The State by Anthony de Jasay

by Anthony de Jasay

  In his remarkable Anarchy and Cooperation, Taylor rightlyraises an eyebrow at Hobbes not applying to a state of nature composed of states, the analysis he applies to a state of nature composed of persons. This reproach looks particularly grave from an empiricist's point of view: for a state of nature composed of states is available in the real world, while a state of nature composed of persons is a theoretical construct, or at least it was that for Hobbes and his readers who had no inkling of what

  modern anthropologists were going to find in remote corners of the world.

  J-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi leshommes, 1755.

  I am borrowing this formulation from Raymond Boudon andFrançois Bourricaud, Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie, 1982,

  p. 477. In attributing the crucial role in the creation of the problemto myopia, I have been preceded by Kenneth M. Waltz, Man, the State and War, 1965, esp. p. 168. Myopia can make the deer worth less than the hare because it is further away; the second hunter's awareness of the first hunter's myopia can induce the former to run off after a hare even though it is the latter who is too shortsighted to see the deer!

  To be led, by a scrutiny of the core structure of mutuallyadvantageous cooperation, to the conclusion that Rousseau's social contract has an insufficient basis in rational self-interest, is certainly unexpected. The theory of the social contract has always served as the rational foundation for the state, making mystical-historical foundations both of the pre-Reformation and the romantic-Hegelian type redundant. Part II of Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State (1946) is entitled "The Struggle against Myth in the History of Political Theory," and deals with the Stoic heritage in political philosophy, culminating in contractarian theory. In it, he writes: "if we reduce the legal and social order to free individual acts, to a voluntary contractual submission of the governed, all mystery is gone. There is nothing less mysterious than a contract."

  However, a contract which it is impossible to derive from the perceived interest of the contracting parties is mysterious, and presumably mystical in its genesis.

  "If, in a group of people, some people act so as to harm myinterest, I may readily submit to coercion if this is the precondition of subjecting them to coercion" (W. J. Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State, 2nd edn, 1965, p. 182). This statement is presented as enabling the state's generally recognized functions to be logically derived from what its subjects want. It is not explained why the fact that some people act to harm my interest is sufficient to persuade me to submit to coercion (in order to submit them to it, too), regardless of the sort of harm they are doing to my interest, its gravity, eventual possibilities of a non-coercive defence, and regardless also of the gravity of the coercion I am submitting to, and all its consequences. Yet it is not hard to interpret history in a way which should make me prefer the harm people do to my interest, to the harm people organized into a state and capable of coercing me, can do to my interest.

  Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 1953, p. 169.

  Ibid., p. 169, note 5.

  Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation ch. 3; David M. Kreps, PaulMilgrom, John Roberts and Robert Wilson, "Rational Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoners' Dilemma," Journal of Economic Theory, 27, 1982; J. Smale, "The Prisoner's Dilemma and Dynamical Systems Associated to Non-Cooperative Games," Econometrica, 48, 1980. For a broader review of the problem, cf. Anatol Rapoport, "Prisoners' Dilemma-Recollections and Observations," in Anatol Rapoport (ed.), Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution, 1974, pp. 17-34. The important point seems to be that the players must not be stupid and totally without foresight. Fairly alert, worldly-wise players will generally cooperate in iterated prisoners' dilemmas. Cf. also Russell Hardin, Collective Action, 1982, p. 146.

  Prisoners' dilemma and free riding are not just different wordsdescribing the same structure of interaction. The former imposes on each rational prisoner one dominant strategy, i.e. to confess before the other can betray him. This alone secures the least bad of two alternative worst-case outcomes (maximin). The free-rider problem imposes no dominant strategy, maximin or other. It is not inherently inconsistent with a cooperative solution. Where would the free rider ride free if there were no cooperative transport service?

  To make it into a prisoners' dilemma, its structure must be tightened up. Let there be two passengers and a bus service where your fare buys you a lifetime pass. If one passenger rides free, the other is the sucker and must pay double fare. Each likes free riding best, riding the bus at single fare second best, walking third best and riding the bus at the double fare least. If both try to ride free, the bus service ceases. As they choose one course of action for a lifetime, and independently of one another, they will both choose to walk, i.e. with this structure, the free-rider problem will work as a (non-iterated) prisoners' dilemma and will be inherently inconsistent with the mutually preferred cooperative solution, i.e. a bus that runs.

  The special "tight" feature, it will be remarked, is that free riding by one makes the fare unacceptably high for the other, leading to cessation of the service. In the "loose," general form of the free-rider problem, there are many passengers and another free rider may not greatly increase the fare payable by the others, so that it may be rational for them to carry on paying. There is no perceptible penalty attaching to the role of the sucker.

