketers are ultimately concerned with the success and survival of their organization, but social marketers with changes in the behavior of their target population. Here the consumer is assumed to be an active participant in the change process. 2

Daniel Miller in his book (1995) Acknowledging Consumption, London: Routledge, p.21-28, treats many of these assumptions as mere myths, in a wholly different –nonpolitical- context. We do not follow his line of argumentation here. For a supportive to consumption argumentation, see also Kotler Ph. u.a. (1999) Grundlagen des Marketing, Muenchen: Prentice Hall, p. 66-75.

3

Kotler insists that: “Candidates have to view their campaigns from the point of view of the outcomes for voters, constituencies and financial donors, the consumers in political campaigns”(Kotler & Kotler,1999: 3). And elsewhere: “Political marketing shares much in common with marketing in the business world. In business marketing, sellers dispatch goods, services, and communications (e.g. advertising) to the market, and in return, money (consumer purchases), information (consumer research), and customer loyalty are received. In campaigns, candidates dispatch promises, favors, policy preferences and personalities to a set of voters in exchange for their votes, voluntary efforts, or contributions”(ibid, p.6). 4 Kotler P. & Zaltman G. (1971) ‘ Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change’, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35, p. 9. Kotler’s continues: “The candidate should not automatically seek the most ideal marketing concept but rather should choose the one that puts him in the best position to offset the product concepts adopted by the other candidates. This is called the product positioning [….] Because the voter market is composed of many segments, the candidate should devise concepts that will influence a certain market share of each segment over his opponents’ concepts” (p. 15). 5

We take under consideration the section concerning the methodology of social sciences in the magnum opus of Max Weber Wirtschaft und Gesselschaft. 6 Julie Ozane & Jeff Murray in (1996) ‘Uniting Critical Theory and Public Policy to Create the Reflexively Defiant Consumer’ in R.P. Hill (ed) Marketing and Consumer Research in the Public Interest,London:Sage, p. 11, stresses the need to face “consumption not as a response to fundamental human needs or use values (utilities)…. but as a cultural code that expresses the logic of differentiation and creates a social structure.” 7 The major problem of utilitarianism in our view here, is that it consists of an ethical monologue, which does not represent a discursive will formation, divides reality into subjective and objective elements and ignores intersubjectivity. 8 Almost the whole argument of this chapter follows Immanuel Kant, (1913) ‘Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft’ in Natorp Paul (ed) Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Vol V, Berlin: Koenigliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and Philip Pettit (1998) Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 9 We are following a major contemporary liberal here, John Gray, with his book (1984) Liberalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, and in part Paul Kelly (2005) Liberalism,Cambridge:Polity Press. 10

This is the main argument of his book (1944) The Road to Serfdom, London:Routledge, which has

inspired M. Thatcher’s politics.

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11

Kant’s positive conception of freedom is not so demonstrably opposed to liberal values as the

hegelian view, because he sees freedom as autonomy or individual self determination in defense of toleration and limited government (not collective self determination but rational self government of the individual agent). 12

We must differentiate this notion ( die Wille) of the kantian practical philosophy from the ‘free’ spontaneous act to choose between some already constituted objects or choices. This second notion is close to the aristotelian ‘proairesis’ and the latin ‘liberum arbitrium’ and differs from ‘voluntas’. About these matters we recommend the brilliant work of Hannah Arendt (1989) Vom Leben des Geistes. Das Wollen,Muenchen: Piper. Also, the very act of willing (actus volendi) is called ‘volitio’ in opposition to ‘voluntas’, since the latter denotes a faculty of mind or a power or possibility of eliciting that act.

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REFERENCES - Allison, H. (1990) Kant’s theory of freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -Allison, L. (1990) The Utilitarian Response. The Contemporary Viability of

Utilitarian Political Philosophy, London: Sage. -Arendt, H. (1989) Vom Leben des Geistes. Das Wollen, Muenchen: Piper. -Bauman Z. (1988) Freedom, London: Open University Press. -Baines, P.R.(1999) ‘Voter Segmentation and Candidate Positioning’, in Bruce I. Newman (ed.) Handbook of Political Marketing, London: Sage, p.403-420. -Brown, S. (1995) Postmodern Marketing, London: Routledge. -Carson, D. et al. (2001) ‘Philosophy of Research’ in Qualitative Marketing Research, London: Sage, p.1-21. -Downs, A. (1957) An Economical Theory of Democracy, N. York:Harper & Row. -Evans, M. (1999) ‘Market segmentation’ in Mike Baker (ed) The Marketing Book,Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, p. 209-236. -Foxall, G.R. (1999) ‘Consumer decision making: process, involvement and style’ in Mike Baker (ed) The Marketing Book,Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, p.109-130. -Gaskell, G. & Bauer, M. (2000) ‘Towards Public Accountability: beyond Sampling, Reliability and Validity’, in Bauer, M. & Gaskell, G. (ed) Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound. A Practical Handbook, London; Sage, p.336- 350. -Gray, J. (1984) Liberalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. -Habermas, J. (1988) On the Logic of the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity.

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-Habermas, J. (1992) Faktizitaet und Geltung. Beitraege zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts unde des Demokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt:Suhrkamp. -Habermas, J. (1992b) Postmetaphysical Thinking, Cambridge: Polity. -Kant, I. (1913) ‘ Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft’ in

Natorp Paul (ed) Kants

Gesammelte Schriften, Vol V, Berlin: Koenigliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. -Kelly, P. (2005) Liberalism,Cambridge:Polity Press. -Kotler Ph. u.a. (1999) Grundlagen des Marketing, Muenchen: Prentice Hall.

-Kotler, Ph. & Kotler, N. (1999) ‘Political Marketing: Generating Effective Candidates, Campaigns, and Causes’ in Bruce I. Newman (ed.) Handbook of Political Marketing, London: Sage, p.3-18. - Kotler, Ph.(1988) Marketing Management, London: Prentice Hall. - Kotler Ph. and Levy S.L. (1969) ‘Broading the Concept of Marketing’, Journal of Marketing 33, January: 10-15. -Kotler, Ph.& Zaltman G. (1971) Social Marketing: An approach to planned social change, Journal of Marketing, 35, 3-12. -Miller, D. (1995) Acknowledging Consumption, London: Routledge. -Ozane, J. & Murray, J. (1996) ‘Uniting Critical Theory and Public Policy to Create the Reflexively Defiant Consumer’ in R.P. Hill (ed) Marketing and Consumer Research in the Public Interest,London:Sage,p. 3-15. -Pettit, Ph. (1998) Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. -Skinner, Q.(1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1. The Renaissance, Cambridge: Camb.Univ.Press. -Skinner, Q. (1998) Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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