steady bias in favour of public goods, which will be "overproduced" (at least by the standard of a Pareto-optimum satisfying the taste of a "representative man"-the useful fiction allowing us to pretend, without saying so, that everybody is like everybody else and all are unanimous).
Public goods by their intrinsic character and private goods by virtue of the progressive atrophy of money and markets, are supplied to people as a function of who they are and where they are situated (e.g. citizen, town dweller, mother, student, member of the hierarchy of a given "collective" such as a place of work, school, or housing development, a police officer or bureaucrat of a given rank, etc.), their place in life largely determining their access to goods. Somewhat sweepingly, we can say that they all get what the state considers appropriate to their existential situation. Putting it more directly, they get what they need. It is in this way that the state's rational interest ultimately converges upon the matching ideological tenet-which is a prediction and a command as well-of giving "to each according to his needs."
As ever larger numbers of people get things primarily as a function of their nominal life-situation and rank, rather than as a function of how well they do what they do, however, one systemic inconsistency is resolved at the cost of provoking another. There are always those who positively enjoy certain kinds of effort, say teaching or driving in traffic, and have the good luck of being entrusted with a classroom or a taxi. But why should the rest do what the plan of resource allocation calls for them to do, and why should they do it well when they would rather shirk and bludge? The shape the evolving social system is taking at this point encourages, or at least fails to deter, shirking. Moreover, where people work in groups, the group imposes shirking, a slow rhythm
of work or poor workmanship on its members on pain of ostracism, contempt or retaliation against the Streber ("striver" does not convey the ironic hostility of the German term). This phenomenon is an upside-down replica of the sanctions a group needing a high level of group effort will use against the free rider who will not exert himself.
If this inconsistency between the need for effort and the lack of any built-in reason for exerting oneself were not corrected, the state sitting on top of this social structure would be maximizing its potentially accessible ends no better than if it were pushing string.
The corrective move is to enforce the quid pro quo that goes with the provision of needs. If the state looks after people's subsistence, it is hardly justifiable for them to continue owning their labour, withholding it partly or wholly as the mood takes them, and devoting it, if at all, to jobs of their own choosing. In equity, they owe their capacity for effort to the state, so that it may fully be used for the common good.
With general obligations arising from people's status crowding out specific ad hoc contracts, the state ends up owning its subjects. Its task becomes more ambitious and more exacting. Its attention must now extend to matters that used to be non-political concerns settled within civil society (as well as to questions that cannot arise at all except in a totalitarian system), rather along the lines of the all-embracing concerns of the rational plantation-owner in the ante-bellum South:
No aspect of slave management was too trivial to be omitted from consideration or debate. Details of housing, diet, medical care, marriage, child-rearing, holidays, incentives and punishments, alternative methods of organising field labour, the duties of managerial personnel, and even the manner and air assumed by a planter in his relationship with his slaves...*76
Most of the implications of having to run the state as a large, complex and self-reliant plantation, are fairly evident. Some are depressingly topical. They need not be laboured, but only touched upon. There has to be a degree of direction of labour to where it is needed rather than where it wants to go. Educational opportunity has to be allocated to raise and train the people needed to fill the future roles and situations the state expects to create. Armed force, surveillance and repressive capacity have to be doubled and redoubled, as they have to cope not only with political disobedience, but also with sloth, waste and free riding. The state cannot tolerate strikes. Nor can it tolerate "exit," voting with one's feet; the frontier must be closed for keeping its property in, and perhaps secondarily also for keeping any alien, discordant influence spoiling the condition of its property out.
Is this social system at last well-rounded, efficient in operation, perfectly consistent? Is no part of it geared to rub against, let alone clash with the working of another, ultimately breaking up vital innards? Does it deliver the satisfactions of governing-tempting the state to sit back and contemplate its finished design, concerned only with the enjoyment and preservation of its place within it, willing history to stop?
If there is a plausible answer to the question, another and equally speculative book would be needed to argue it. At first glance, however, the prospects for any definitive settlement of
outstanding affairs between state and civil society look doubtful-perhaps reassuringly so. In the event the state's striving for self-fulfilment were successfully to issue in a well-managed totalitarianism, the human types (the addict no less than the allergic) which such a system is apt to breed, would before long quite likely frustrate and disappoint the state's expectations. That may indeed be its inescapable predicament, just as it is probably the inescapable predicament of civil society to be disappointed in the state.
5.3.25
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Anthony de Jasay, The State: NOTES, Chapters 1-3 Notes: Chapters 1-3 Notes: Chapters 4-5
Introduction
K. Marx, "The Jewish Question," Early Writings, 1975, pp.220, 226, 222.
As one of the founders of this school puts it, welfare economicsis about market failures, public choice theory is about government failures (James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, 1975, ch. 10). Note, however, the different tack adopted by certain public choice theorists, referred to in chapter 4, pp. 270-1, n. 38.