  The allusions are to A. K. Sen's "Isolation, Assurance and theSocial Rate of Discount," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 81, 1967.

  Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr and Herbert Marcuse,A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 1965.

  For Hegel, man is free; he is subjected to the state; he is reallyfree when he is subjected to the state. The alternative way of completing the triad, of course, is that when he is subjected to the state, he is unfree; but few Hegelians would content themselves with such a simplistic version.

  A relatively readable exponent of this Ableitung is ElmarAltvater. Several other contributors to the Berlin journal Probleme des Klassenkampfes employ a rather steamy prose through which, however, much the same contractarian motif of capital's general interest (general will?) can be discerned. They are criticized (cf. Joachim Hirsch, Staatsapparat und Reproduktion des Kapitals, 1974) for failing to show why and how capital's "general will" comes in fact to be realized in the historical process. This failure, if it is one, assimilates them even more closely to Rousseau. The criticism basically reflects the mystical character of contractarianism.

  François Furet, Penser la révolution français, 1978. Bothquotations are from p. 41.

  This is a comfortable diagnosis which foreshadows, in itsDeus ex machina character, the more recent one ascribing the doings of the Soviet state for a quarter-century to the Cult of the Personality.

  J. H. Hexter, On Historians, 1979, pp. 218-26.

  Apart from agricultural colonization in the south, Russianpeasants also played a pioneer role, as principals, in industrial capitalism. Interestingly, many bonded serfs became successful entrepreneurs from the last third of the eighteenth century onwards, while remaining serfs. Cf. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 1974, pp. 213-15. If there is a pre-capitalist hindrance to playing the role of capitalist entrepreneur, being a serf must surely be it.

  F. Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and theState," in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, my italics.

  In "The Class Struggles in France," Political Writings, 1973,

  p. 71, Marx points unerringly at the risk the bourgeoisie runsunder elective democracy with a broad franchise. The latter "gives political power to the classes whose social slavery it is intended to perpetuate... [and] it deprives the bourgeoisie... of the political guarantees of [its social] power" (my italics). Once more, the young Marx recognizes reality, only to leave his brilliant insight unexploited in favour of his later, unsubtle identification of ruling class and state.

  V. I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution," Selected Works,1968, p. 271.

  In modern Marx
ist literature this has at least two alternativemeanings. One corresponds to the "structuralist" view (notably represented by N. Poulantzas). Vulgarized, this view would hold that the state can no more fail to serve the ruling class than rails can refuse to carry the train. The state is embedded in the "mode of production" and cannot help but play its structurally assigned role. The other view would have the state choose to serve the

  ruling class for some prudential reason, e.g. because it is good for the state that capitalism should be prosperous.

  Presumably the state could, if its interest demanded it, also choose not to serve the ruling class; this case, however, is not, or not explicitly, envisaged. Such neo-Marxist writers as Colletti, Laclau or Miliband, who have got past the mechanistic identification of state and ruling class (rejoining in this Marx, the young journalist), do not for all that allow for antagonism between the two, despite the rich array of possible reasons why the state, in pursuit of its interest should choose to turn against the ruling class (which, in Marxist theory, only "rules" because it "possesses" property, whereas the possession of arms is reserved for the state).

  J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, 1974,pp. 47-8.

  Cf. Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market, 1970 and DavidFriedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 1973.

  The political hedonist could be defined as a person who signsthe social contract because he holds this particular expectation. It is not unreasonable to argue that in no version of contractarian theory is the social contract signed by anybody for any other reason than the expectation of a favourable pleasure-pain balance, properly interpreted. If so, the fact of agreeing to the social contract is alone sufficient to define the political hedonist.

  This is known in the trade as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem,after its first rigorous statement by K. J. Arrow in Social Choice and Individual Values, 1951.

  Jon Elster, "Sour Grapes," in Amartya Sen and BernardWilliams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, 1982, has a

  penetrating discussion of what he calls adaptive and counter-adaptive preferences, and which bear some relation to what I call, in the present work, "addiction" and "allergy." He insists on adaptation and learning being distinct, notably in that the former is reversible (p. 226).

  It seems to me difficult to affirm that the formation of political preferences is reversible. It may or may not be, and the historical evidence can be read either way. My intuitive inclination would be to regard it as irreversible, both in its adaptive and counter-adaptive manifestations. The question is of obvious importance if one form of government can, so to speak, "spoil the people forever" for another form of government.

  Chapter 2. The Adversary State

  Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, 1946, p. 78.

  An application of this particular principle to the special case ofthe legitimacy of the use of force between states is Machiavelli's doctrine that war is legitimate when it is necessary, the state itself being the only possible judge of necessity. For illuminating remarks on the enforcement by states of the monopoly of war-making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, cf. Michael Howard, War in European History, 1976, pp. 23-4.

