The doctrinal impotence of the capitalist interest is nicely illustrated by the course of labour law. English law regarding trade unions went round full circle between 1834 and 1906, from forbidding combinations to restrain competition in both the supply of and the demand for labour, to ultimately legalizing combinations to restrain supply and also exempting them from having to keep contracts when it was inconvenient to do so. Much the same effect favourable to labour could have been achieved in less provocative ways. Violating the principle of equality before the law between capital and labour was, one might have thought, asking for it. Yet there was no worth-while doctrinal capitalist counter-attack, no appeal to first principles, nor to the as-yet uncontested verities of political economy.
The English state, twice almost disarmed vis-à-vis civil society in 1641 and 1688, regained its predominance over private interest on the back of social reform, accomplishing its partisan anti-capitalist turn tentatively and gradually over nearly a century. In Continental Europe, civil society never disarmed the state which remained powerful, in governing apparatus and repressive capacity, even where it was standing on clay feet. The anticapitalist turn as a means of building a base of consent, came rather later in these countries, but it was accomplished more rapidly. The watershed years when capitalism became the political underdog (though very much the top dog financially, becoming acceptable socially and still capable, in the case of such eminences as the Pereira brothers, the James de Rothschilds, the Bleichröders or the J. P. Morgans, to bend back the state to serve capitalist purposes), were either side of 1859 in France, 1862 in the North German Federation and 1900 in the USA.
It was roughly in 1859 that Napoleon III, in his own eyes a man of the left, began really to rely on the Assembly and to practise the rudiments of parliamentary democracy, and of a particular sort at that: for Guizot and Odilon Barrot were gone from the scene, to be replaced by such men of the radical left as Jules Favre, Jules Ferry and Gambetta, with only the "despicable Thiers" representing continuity of an unlovely kind with the bourgeois monarchy. Striking became legal in 1864 and a proper charter for labour unions, with fringe measures ranging from workers' pensions to price control on bread, was legislated in 1867, Napoleon III taking a sympathetic interest in the encouragement of trade unions. Perhaps coincidentally with his shift toward the politics of consent, he showed a fine disregard for the capitalist interest in throwing open the French iron and steel, engineering and textile industries to the more efficient English and Belgian competition. Sharing the widespread illusion that a nation of shopkeepers will pay for a commercial good turn with such political support as he needed for his transalpine ambitions, in late 1859 he sent Chevalier, an ex-professor of economics with the free-trade convictions that such a calling tends to engender, to Cobden in London; it took the two kindred spirits an hour to negotiate a whole new free-trader tariff, to the furious surprise both of the Minister of Finance and the manufacturers concerned. Though perhaps of no more than anecdotal interest (anyone with a little acquaintance with tariff negotiations can at least smile at the story), the incident is characteristic of the respect the French state had, then as ever, for the interests of its industrialists.
2.2.10 Another facet of the adversary state which started to matter under the Second Empire and became very important in the Third Republic, was the autonomous evolution of the bureaucracy. The French professional civil service, built by the labours of Colbert, Louvois, Machault, Maupeou and, in unbroken continuity, by Napoleon, was at first closely entwined with property and enterprise, both because of the negotiability and (initially) relatively high capital value of offices, and of the dual role most of the civil service dynasties played in the royal administration and in the chief capitalist trades of the time, army contracting and tax farming. At the fall of the July Monarchy, in 1848, a regime which was less ambitious than most to dominate society, the civil service was more powerful than ever and, of course, more numerous (Marx noted, as a significant element in his characterization of the Second Empire, that there were 500,000 bureaucrats smothering civil society in addition to 500,000 soldiers), but no longer had much of a proprietorial stake in French industry and little property in general. The estrangement between capital and the bureaucracy was further accentuated in the Third Republic. While the top layer of the civil service was certainly upper-class (to Gambetta's indignation) and continued to be dynastic, such property as it had was mainly in rentes, and it had no understanding of, nor common interest with, entrepreneurial capitalism.
Moreover, when in 1906 the emoluments of a député were nearly doubled, the profession of legislator became overnight quite attractive as a living. Till then, whatever was the social and economic background of the civil service, at least on the legislative side, capital, industry and land were strongly represented. From then onward, however, the republic of notables rapidly became, in Thibaudet's oft-cited phrase, a "republic of teachers" which, to judge by the occupational backgrounds of successive French legislatures, it has remained ever since.
Unlike France, Germany did not have its "bourgeois" revolution (not that it is altogether evident how its history would have been different if it had). Nor did it have its July Monarchy, cheering on the German bourgeoisie to enrich themselves, though (despite their late start around the mid-century) they did not fail to do so for all that. Under the romantic anti-capitalism of Frederick William IV (i.e. till 1858), the Prussian state, while resisting the national liberal ideas imported from the Rhineland, nonetheless cleared up much of the administrative clutter and pointless interference which used to encumber enterprise. This relative economic liberalism was an (albeit minor) enabling cause of the spate of new enterprise which characterized the 1850s. When Bismarck gained the highest office in 1862, the National Liberals had definitely to give up any serious hope of shaping state policy. If it is not too crude to regard them as the party of capital, one can say that their subsequent conduct really signified the acceptance by the capitalist interest of a politically quite subordinate role.
