All social organization is administered and, ultimately, administered by the state (government). In the vast majority of cases, this is accepted as a commonplace. What interests me is why some such acts of administration are seen as impositions.
Liberalism has its own account of why some forms of administration are impositions: some issues are a matter of ‘personal conscience‘ and are not the state’s business. In these matters, if the state ‘interferes’, it imposes itself. This is completely wrongheaded.
Liberalism’s ’personal conscience’ is the result of social oraganization and as such is administered. Moreover, it belongs to those things the administration of which we take as a commonplace. Nobody much cares that the content of their ‘conscience’ comes from without.
The ‘pluralism’ that liberalism seeks to protect is manufactured by liberalism and nobody among the plurality (except perhaps for some post-structuralists) is much concerned with pluralism being ‘imposed’ upon them.
What then is the source of the idea of the state ‘imposing‘ itself? The nature of social organization means that the notion of ‘state imposition‘ must be maintained by the state itself. That is, the idea that we’re ’imposed upon’ is part of the identity the state wants for us.
The liberal state, like all self-limiting states, must produce a certain kind of subject who will be capable of administering it. It needs to reproduce itself. Maintaining certain relationships as coercive in order to produce the individualized subject is part of this.
The point of, say, the labor relationship is not ’exploitation’ as such, but alienation. The coercive nature of labor relations and the nature of poverty (both of which are maintained by the state) are essential to generating the self-image of the ’sovereign individual’.
The purpose of much of the indirection of the exercise of political power in liberal society is to maintain the individual subject; to make us think the world must be a certain way, and therefore to produce a particular subject capable of perpetuating the state.
This is not a new feature of the liberal state. What's new is the particular kind of subject it seeks to create - the ’sovereign individual’ - and so the pattern of relationships it must enforce. Prior states would've used indirection to maintain, e.g., the aristocratic subject.
Ultimately, this sort of manufacture of identity serves the purpose of self-limitation. Without it, we would have a state that reproduces itself technically, rather than by the manufacture of a constraining identity, and its technological development would be open-ended.
Thus, all sense of being ’imposed upon’ in society is artificial and serves to perpetuate a specific identity and hence advances the state's project of self-limitation. Liberalism is a particularly pernicious version created in response to the ’opening of the cosmos’.
