The State by Anthony de Jasay

by Anthony de Jasay

  I find "personal endowments" better to use than the "naturalassets" employed among others by Rawls, because it begs no unintended question of how a person has come by his endowments, "naturally" or not-whether he was born with them, worked for them or just picked them up as he went. In my scheme, personal endowments differ from capital only in that they are not transferable; "finders are keepers" rules out questions about their deservedness and "provenance."

  Cf. Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, 1973, p. 159,for the suggestion that there are enough people who enjoy, or would enjoy, doing professional and managerial jobs to enable the pay of these jobs to be brought down to that of teachers and social workers.

  It is tempting to ascribe the early liberal respect for property tothe Lockean tradition in Anglo-American political thought, with its close identification of property and (political) liberty. In a different culture, a different explanation would have to be found: why did the Abbé de Sieyès, a liberal in the Dewey mould who did not care a fig about Locke, think that everything should be equal except property?

  It is a gross fallacy to suppose that the rule "it is publicopinion, or the majority of voters, who shall determine whether somebody is a Jew" is morally or rationally of a superior order to the apocryphal Hitler rule. Note, however, that "the majority of voters shall determine whether a contract is free, and whether distributive shares are just" is widely accepted by the general public.

  I am indebted to I. M. D. Little for the suggestion that "endlessiteration" is not the unavoidable fate of this social process. Convergence towards a state of rest is logically just as possible. Nor is there an a priori presumption that endless iteration is more likely to be the case. However, the historical experience of actual societies supports the hypothesis of endless iteration and does not support that of convergence towards an equilibrium where no new state commands, prohibitions and aids are forthcoming.

  The reader may think that between the above lines there lurksa dim shadow of some "social trade-off between justice and liberty" which, side by side with the other trade-offs between pairs of society's plural ends, is at the base of "pluralist" political theory. No such shadow is intended. As I fail to see how a society can be thought of as "choosing," I would object to a social trade-off intruding its woolly head here.

  F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960, p. 444, myitalics. The quotation repays study. First, we learn that what may have been true then is not true now that we control the state. Second, we are encouraged to embrace unintended effects, to make them into intended ones, positively to will second, third and nth rounds of state expansion and deliberately to push along the process of iteration engendered by the self-feeding feature of these effects. Used as we are to the contemporary state being overwhelmed by demands for "extending its functions" and "enlarging its operations" to help deserving interests, it may well strike us as funny that Joe Chamberlain saw a need for whetting people's appetites for the state's benefactions.

  The corollary could, for example, take this form: "Thestronger the blows it can deliver to smash the class enemy, the better the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat can fulfil its historic function." Needless to say, the liberal ideology is quite unready to accept a corollary of this sort.

  Benjamin R. Barber, "Robert Nozick and PhilosophicalReductionism," in M. Freeman and D. Robertson (eds), The Frontiers of Political Theory, 1980, p. 41.

  Chapter 3. Democratic Values

  I am alluding to S. M. Lipset's frequently quoted cri de coeur(Political Man, 1960, p. 403), that democracy is not a means to the good life, it is the good life.

  Notably by the state drafting potential muggers into the armyand leading them to pillage rich foreign towns in the manner of Bonaparte in 1796. The conflict arises later, in the follow-up: Bonaparte soon came to require, as he put it, "an annual revenue of 100,000 men" ("une rente de 100,000 hommes").

  Cooperative solutions are best understood as outcomes ofpositive-sum games with no losers. A game, however, may have losers as well as gainers and yet be considered to have a positive sum. In helping some by harming others, the state is supposed to be producing a positive, zero or negative sum. Such suppositions in strict logic imply that utilities are interpersonally comparable.

  It may be said, for instance, that robbing Peter to pay Paul is a positive-sum game. If we say this, we affirm that the marginal utility of money to Paul is higher. Instead of saying this, it is perhaps less exacting to assert that it was only just or fair to favour Paul; that he deserved it more; or that he was poorer. The last argument may be an appeal either to justice or to utility, and thus has, like fudge, the strength of shapelessness.

  Is the liberal intellectual better off in the state of nature, orunder state capitalism? If he just cannot tell, and if he is the sort who must nudge society, which way should he nudge it?

  A simple, undifferentiated community in this context means notonly that all its members are equal (before God, before the law, in talents, influence, wealth or other important dimensions in which equality is customarily measured), but that they are all about equally concerned by any of the issues which come up to be democratically decided on behalf of the community. A community of equals in the customary loose sense may have members of different occupations, sex and age groups. They will not be equally concerned by issues which impact occupations or sex or age groups differentially; most issues do.

  It is an interesting fact that German and French company lawmake important provision for "blocking minorities"

  (Sperrminorität, minorité de blocage), while British company law and American corporation law do not.

  Cf. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 2nd edn,1980, p. 19. For Schelling, the secret ballot protects the voter. This is undoubtedly true. However, it is also true that it transforms him into a bad risk. Corrupting, bribing him becomes a sheer gamble.