2.2.13 Both directly, and indirectly by harnessing William I's obsession with the army, Bismarck ensured that absolute priority be given to all-German and foreign affairs, almost regardless of the consequent tax burden on industry. The schematic explanation of his freedom of manoeuvre is, of course, his ably managed truce, at times amounting to a downright alliance, with the mainstream of the Social Democrats. A simple, but not for that reason wrong, way to grasp Bismarck's policy is that his remarkably advanced social security and welfare legislation was the price he compelled German capital to pay, to have the domestic calm and consent he needed for the effective pursuit of his priority objectives in foreign policy. The latter was of mixed benefit to German industry and finance. Perhaps more accurately, one might judge that German manufacturing, technically and commercially riding the crest of the wave, could have derived some benefit from almost any feasible foreign policy of passable competence and continuity, whether active or passive, at least as long as it produced the German customs union. It did not really need more to prosper. Achieving much more than that in foreign policy probably cost it more than it was worth.
2.2.14 Bismarck's fundamental bargain with a vital part of the socialist left and the fiscal exigencies of his foreign policy, however, were not the sole causes of the Prussian state, and later the Second Reich, turning a stern mien to capital. Another reason was the intellectual grip which Kathedersozialismus ("socialism of the professorial chair" and "teachers' socialism" seem equally inadequate renderings)-took upon some of the most ambitious and devoted elements in the civil service, both through formal education and through the influence of the research done within the Verein für Sozialpolitik. If this Verein was more potent, and won its influence sooner, than the Fabians in Britain, its greater initial impact on legislation and regulation was in large part due to the excellence and policy-making latitude of the German civil service. It had a strong tradition, going back to Stein, of not only serving but o
f actually defining, interpreting the good of the state, and no false modesty about "merely executing" the will of its political masters. If we remember, in addition, that it tended to have little or no fortune and its family roots were mainly in the austere East while those of the representative German capitalist were more to the West or North, we have enough elements for appreciating the Reich's adversary relationship to capital in the era of its greatest organizational and technical success. The breach with Russia, William II's febrile foreign policy and the collision with France and England in 1914 were the culmination of a half-century of policy choices, rational and competently executed at the outset and progressively less so as time went by, in which the narrower interests of German capital were unhesitatingly sacrificed to the state's own conception of the global national good. This was accomplished with the support of the bulk of social democracy and the labour union movement.
The reason, if ever there is a good reason for trying precisely to date historical turnings, for calling Theodore Roosevelt's accession to the Presidency the start of the adversary relation between American government and capital, is mainly that any earlier starting date would include the McKinley years at the White House, about the most obvious antithesis to the thesis I am putting forward. The McKinley-William Jennings Bryan contest was the last time that money alone, against all odds, could get its candidate elected. The closing years of the nineteenth century saw the executive power of the state depending for support, in a way never since seen, on the capitalist interest rather than on the popular appeal of its conduct of affairs. The political colour of Theodore Roosevelt's two terms is all the more of a contrast. His anti-trust, anti-railroad and anti-utility accomplishment is as wide by past standards as it is puny by those of most of his successors. It may be true that his bark was more fierce than his bite, that his true element was demagogy rather than unostentatious achievement, and that his administration in fact represented less of a populist and pro-union tilt, less of a stealing of the Democrats' clothes, than one would judge from its bluster. However, his bark was in the short run perhaps as effective as any bite could have been, to put distance between himself and big business in the eye of the public and to mobilize national support for his purposes.
It is probably fair to say that there has never been an American administration which did not almost exclusively rely on consent to get itself obeyed, unlike some British and Continental European regimes which did not rely on it or did so only a little. Lincoln's
administration, having to take on in civil war the minority, might not otherwise have retained the consent of the majority (which is precisely Acton's point about the potentially tragic implications of democracy in a non-homogeneous society). Consent was either votes or clout. Champions of the people tended to rely directly on votes. Others relied in the first place on the clout of those concentrations of private power, be they men or organizations, which stand between the state and the amorphous mass of the citizenry and provide society with structure.*59 The alternance between the two types of organizing consent, the direct and the indirect, used to play much the same role in American political life as did (and do) the alternance of ideologically marked tendencies, conservative and progressive, Christian and lay, monarchist and republican parties in other societies. With Theodore Roosevelt, alternance in this sense ended in the USA; two parties subsist but both have become champions of the people. If one is less of an adversary of capital and readier to make use of sheer clout than the other, the difference is but of slight degree, especially as clout is no longer well correlated with capital.
