Imagined institutions · LUC ARDEN
Designing a Society from the Beginning: The Libertalia Thought Experiment
What if the rules of a society were reconsidered from first principles? That is the imaginative experiment running through Luc Arden’s three-volume The Way to Liberty. Volume 3 focuses on the state and justice, exploring institutions and responsibilities within fiction rather than offering a real-world political programme.
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The Way to Liberty — Volume 3: State & JusticeA CLOSER LOOK AT THE BOOK
The institutions the reader will encounter
The novelistic framework includes questions of civic participation, the public good, taxation, accessible justice and the accountability of institutions. Its numbered proposals include the Citizen Share, which cannot be bought or sold in the imagined society, and the idea that the nation itself should not become a commodity.
Arden moves from broad principles to awkward details: what happens when a public institution fails? How can authority be held accountable without preventing institutions from functioning? How can a citizen challenge a decision made by a technologically powerful administration?
Taken together, the three volumes form an unusually wide-ranging fictional social thought experiment. Familiar concerns sit beside issues that rarely appear together in a single literary work—autonomous robots, digital identity, implants and the limits of AI authority. The interest lies not in claiming that every answer is correct or entirely unprecedented, but in the breadth and specificity of the questions.
These numbered proposals belong to Luc Arden’s fictional world. Readers can examine and challenge them in context, rather than mistaking them for legislation currently in force.
Selected numbered articles to explore
LIBERTALIA · LUC ARDEN
