Social Market
You may be right but, as you say, the liberals and democrats would be flipped to absolutism and would therefore no longer be liberals and democrats. Perhaps they wouldn't put up such a big fight along the way--that's something I'd be happy to be wrong about.
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Good questions. One form of attention can readily convert into the other--that's what happened on the originary scene. "Disciplinarity" is meant to address this, but I think working through Gans's understandings of morality and aesthetics is helpful here. We would have to be able to tell the difference between making something or someone a center of attention so as to blame it for our mimetic rivalries, on the one hand, and making it a center of attention by subtracting the markers of those rivalries, on the other.
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I think the appeal would go in the other direction: sovereign n+1 is not getting something he needs from sovereign n, so he gives sovereign n a chance to revamp operations so as to provide it or, if necessary, goes over the his head and solicits "appeals" from the masons. If the work coming from under n is unsatisfactory from n+1's standpoint, it's likely that some of the more competent and conscientious workers under n are frustrated as well. (If n+1, or the enterprises he oversees, gets everything he needs, what is that mason complaining about in the first place?) I also don't see why the higher up sovereigns couldn't maintain a kind of entrepreneurial fund, which takes "grant applications" from within enterprises at various levels. Those who get the grants could be left to try and make it on their own. It's always good to have some people tinkering around outside of the established channels.
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Right--someone is simply in charge. And people are known quantities. The whole game bureaucracies have to play, of looking at each application "blind," which means the applicant must know the right coded language to use, can all be set aside. This guy applying for the grant is known for having done various work and made various contributions before. It might be harder for some genius to come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing idea, but how often does that really happen anyway?