“The invisible hand,” a term coined by Adam Smith, has come to describe the social benefits that accrue when individuals are empowered to pursue their own self-interests and specialize economically. By allowing individuals to work to their own ends, the whole of society grows richer, as if guided by an invisible hand. That “as if” is crucial. Smith’s detractors often mischaracterize the invisible hand, insinuating that supporters of the free market think there is something guiding coordination, but the whole point is that the coordination simply emerges.
Olson explains how the stationary-bandit model is an improvement over what came before. It’s really just math. A stationary bandit has a longer time horizon. He realizes that taking 100 percent of a village’s wealth will make him richer right now. But what will he get next year? Nothing. If he takes half this year, he knows there will be something to take next year. He also realizes that if he lets the villagers plant more crops, there will be more for him to tax in the years ahead. This gives the stationary bandit an incentive not just to fend off the roving bandits but to make investments in public goods other than security. He might build roads or lend resources for the digging of new irrigation canals or the clearing of forests to plow new fields. How much he taxes becomes a simple question of return on investment. “The starting point” for Olson’s theory of development “is that no society can work satisfactorily if it does not have a peaceful order and usually other public goods as well.”6 The stationary bandit is the first real provider of a peaceful order, without which the invisible hand can never appear.
Today, the state has an important role in all of this. The state regulates the use of violence and protects the right of the citizens to use their property. Absent the confidence that the police will stop people from plundering the bakeries, the bakers will not bake bread. The stationary bandit was the first entity to serve this function.
Of course, this does not mean that the stationary bandit is a good person. Odds are strong that, more often than not, he was awful from the perspective of the very high moral perch we sit on today and probably from the view of some much lower perches as well (and his hand in the economy was almost surely far from invisible). Thus the classic libertarian indictment of government as a criminal enterprise—most famously stated by Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy, the State (1935)—has some merit.7
The Mafia works on the same principle of long-term exploitation. They sell protection to businesses, both legal and illegal, in return for “a piece of the action.” The don understands that if they rob their “clients” of everything they have all at once, their clients will go out of business.8
But what Nock and others failed to appreciate is that there are social benefits to the state’s monopoly on violence. For starters, we would not have property rights without the state. Prior to the order and security of the stationary bandit, if a stronger man or army took what was yours, it became his or theirs. Possession is ten-tenths of the law under the laws of nature: The weaker lion cannot sue when the stronger one claims the larger share of the kill.9
Because a stationary bandit has an interest in letting his subjects get richer—his slice of the pie gets bigger when the whole pie gets bigger—he must protect the lives and property of his “clients” if they are to keep working for him. He may say everything in his territory belongs to him, and that is true in the sense that, if he wants to take it, he can. But he understands that, in practice, people need a high level of confidence that they will be left a “fair” share of what they make or grow.
To accomplish this in a large society, where the ruler cannot keep a watchful eye on everything under his dominion, requires clearly stated rules. These rules begin as arbitrary edicts from the boss or king, but in short order they become binding—and the introduction of writing gave these rules a kind of universal and fearful authority and, eventually, sacredness. The king always has the right to change his mind, of course. But when petitioners come to court to settle a disagreement, the peasant who most persuasively claims he was following the recognized rules is the one most likely to win. If the king sides with the rule breaker—as he no doubt often did—there’s a social and political cost for the king in the sense that he is sowing doubt and instability.
This dynamic probably defined the earliest days of the agricultural revolution, when the first bands and tribes settled down to grow crops. From there, it was almost inevitable that the state as we understand it today would emerge.
How, exactly, did we go from the stationary bandit to the state?
There’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem here. A self-starting state, one that just springs up from a voluntary collaboration of individuals and institutions—what scholars call a “pristine state”—is for anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists a bit like the lost city of Atlantis. They think it probably existed. They just haven’t found it. What they have found are numerous examples of “competitive states.”10 These are states that come into existence when loosely associated or less developed neighboring societies recognize the need to combat already existing states. Since the state-governed societies are usually larger, more organized, and more advanced, they tend to prey successfully on non-state societies, repeating the same cycle of the stationary bandit versus the roving bandit on a larger scale. In response, the prey organize themselves to defend against the predators. (Game of Thrones fans might think of Lord Stark calling in his bannermen.) This almost reflexive self-organization into a kind of permanent battle formation happens again and again in human history. As Charles Tilly famously said, “War made the state and the state made war.”11
This is not to say that there was no first state. Surely someplace deserves that title. But the important point is that states evolved—emerged, really—from what came before them as a problem-solving response to external aggression. (One of the only ways we could get anything like a real world government—at least in our lifetimes—would be if our planet faced an invasion from outer space. It might not happen, but you can see how it might.)