  It may be reasonable to suppose that there is someprobabilistic feedback from an independent judiciary yesterday to good government and hence the toleration of an independent judiciary today, a virtuous cycle running counter to the vicious circle, if there is one, of state power changing society and the changed society providing the state with yet more power over itself. Clearly, however, the virtuous cycle has little stability; if it

  is interrupted by bad government for whatever reason, the independence of the judiciary is soon taken care of.

  Gilbert Ryle's famous term for referring to the whole when wemean the part, as in "The Russian occupation forces raped your sister."

  The Oxford History of England, vol. V, Mary McKisack, TheFourteenth Century, 1959, p. 413.

  Donald V. Kurtz, "The Legitimation of Early Inchoate States,"in Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (eds), The Study of the State, 1981.

  Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent, 1982, p.24, his italics.

  Ibid., p. 26, my italics, cf. also pp. 215-6.

  Chadwick did not think that he and his fellow civil servantpioneers were empire-building, promoting their own pet policies, fulfilling their own (selfless) ends or working for the (selfish) interests of a self-serving bureaucracy. No doubt sincerely, he felt that they were neutrally administering the law and thus, but only thus, serving the public. He did not see that they were largely making the law. In fact, he considered attacking a civil servant to be like hitting a woman-the analogy presumably residing in their common defencelessness!

  Sir Ivor Jennings, Party Politics, 1962, vol. III, p. 412.

  The estimates are those of G. K. Fry in his The Growth ofGovernment, 1979, p. 2.

  Ibid., p. 107.

  Leszek Kolakowski, the philosopher and eminent student ofMarx's thought, holds that civil society cannot have structure without private ownership of the means of production (Encounter, Jan. 1981). If so, the democratic drive (noted by Tocqueville) to break down structure, bypass intermediaries and appeal to one-man-one-vote, and the socialist drive to abolish private ownership of capital, are more closely related than is apparent.

  Michael Oakeshott, "Political Education," in Peter Laslett(ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1956, p. 2.

  For example, it could be stipulated that no arrangement mustbe tinkered with unless doing so produced a greater gain in utility than the loss, if any, entailed in the act of tinkering, where utility would include the value that one may attach to the mere non-disturbance of an existing arrangement in addition to its utility in the customary, narrower sense.

  Frank Hahn, "On Some Difficulties of the UtilitarianEconomist," in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, 1982, pp. 195-8, has a particularly lucid exposition of this question. Cf. also P. J. Hammond, "Utilitarianism, Uncertainty and Information," in the same volume.

  It is only fair to remind the reader that Sir Karl Popper, in hisPoverty of Historicism, 2nd edn, 1960, approves of piecemeal (at least as opposed to large-scale) "social engineering" on the grounds that the piecemeal approach allows being "always on the look-out for the unavoidable unwanted consequences" (p. 67). Being on the look-out is certainly the proper attitude. It is

  effective when the consequences are easy to identify and quick to appear; it is not when they are not.

  William J. Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of theState, 2nd edn, 1965, p. 29.

  A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law andPublic Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, 1905.

  Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, p. 495,quoted by Lord Robbins, Politics and Economics, 1963, p. 15; my italics.

  A rigorous exposition of the types of interpersonalcomparisons required for various types of "social welfare functions" is provided by K. C. Basu, Revealed Preference of Governments, 1980, ch. 6.

  I have borrowed the title of this perfectly dispassionate book to head the present section because its unintentional black humour conveys so well what I take to be the irreducible core of the utilitarian solution. The only preference which is ever "revealed" in the maximization of social welfare is that of the maximizer, of the holder of sovereign power over society.

  A non-unanimous (e.g. majority) agreement to performinterpersonal utility comparisons in certain ways, would confer the same logical status upon the utility-maximizing quality of the public action selected on the basis of such comparison, as upon those directly selected, without benefit of any interpersonal comparisons, by any sort of non-unanimous agreement (vote, acclamation or random choice).

  In the Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, 1889,Green takes off from ground next door to the Manchester School, and lands on the Hegelian cloud. Property arises out of the conquest of nature by unequal individuals, hence it is rightly unequal. It is owed to society
because without the latter's guarantee it could not be possessed. All rights derive from the common good. There can be no property rights, nor any other rights, against the common good, against society. The general will recognizes the common good.

  The individual's ownership of property, then, must be contingent on the general will approving of his tenure, a result which is as much Jacobin as it is Hegelian. Green did not make this conclusion explicit. His successors increasingly do.

  "Owning" plainly excludes "possessing de facto butunlawfully," and "usurping."