  Majority rule, with votes cast entirely according to interest,would inevitably produce some redistribution, hence some inequality in a society of equals. In a society of unequals, there would likewise always be a majority for redistribution. As Sen has remarked, a majority could be organized for redistribution even at the expense of the poor. "Pick the worst off person and take away half his share, throw away half of that, and then divide the remainder among the rest. We have just made a majority improvement." (Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, 1982, p. 163.) Competition, however, ensures that the majority has more attractive, richer redistributive alternatives to vote for,

  i.e. that redistribution will not normally be at the expense of thepoor. Given the choice, egalitarian redistribution would be preferred to the inegalitarian, because the potential pay-off is always greater in rich-to-poor than in poor-to-rich redistribution.

  Wiser heads would perhaps judge me foolhardy for advancing adefinition of liberalism, considering that "it is an intellectual compromise so extensive that it includes most of the guiding beliefs of modern Western opinion." (Kenneth R. Minogue, The Liberal Mind, 1963, p. viii, my italics.)

  Liberals do not espouse these goals today because they expectthe majority of people to espouse them tomorrow. Rather they expect the majority to do so because these goals are valuable.

  Either reason would be sufficient for boarding the bandwagon before it started rolling. The second reason, however, tells liberals that the bandwagon is morally worthy of being boarded.

  R. H. Tawney, Equality, 1931, p. 241, italics in text.

  Contrast the diagnosis of Tocqueville: "on semblait aimer laliberté, il se trouve qu'on ne faisait que haïr le maître." (C. A. H.

  C. de Tocqueville, L'ancien régime et la révolution, Gallimard,1967, p. 266. English translation, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, 1966.)

  Tawney, Equality, p. 242, my italics.

  In his classic Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1960), J. L.Talmon, having postulated that there is now a liberal and a totalitarian democracy but that at one time these two were on
e, is at a loss to locate the schism. He looks for it mainly in and around the French Revolution without claiming that he has found it. Perhaps it is impossible to find the schism; perhaps there never was one.

  Talmon seems implicitly to lean to this view in characterizing democracy as a fundamentally unstable political creed, a potential monster which must be firmly embedded in capitalism to be safe. He does not address the question of how this can be accomplished. As the reader who got this far will have gathered, it is part of my thesis that no such thing is possible. Democracy does not lend itself to be "embedded in capitalism." It tends to devour it.

  Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, 1956, p. 36.

  There must be an "out" for the man who likes it in boot camp;some prisoners, too, like the relief from responsibility and are said to prefer inside to out. To accommodate this, we can always have recourse to the dialectic understanding of freedom. The man under military discipline attains real freedom. Civil society governed by the state is a prerequisite of genuine freedom as opposed to the virtual freedom offered by the state of nature. Many people actually do use such arguments.

  Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1962, vol.II, pp. 124-5, my italics.

  Ibid., p. 124.

  For a different and much more complete formulation of thispoint, cf. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974, pp. 263-4.

  Other liberal arguments about redistribution are not positivebut normative; they deal with values, not facts; their recommendations are supported by appeals to social justice rather than social utility.

  M. Friedman and L. J. Savage, "The Utility Analysis ofChoices Involving Risk," in American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory, 1953, p. 88. First published in Journal of Political Economy, 56, 1948.

  J. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 1972, p. 156. The second andthird "features" invoked by Rawls to explain why his people do what they do mean, respectively, that a rise in his "index of primary goods" (which is stated to be co-variant with his income tout court) would not make the Rawls man significantly better off, and a fall would make him intolerably worse off.

  "Not even the chooser himself knows his preference until he isconfronted with an actual choice, and his understanding of his own preferences is to be doubted unless he is in a real choice situation." (Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets, 1977, p. 103.) If this stand looks a little too severe with regard to the simplest, tea-rather-than-coffee preference relation, it is no more than properly cautious when applied to whole modes of life.

  I say "other" futures markets to stress that financial marketsare ipso facto markets in futures, e.g. in future interest and dividends.

  Thus Robert Wolff in Understanding Rawls, 1977, p. 173: "Afull belly of beer and pizza requires very little money, but a cultivated, tasteful, elegant lifestyle, rationally managed in order to 'schedule activities so that various desires can be fulfilled without interference' costs a bundle."

  F. Y. Edgeworth, The Pure Theory of Taxation, 1897,reprinted in Edgeworth, Papers Relating to Political Economy, 1925, p. 114, my italics.

  Rawls's principles serve to help design "practices" or"institutions" which "determine (the) division of advantages" and underwrite "an agreement on the proper distributive shares" (A Theory of Justice, p. 4). (Page references in parentheses are all to this work.) He considers institutions on a high level of abstraction and generality, but it is clear, either from the context (esp. pp. 278-83) or from analysis of his arguments that the one institution that has "bite" and that can "underwrite" anything at all, is the state.

  There is no ground for supposing, at this stage, that all will.The position does not make for unanimity.