The term "political hedonist" was coined by the great LeoStrauss to denote Leviathan's willing subject.
Marx, "The Jewish Question," p. 219.
Chapter 1. The Capitalist State
Robert L. Carneiro, "A Theory of the Origin of the State," in J.
D. Jennings and E. A. Hoebel (eds), Readings in Anthropology,3rd edn, 1970.
6. A more succinct statement of the same point is found inMichael Taylor's excellent Anarchy and Cooperation, 1976, p. 130: "if preferences change as a result of the state itself, then it is not even clear what is meant by the desirability of the state." See also Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, 1973, pp. 123-4, for the related argument that since socialization adapts people to their environment, a heterogenous or pluralistic society is unlikely to turn homogenous and vice versa, although "only one generation has to suffer to create orthodoxy (as the absence of Albigensiens in France and Jews in Spain illustrates)."
However, Barry's use of the socialization argument seems to me somewhat lopsided. Must we exclude the possibility that the environment can generate not only positive, but also negative preferences for itself? Enough examples from second-generation socialist countries and even from third-generation Soviet Russia, attest to a virulent allergy to totalitarian ways and a yearning for diversity on the part of some unknown but perhaps not negligible part of the population. In the pluralistic West, there is a parallel yearning for more cohesion of purpose, for moral attitudes, an allergy to admass, to what Daniel Bell calls the "porno-pop culture" and the "psychedelic bazaar."
This is perhaps saying no more than that all societies tend to secrete corrosive elements (though in only some societies do the rulers suppress them). Yet it is not trivial to generalize the "endogenous preference" argument by admitting that social states may generate both likes and dislikes. Otherwise, the endogenous generation of preferences would ceaselessly cement any status quo and historical change would become even more mysterious, incomprehensible and random than it is anyway.
7
. In the luxuriant literature that has sprouted around John Rawls'sTheory of Justice, 1972, no objection appears to have been raised against the "original position" on this ground. The participants in the original position are devoid of all knowledge of their particular persons. They do not know whether they are representative white Anglo-Saxon men or representative Red Indian women, tenured philosophers or welfare recipients. They do not even know the age they live in (though this seems hard to reconcile with their knowledge of "political affairs and the principles of economics"). They are induced to seek a "cooperative solution" to their existence (in game-theory terms), which can be summarily interpreted as agreement on a social contract for a just state.
Failing agreement, in leaving the original position they would exit into the state of nature. They seek to avoid this outcome, because they know enough about themselves and the state to prefer it to the state of nature. They know their "life-plans" whose fulfilment depends on command over tangible and intangible "primary goods." They also know that the state, through the "advantages of social cooperation," entails a greater availability of primary goods than the state of nature. In technical language, the participants thus know that they are playing a "positive-sum game" in bargaining for a social contract (which is just in the sense, and only in the sense, that everybody is willing to stick to its terms).
This means that if the cooperative solution is reached, more primary goods can be distributed than if it is not.
The comparison of two bundles of primary goods, however, requires indexing, and the weights adopted for the index (for instance, the relative valuation of time off against real income), cannot help but reflect a logically prior preference for a type of society. In other words, people in the original position cannot say that the bundle of primary goods available in the state of nature (containing, for instance, much leisure) is smaller than that available under the state (containing, for instance, many tangible consumption goods) unless they already know that they prefer to live in civil society. Comparison of the state-of-nature bundle and the state bundle presupposes the very preference which it is employed and required to explain.
The state-of-nature bundle of primary goods contains more of the things which people living in the state of nature are used to and have learnt to appreciate. It is, for them, the bigger bundle. The converse is true of the bundle available under conditions of social cooperation. It is the bigger bundle for people who have learnt to like what it contains and not to mind its constraints. But can people in the original position really tell which bundle is bigger?
Pierre Clastres, La société contre l'état, 1974; Englishtranslation, Society against the State, 1977.
Ibid., ch. 11.
John Plamenatz, Man and Society, 1963, vol. II, pp. 280-1.See also his German Marxism and Russian Communism, 1954, ch. 2.
Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of PossessiveIndividualism, 1962, p. 49, for the view that without unconditional ownership, there can be no market for land. The same argument must hold for any other "means of production," including labour. (For Macpherson, no less than for Marx, the rot set in when the individual was acknowledged to own his labour and came to sell it rather than its products.) In Russia, service tenure of land meant that serfs ("souls") could not, prior to 1747, be sold off the land because they were needed to maintain the landlord's capacity to serve the state. The transferability of "souls" (hitherto regarded as managed by the landlord on behalf of the ultimate owner, the state) was a symptom of social progress, a sign that private property was taking root in Russia. The reader must bear in mind that the Russian nobility had no title to its lands prior to 1785 and that its service tenure was quite precarious. In view of the recent nature of private property as a social institution, the progress of capitalism in Russia in the short run-up to 1917 was most remarkable.
