If this all sounds rather far-fetched, then it may be worth considering how close it already is to reality.

String theory, Italian physicist Daniele Amati once said, is a piece of 21st century physics that fell by accident into the 20th century.

Similarly, a hugely radical but massively underestimated change in English social care policy holds lessons for how the future might look. It is, in effect, a new system of microadministration.

In social care, a system of personal budgets has been piloted which allows recipients to decide how the money allocated to help them is spent.  The money can be spent on help from family or friends, care professionals or on public or accredited private services.

Citizens can keep their existing services or opt to take as much or as little responsibility for the planning and management of their support as they wish to.

In running this system, three types of social care budgets have been created.

Individual budgets (IB) bring together a variety of funding streams to allow an individual a more joined-up package of support. These budgets can be a cash direct payment, the provision of services commissioned by the local authority or broker who manage the budget on an individual's behalf, or a combination of both. And money can be spent on any product or service that achieves the outcomes specified in the care plan.

Direct payments apply only to social care funds and are sums of money given directly to those entitled to publicly-run care services as an alternative to the cost of directly providing the services. The payments can be used to arrange most community care services that the user has been assessed as needing.

Personal budgets are an allocation of funding given to users after an assessment of their needs. These are generally restricted to social care funding.

A January 2008 Local Authority Circular from the UK Department of Health, entitled Transforming social care, concluded that change to the existing care systems was needed because "faced with long-term demographic change, the current system of social care delivery will need to fundamentally re-engineer and modernise to respond to the pressures on the system, the increased expectations placed upon it and tackle substantial culture change".

The Department of Health said its aim was personalisation so that "every person across the spectrum of need, [has] choice and control over the shape of his or her support, in the most appropriate setting".

This is the same analysis which this essay has sought to apply to the existing political system.

A review of the initial pilots by the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York concluded that there was little difference in the average costs of individual benefits and conventional social care support.

But mental health service users reported "significantly higher quality of life" when using individual budgets, and people with learning disabilities were more likely "to feel they had control over their daily lives".

While older people were less likely to report better outcomes, overall: "When pooling data across the sample as a whole, we found that the IB group were significantly more likely to report feeling in control of their daily lives, the support they accessed and how it was delivered."

So this policy offers two lessons.

Importantly, it indicates that active citizen engagement is both possible and delivers better outcomes. As representative democracy becomes less workable, a move towards this system could credibly offer the prospect of continued legitimacy.

And while this example is about the delivery of a policy, rather than making a choice between competing policies (a case study addressing this point is considered in Part III), it shows how it is possible to move towards a more personalised state.

In some ways, microgovernance could in fact be simpler to administer than personal social care budgets. While this social care model offers highly personalised services, the policy framework model would see many individuals opting into a single policy, making bureaucratic delivery easier.