When the conditions are right, we form states. War—i.e., an external threat—is clearly one of those conditions. But an equally important one is population size. When societies are provided with security and order, a number of secondary patterns emerge. Labor becomes more specialized, which produces more wealth. Another outgrowth of large populations and state-provided security is that property rights become ever more secure, at least for the wealthy holders of property. Property holding is itself a kind of division of labor. When you own land, you can extract more productivity or wealth from it. More wealth and security from external foes means more population, and more population means more wealth and security. It’s a virtuous cycle. And when societies get bigger, they need even more formal rules to govern them. “Growth will simply not occur unless the existing economic organization is efficient,” write economists Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas.12 And this “entails the establishment of institutional arrangements and property rights.”13
The agricultural revolution made mass societies possible, and mass societies could only be maintained through force, both physical and psychological. Hunter-gatherer tribes were largely voluntary associations insofar as the group was held together by strong blood ties and mutual dependence. You could leave if you wanted, and some families did when the band got too large.
The philosopher Ernest Gellner argues that, in a state of nature, mankind lived in universal propertylessness. “Hunter/gatherers are defined by the fact that they possess little or no means for producing, accumulating and storing wealth. They are dependent on what they find or kill. Their societies are small, and are characterized by a low degree of division of labour.” However, Gellner notes: “Agrarian societies produce food, store it, and acquire other forms of storable wealth.”14 That storable wealth not only creates classes of people; it also serves as a means of social control. Stored food is an insurance plan against
crop failures and other calamities.
But storable wealth isn’t just food. It also includes the tools for producing more food, and the weapons necessary to protect—or seize—it. Money as a storehouse of value is a relatively recent invention. Before currency, a man was wealthy if he owned livestock, shovels, swords, and slaves, among other means of production. But before the agricultural revolution, there was little use for much of that. Some hunter-gatherers might have carried gold or some other trinkets—seashells are among the first baubles in the archaeological record—but when you have no permanent residence and must stay on the move, wealth was largely restricted to what you could carry and use.
Settled communities are communities of specialized laborers. To understand the power of the division of labor, consider the case of the humble sandwich. In 2015, a man inspired by the canonical libertarian essay by Leonard E. Read, “I, Pencil,” set out to make a sandwich from scratch—i.e., with no products he didn’t make himself. He grew his own vegetables, distilled salt from seawater, milked a cow, and used the milk to cultivate cheese. He pickled a cucumber in a jar, grew his own wheat, and ground it into flour for bread. He collected his own honey, and killed a chicken himself for the meat. The whole process took him six months and cost him $1,500. At the end of the project, he issued his verdict on his sandwich: “It’s not bad. That’s about it. It’s not bad.” Even here, he took shortcuts. He didn’t buy the cow or scour the countryside for the seeds, etc.15
The specialization inherent to the agricultural revolution creates classes of people in ways never imagined in small bands of hunters. Crops need to be tended to and protected. That means some people will be farmhands, others soldiers. Still others are better suited to work the mills or bake the bread. When you think about what is required to maintain a large agriculture-based society, the number of specialized jobs gets long very quickly: soldiers, farmers, butchers, cobblers, blacksmiths, masons, carpenters, and, of course, slaves and overseers. How do you keep all of these specialists in their assigned roles? Dependence on the state’s insurance function is one method. Another is coercion.
Coercion, of course, implies violence, and all societies, including our own, depend on violence to maintain social order to one extent or another. Academics get the shakes when you try to offer a universal definition of the state, but one component is essential and pretty much universally agreed upon: force.
Max Weber famously defined the state as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”16 Weber would be the first to note that there’s a bit more to it than that. States have laws (and the means to enforce them), bureaucracies, and systems of taxation. But for a state to be a state, it must be able to enforce its rules, i.e., its will.
But whether it’s the arbitrary whim of a third-century warlord or official guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, if there is any lesson to be learned from history it is that, ultimately, laws have to be enforced through violence or the threat of violence.17 Indeed, the very word “enforce” literally means to use force.18
But coercion doesn’t only take the form of physical force, and not all compulsion is violence. No society can last long if held together solely by violence, or even the threat of violence. Ideology—by which I mean an internally coherent worldview that tells us how to behave and cooperate—is essential. If violence is the only measure of right and wrong, then the peasant has every incentive to kill his lord if he can get away with it. Large-scale societies need a theology and metaphysics to help everyone “know their place” in the social pecking order. Societies differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence by that standard. Even contemporary North Korea, which uses violence and fear more than almost any other state imaginable, still devotes massive resources to the propagation of an ideology for its people. Yes, many people obey the Dear Leader out of fear, but one need only read interviews with defectors or see footage of women openly weeping with joy at the sight of Kim Jong-un to understand that some besotted souls obey their Dear Leader out of love.