Gewerbefreiheit, the freedom to engage in a particular craft orcommerce, was introduced in Austria-Hungary in 1859 and in the various German states in the early 1860s. Prior to it, a cobbler needed a state licence to cobble and even a mercer needed one to sell thread. The licence was granted, or not, at the state's discretion, ostensibly on grounds of proficiency and good standing, in fact as a means to regulate competition. At all events, because of the licence, the goodwill of the business could not be easily negotiated.
One must not confuse injustice and cheating. An unjust manwill, if he can, hire you for wages you cannot be expected to work for. (What this may precisely mean is a large question. As I am not concerned with substantive questions of justice, happily I can
pass it by.) A cheat will not pay you the wages he said he would. The capitalist state must, of course, go after the cheat.
The answer consistent with the capitalist ideology whosecontours I am trying to sketch, might run like this: "Yes, a man should be left free to sell himself into slavery; there is no more competent judge than he of his reason for doing so." The state has nonetheless the duty to withhold legal protection from the institution of slavery, contributing to its removal as an option available under contractual freedom. Contracts under which slave-traders sell captured Africans to slave-owners obviously violate the Africans' rights. If plantation-bred third-generation slaves, for reasons which will always remain debatable but which are their reasons, do not seek freedom, we have to think again. Note that the British government first prohibited the slave trade without prohibiting slavery. The state must simply ensure that if he wants to walk off the plantation, he should not be prevented from doing so, i.e., it should not help enforce a contract under which the planter owns the slave. This is patently not an abolitionist position. It is doubtful whether it would have been an acceptable compromise to Calhoun and Daniel Webster.
This assumes that the arrangement requires unanimity. If itdoes not, and the arrangement continues to produce its benefits after the withdrawal of the person who failed to get his way in bargaining, the well-known free-rider problem arises and might destabilize the arrangement. If the non-cooperator benefits as well as the cooperators, an incentive is created for the latter to defect. As each successive cooperator becomes a free rider, ever fewer cooperators carry ever-more free riders and the incentive to defect keeps increasing. Various devices, some practicable in some situations and others in others, can be conceived to hinder this outcome and give the arrangement some stability. (Cf. pp. 23739.)
The reader will have spotted that while one type of statewould have an interest in proceeding as above, other types of state might want to do the precise opposite, to make their subjects appeal to them as frequently as possible; this may well coincide with the interest and the perhaps-unconscious wish of the legal profession. Laws breed lawyers who, in turn, breed laws.
K. Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, 1968, p.169.
18. Locke, seeking to oppose Hobbes and to present a morepalatable doctrine, saw that if people's natural right was to remain inviolate (i.e. if the state was not to trespass upon property which, in turn, was coextensive with liberty), sovereignty could not be absolute. It had to be limited to the upholding of natural right (Second Treatise, 1689, section 135). Subjection of the executive to a strong legislature was to safeguard this limit.
Two objections arise. First, the sovereignty of the legislature being absolute, we are back in the Hobbesian situation: the legislature is the monarch; why should it not violate natural rights? Quis custodiat ipsos custodes? Second, why should the executive choose to stay subjected to the legislature?
Locke was really arguing from the circumstances of a historical fluke: property-owners have managed to dethrone James II and put William III in his place, therefore the legislature has the upper hand over the executive. He was manifestly unaware that by giving the majority the right of rebellion, he did not provide them with the means for rebelling successfully in less exceptionally propitious historical circumstances than those of the Glorious Revolution (1688). It is fairl
y probable that had he been writing in the age of armoured vehicles, automatic weapons and proper telecommunications, he would have avoided the concept of a right to rebel altogether. Even within the technical civilization of his own day, he failed to allow for a state which is neither inept at keeping power nor insensible to its subjects' property.
I submit that "prisoners' "; is preferable to the more usual"prisoner's," for the dilemma is always that of two or more persons and its essence is the fatality of mutual betrayal. It cannot ever be a game of solitaire.
Hobbes's dilemma is more natural and less rigorous than theone set up under the conventions of formal game theory and it should, much of the time, have a cooperative solution. In a formal game, the player must make his move all the way, he is not allowed pauses, feints or tentative half-moves whose second half depends on the equally tentative reactions, tâtonnements of the other player. In the state of nature a player, before even making a half-move, may make speeches, brandish his weapon, cajole, etc. Depending on the other player's reaction or rather on his reading of it, he may walk away (if the other stands his ground), or strike a blow (either because the other looks about to strike first, or because he is looking the other way), or perhaps hear and consider an offer of Danegeld.
The State by Anthony de Jasay Page 35