The State. Anthony de Jasay
of these objectives. The state has a special kind of means: power over the conduct of its subjects that when exercised in particular ways is widely accepted as legitimate. Whatever may be its objectives—whether morally commendable or not, whether good for its subjects or not—the state can attain more of them fully if it has more power rather than less. In the rational-choice paradigm that underlies the more disciplined half of the social sciences, the consumer maximizes “satisfaction,” the business undertaking maximizes “profit,” and the state maximizes “power.”
Imputing to the state a rational mind and objectives it tries to maximize has attracted a measure of surprise, criticism, and even incomprehension since the first edition of The State. The approach was difficult to reconcile with the more conventional notions of the prince’s holding power in trust, of modern government as the agent of a winning coalition within society, or of a pack of professional politicians serving particular interests in exchange for money, fun, and fame. It left no role for the social contract and no room for the common good. Above all, it treated the state, a web of institutions, as if it were a person with a mind.
Arguing as if this were the case, however, produces a “simulation,” a sort of schematic history whose power to explain and predict complex trends by tracing the work of simple and permanent causes may perhaps justify the break with conventional theory.
The book predicts that by relentlessly expanding the collective at the expense of the private sphere the state-as-drudge always strives to become the state-as-totalitarian-master. The years since the book first appeared have witnessed one resounding failure of this attempt, the collapse of the socialist regimes in Russia and its satellites. It is hard to say what, if anything, this collapse disproves. Must the attempt always fail in the end? I see no persuasive reason why, in one form or another, it always should. Nor does it need to go all the way for corruption and the atrophy of social virtues to set in. May we hope, though, that forewarned is forearmed?
May 1997
THE STATE
What would you do if you were the state?
It is odd that political theory, at least since Machiavelli, has practically ceased asking this question. It has devoted much thought to what the individual subject, a class or the entire society can get out of the state, to the legitimacy of its commands and the rights the subject retains in the face of them. It has dealt with the obedience the hopeful users of the state’s services owe it, the manner in which they participate in making it function and the redress the victims of its eventual malfunction can claim. These are vitally important matters; with the passage of time and the growth of the state relative to civil society, they are becoming steadily more important. Is it, however, sufficient to treat them only from the point of view of the subject, what he needs, wants, can and ought to do? Would not our understanding become more complete if we could also see them as they might look from the state’s point of view?
The present book is an attempt to do this. Braving the risks of confusing institutions with persons and the difficulties of passing from the prince to his government, it chooses to treat the state as if it were a real entity, as if it had a will and were capable of reasoned decisions about means to its ends. Hence it tries to explain the state’s conduct towards us in terms of what it could be expected to do, in successive historical situations, if it rationally pursued ends that it can plausibly be supposed to have.
The young Marx saw the state “opposing” and “overcoming” civil society. He spoke of the “general secular contradiction between the political state and civil society” and contended that “when the political state... comes violently into being out of civil society... [it] can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the destruction of religion; but only in the same way as it proceeds to the abolition of private property (by imposing a maximum, by confiscation, by progressive taxation) and the abolition of life (by the guillotine).”1 In other isolated passages (notably in “The Holy Family” and the “Eighteenth Brumaire”) he continued to represent the state as an autonomous entity, going its own way without, however, offering a theory of why this should result in “overcoming,” “confiscation,” “contradiction,” why the autonomous state is an adversary of society.
As Marx moved toward system-building, he fell in with the main body of political theory whose unifying feature is to regard the state as essentially an instrument. Thus, for the mature Marx, and more explicitly still for Engels, Lenin and the socialist thought they continue to inspire, the state became a tool, subservient to the interests of the ruling class and assuring its dominance.
For non-socialist mainstream theory, too, the state is an instrument, designed to serve its user. It is seen as generally benign and helping to further the purposes of others. The shape of the instrument, the jobs it performs and the identity of the beneficiary may vary, but the instrumental character of the state is common to the major strains of modern political thought. For Hobbes, it keeps the peace, for Locke it upholds the natural right to liberty and property, for Rousseau it realizes the general will, for Bentham and Mill it is the vehicle of improving social arrangements. For today’s liberals, it overcomes the incapacity of private interests spontaneously to cooperate. It forces them to produce collectively preferred volumes of the public goods of order, defence, clean air, paved streets and universal education. Under a stretched definition of public goods, its coercion also enables society to reach for distributive justice or just plain equality.
There are, to be sure, less starry-eyed variants of the instrumental view. For the “non-market choice” or “public choice” school, the interaction of private choices through the instrument of the state is liable to overproduce public goods and fail in other ways to attain preferred outcomes.2 This school deals with the unwieldiness of the tool that is the state and its potential to hurt a society that tries to wield it. Nevertheless, the state is a tool, albeit a defective one.
What, however, are defect, faulty design, inherent malfunction? And what is internal consistency? On the way from democracy to despotism, does Plato’s Republic degenerate? Or is it conforming to its own purposes?
A first step to an adequate understanding of the state is to think about an environment without one. Taking our cue from Rousseau, we tend gratuitously to associate the state of nature with savage and perhaps not very bright hunters at the dawn of history. It has become our conditioned reflex to think of it as some early, primitive stage of civilization, a more advanced stage both requiring, and being required for, the formation of a state. As a matter of empirical fact, this is as it may be. As a matter of logic, it does not follow from the sole necessary feature of the state of nature, which is that in it the participants do not surrender their sovereignty. No one has obtained a monopoly of the use of force; all keep their arms. But this condition need not be inconsistent with any given stage of civilization, backward or advanced.
Nation states are in a state of nature and show no inclination to pool sovereignty in a superstate. Yet contrary to what Hobbes is usually taken to have implied, most of them manage to avoid war a good deal of the time. They even cooperate in armed peace, most conspicuously and bravely in international trade, investment and lending, all in the face of sovereign risk. Social contract theory would predict that in these areas, there will be international thieving, default, confiscation and beggar-my-neighbour behaviour, and contracts will be worthless bits of paper. In effect, despite the lack of a superstate to enforce contracts across national jurisdictions, international cooperation is not breaking down. If anything, there is some movement the other way. International relations tend to cast doubt on the standard view of people in the state of nature as myopic simpletons clad in animal skins clubbing each other on the head. Instead, there is some reason to hold that the more civilization advances, the more viable becomes the state of nature. The fearfulness of advanced armaments may yet prove to be a more potent enforcer of abstinence from war, saving people from a “nasty, brutish and short life,” than were such historic super-states as Rome, the Carolingian or the British Empire, though it may be too soon to tell.
Among men and groups of men, it is harder