“Agrarian societies tend to develop complex social differentiation, an elaborate division of labour,” Gellner writes. “Two specialisms in particular become of paramount importance: the emergence of a specialized ruling class, and of a specialized clerisy (specialists in cognition, legitimation, salvation, ritual).”19 In other words, you need an aristocracy, starting with a monarch, and you need a priesthood of some kind to explain to people why the monarch deserves obedience. As the saying goes in Game of Thrones, “The Faith and the Crown. These are the two pillars of the realm. If one should fall, so will the other.”20
The aristocracy rules primarily through force. The priests use words, specifically, texts. Indeed, the development of writing was arguably the greatest leap forward in the history of human coercion—and cooperation.
The ability to write words probably began with the need to write numbers. Taxing and trade required record keeping. Not only was human memory unequal to the task of reliably storing data about all those bushels of wheat and shipments of rice, but the character of the memorizers also wasn’t altogether trustworthy.
“The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia,” Yuval Noah Harari writes:
“There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing.’ ”21
It didn’t take long for this system of bookkeeping to evolve into a system for law giving. Even discounting my vanity for my own profession, it is impossible to overstate the revolutionary nature of the written word. Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”22 That was surely the case with the first books and scrolls. From scratchings on a page, wise men and priests could learn things they did not know and tell tales about places far away and events long ago. (Amidst all the talk about how “the cloud” of data storage is some grand new thing under the sun, people seem to forget that The Cloud 1.0 was invented in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.)
The written word did not merely accelerate the diffusion of information in radical and profound ways; it also made sanctity portable. As Ernest Gellner observed, writing permits solemnity and authority to be decoupled from a verbal context. Prior to writing, sanctity required verbal, face-to-face ritual. Now it could be transported across vast distances as well as stored for future generations.23
One of the first lines of Hammurabi’s code reads: “Then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land…” Hammurabi’s job was “to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers, so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.” The epilogue of the code established Hammurabi’s status as the father of the people, as commanded by the gods. “Hammurabi is a ruler, who is as a father to his subjects, who holds the words of Marduk in reverence, who has achieved conquest for Marduk over the north and south, who rejoices the heart of Marduk, his lord, who has bestowed benefits for ever and ever on his subjects, and has established order in the land.”24
Babylon, the largest city in the world at the time, was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, which stretched through much of modern-day Iraq and Syria. Hammurabi issued his famous code as a way to
unify disparate kingdoms, streamline rules across his diverse imperial subjects, and elevate his status as the divine father of his people. It was also a bit of a legacy project. He wanted a permanent record of his supposed wisdom and fairness.
There’s debate about how the code’s 282 laws were actually incorporated into daily life. But, for our purposes, the most important thing about the Code of Hammurabi was that it, and laws like it, served as the operating software for a vast cooperation network. It did this by establishing clear rules about violence, commerce, and social status.
A citizen living on the coast of the Persian Gulf and a citizen living hundreds of miles up the Euphrates were now bound by the same rules, even though they might never meet each other or lay eyes on their ruler.
Schoolchildren are taught that the Code of Hammurabi is a great moment in human progress, but that does not mean it was what most people today would consider to be a “progressive” document. For instance, law number 15 declares: “If any one take a male or female slave of the court, or a male or female slave of a freed man, outside the city gates, he shall be put to death.”25
Probably the most famous of Hammurabi’s laws were numbers 196 to 199, which established the principle of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”:
196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. [An eye for an eye ]
197. If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken.
198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina.
199. If he put out the eye of a man’s slave, or break the bone of a man’s slave, he shall pay one-half of its value.26
The code also says that if a son strikes his father, the son’s hand must be cut off.27 It’s easy to see all of this as barbaric from our vantage point; I certainly do. But it’s important to recognize that regulating violence is a huge boon to humans seeking security and order. The whole reason the stationary bandit is welcomed by the peasants is that his predictable use of violence is preferable to the arbitrary violence of the roving bandit. That desire and need for order and security did not vanish with the rise of the state; the nature of the threat did. Military protection from dangers without evolved into police protection from dangers within.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 9