ABSTRACT
We are at once desiring acting creatures and judging speaking beings. Although agency has discursive presuppositions and judgement practical ones, we can derive the formal criteriology for the good society from either alone.‡ Paradigmatically it is informed desire, experienced as an absence or lack, that drives praxis on. Now it is analytic to the concept of desire that we seek to absent constraints on it, i.e. to be autonomous or self-determining in some relevant respect or class of respects. In seeking to satisfy my desire, I am logically committed to the satisfaction of all dialectically similar desires. (This does not depend upon the judgement form, but is implicit in action as such.) Now theory/practice consistency in a praxis in a process entails that the act performed in or by it be practical, directionally progressive and universalizably accountable such that it is transfactually, concretely, actionably and transformatively grounded. These are the discursive presuppositions of praxis. I shall shortly come on to the practical presuppositions of discourse. In absenting a constraint I am thus committed to the removal of all dialectically similar constraints;
and thence to the removal of all (remediable) constraints as constraints, i.e. of constraints insofar as they are dialectically similar in being constraints; and thence to the realization of assertorically sensitized concretely singularized equality of autonomy. This is the basic form of the dialectic of agency.