2.2.17 The American example, where material inequalities were for a long period more admired than resented and rich-to-poor and rich-to-middle-class redistribution has only recently become the central tool of consent-building, lends itself poorly to clarifying the relation of consent by vote to consent by clout. Take instead any "country" which is perfectly repressive to begin with, say a concentration camp. For its successful functioning according to the purposes of its commandant, the allegiance or support of its cowed and emaciated inmates is immaterial, no matter how numerous they are; that of the less numerous band of well-fed trusties is relatively more important; and that of the handful of well-armed guards is essential. Even if he could, the camp commandant would be ill-advised to try and win over the inmates by promising to give them the guards' rations. The subset of camp society containing the commandant and the guards is essentially a pure electoral democracy in that, with all the guards about equally well armed, the commandant must find the support of a majority of them, and it is the headcount that matters (even if there is no formal voting). If a larger subset including the trusties were carved out, the greater clout of the guards would have to be used to sway the "vote" of the trusties and secure the consent of their majority to the commandant's way of running the camp. The implicit threat of throwing dissenters to the inmates would normally suffice. If, for some reason, the democratic subset were to be further enlarged and the rule of consent extended to the inmates, they would have to be divided and the support of one part obtained (if that was at all possible) by promising them the rations of another part. The less the clout of the guards and trusties or the less use one could make of it, the more the whole camp would approximate pure electoral democracy giving consent by headcount, with the majority getting the minority's rations.
It seems to be a strange confusion, and one suffered by many states no less than by their subjects, to want to have the state rely on consent and to be everybody's state, standing above classes and group interests, beholden to no group and impartially realizing its conception of society's greatest good.
When the state takes sides, not only is it building the required base of consent. Perhaps unconsciously and unwittingly, it is also "learning by doing." With every measure it takes to favour a subject or group of subjects, to modify the system of rewards and obligations which derives from past custom or voluntary contracts, to change social and economic arrangements that would
prevail but for its intervention, it acquires more knowledge of its subjects' affairs, a better and bigger administrative apparatus and, hence, an added capacity both to imagine and to carry out further measures. Two channels of unanticipated causation are dug in this manner, and end by forming a self-sustaining circuit. One leads from intervention to capacity for intervention, as physical labour leads to bigger muscle. The other leads from a larger state apparatus to an altered balance of interests in society, tilted in favour of more state intervention; for by self-aggrandizement the state increases the activist constituency.
These channels run within the state apparatus and not between it and civil society. Another and probably more potent circuit runs from state benefactions to a condition of dependence or addiction in civil society, calling for further benefactions. It is easier to grasp the mechanics of such circuits than to have confidence in their stability, in the capacity of built-in regulators ultimately to prevent them from getting out of control.
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
Advanced Search 2. The Adversary StateTinker's Licence
Utilitarianism favours activist government mainly because it is constructed to ignore a whole class of reasons for hastening slowly.
Judging things on their merits with an open mind fatefully attracts open minds.
It would be unhistorical and worse to imply that the state will in general just up and do whatever most efficiently ensures its political survival and the fulfilment of such other ends as it may have. On the contrary, it is, time and again, liable to choose relatively inefficient means to its ends, and even retard or hinder their attainment, for its feasible choices are to some extent pre-set for it by the Zeitgeist, the ethos of time and place. It cannot, without endangering the often delicate compound of repression, consent and legitimacy which it is aiming at worst to maintain and at best to strengthen, resort to actions for which it has, as it were, no ideological licence.
At the same time, in one of the chicken-and-egg sequences which seem to govern much of social life, ideology will sooner or later providentially issue the licence for precisely the sort of action which it is efficient for the state to undertake. Thus when we
speak of "an idea whose time has come" (the development of the "base" producing the corresponding "dominant ideology"), we must also bear in mind the equally interesting inverted version,
i.e. that the time has come because the idea has called it forth (the"superstructure" bringing about a corresponding development of the "base"). This preliminary is offered to help put in perspective the reciprocal relations of the adversary state and utilitarianism.
It is fairly conventional practice to discern three stages in the evolution of the state's functions (though they are better regarded as heuristic rather than as historical, real-time stages). In the first, a vaguely Hobbesian state resolves a basic prisoners' dilemma by enforcing respect for life and property, such enforcement being taken to include protection against a foreign state also. When political theory is handled as if it were economics, such a first-stage state can be assimilated to the single-product monopolistic firm making one public good, e.g. "order." The second or Benthamite sort of state would then resemble a multi-product firm which provides a diversified range of goods or services whose profitable free-enterprise production runs up against some prisoners' dilemma or at least a "free-rider" problem, and consequently requires coercion to cover its costs. (Voluntary arrangements lacking coercion would by assumption produce either distant substitutes, or different, possibly smaller, quantities of close substitutes of such goods.) What additional goods or services the state shall provide, or what additional functions it should undertake, is to be decided on their merits. In the third stage of the evolution of its functions, the state will undertake to produce the range of public goods thus selected and social justice as well.
The State by Anthony de Jasay Page 11