  I believe it is fair to interpret Rawls as meaning that the socialcontract is a unanimous (omnilateral) agreement on principles for a state which will, by overriding ordinary (bilateral) contracts whenever the principles so require, ensure a just distribution. The state of nature is a network of ordinary contracts giving rise to a "natural distribution" with no "institutions" (no state) for making it conform to a conception of justice. Aspects other than the distributive aspect of justice do not seem to enter into the distinction between "social contract" and "state of nature" in an important and explicit manner. A society equipped with a state concerned with the preservation of life and property only, would from the Rawlsian point of view still be a society in the state of nature. As he would be the first to admit, Rawls's social contract descends from Rousseau and not from Hobbes.

  Richard Miller, "Rawls and Marxism," in Norman Daniels(ed.), Reading Rawls, 1974, p. 215, argues that willing cooperation can be maintained "for centuries" by ideological institutions and the coercive apparatus of the state (paid for out of the workers' taxes!) without any social contract about principles of distributive justice.

  Interpreted in a Marxist framework, Rawls's better-endowed would agree on better-than-the-market terms for workers when they feared that the centuries referred to by Miller were drawing to their historically inevitable close, and reformist remedies were the order of the day. Although they would, I believe, be hastening their demise, and be suffering from "false consciousness" in choosing the means to their end, the argument is at least genuinely based on self-interest. Rawls's argument altogether fails to establish a basis in self-interest.

  Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 192-5.

  In fairness to Rawls, he provides an account (para. 9) of whatmoral philosophy is about, which (if correct) would make his stand right end up. His parallel with the theory of syntax is revealing. The way people speak is the source of knowledge about language. People's moral judgements are the source of substantive knowledge about justice. If it is democratic to like equality, this tells us something about justice-though nothing as crude is implied as that the principles of justice derive from opinion polls.

  "Strong" preference at that; to justify the inequality, even theleast advantaged must be better off than they would be under equality, and other groups, strata or classes (or whatever representative men represent) must be better off than the least advantaged, for otherwise there would be no inequalities to justify. (I take it that people always "prefer" to be "better off" and prefer only that.) The two formulations "inequalities must be to the advantage of every representative man" and "of the least advantaged representative man" respectively, become equivalent vis-à-vis equality as the alternative, but not vis-à-vis the general case of all possible distributions.

  This is easily seen by comparing how three representative men, A, B and C fare under three possible distributions, o, p and q; total income to be distributed increases with inequality, which is the case the "difference principle" was invented for:

  A 2 5 7 B 2 4 5 C 2

  6 12 15

  Everybody is better off in both p and q than in o (equality), but only A and B are better off in the more unequal q than in the less unequal p; the additional inequality of q is of no benefit to the least advantaged C, and he is merely indifferent between them (being neither envious nor altruistic). Hence q will be ruled out as violating at least one of the principles of justice, though it would yield three more primary goods at nobody's expense.

  This perverse result of the difference principle has been spotted early on by A. K. Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970, p. 138n. Rawls, ever conveniently, can rule it out by his strange assumption of "close-knitness," under which the improvement in the situation of A and B when placed in q rather than p, entails an improvement in the situation of C also (and vice versa). In other words, "close-knitness" asserts that p and q cannot both be possible, so we do not have to worry about which would be preferred and which is just.

  Should close-knitness fail, Rawls has recourse to a more complex "lexicographic" difference principle (p. 83), under which inequalities are permitted if they maximize the situation of the next-least-advantaged (in this example, of B) once that of the least advantaged (C) cannot be further improved.

  Close-knitness is very hard to
make sense of in a scheme where the difference principle requires that some people be made worse off so the least advantaged can be made better off (e.g. by redistribution of income). Taxing A makes C both better off (he gets a transfer payment) and worse off (as close-knitness requires).

  If this were so, it ought surely to be taken by nations opposedto Moscow as a potent foreign policy reason for not increasing aid, in order to hang all these teeming millions around Moscow's neck.

  I.M. D. Little, "Distributive Justice and the New InternationalOrder," in P. Oppenheimer (ed.), Issues in International Economics, 1981.

  Among such unintended effects, a fairly obvious one is thegrowth of the "black economy" and of voluntary unemployment. These, in turn, set off a self-reinforcing tendency to place an ever-weightier burden on the ever-shrinking "legal" and gainfully employed proportion of society which lets the "background institution" batten on it, instead of its battening on the "background institution."

  However, other less conspicuous unintended effects may be more powerful in the long run. I am chiefly thinking of the ill-understood ways in which the characteristics of a society change as the behaviour of one generation slowly adapts to the kind of "background institution" implanted by the preceding generation. The lagged sequence is, in principle, capable of bringing about a steady (or why not a variably paced, or accelerating?) degeneration both of society and of the nature of the state. It may, of course, be impossible ever to agree on objective criteria for telling that such degeneration is going on, let alone for judging its pace and the no doubt very involved functional relations controlling it.