The State. Anthony de Jasay

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      THE STATE

      This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.

      The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

      © 1998 by Liberty Fund, Inc. Originally published in 1985 by Basil Blackwell, Ltd.

      This eBook edition published in 2013.

      eBook ISBNs:

       978-1-61487-101-9

       978-1-61487-219-1

       www.libertyfund.org

       Contents

Preface

Author’s Note

Introduction

1. The Capitalist State

Violence, Obedience, Preference

Title and Contract

The Contours of the Minimal State

If States Did Not Exist, Should They Be Invented?

Inventing the State: The Social Contract

Inventing the State: The Instrument of Class Rule

Closing the Loop by False Consciousness

2. The Adversary State

Repression, Legitimacy and Consent

Taking Sides

       Tinker’s Licence

       The Revealed Preference of Governments

       Interpersonal Justice

       Unintended Effects of Producing Interpersonal Utility and Justice

       3. Democratic Values

       Liberalism and Democracy

       Through Equality to Utility

       How Justice Overrides Contracts

       Egalitarianism as Prudence

       Love of Symmetry

       Envy

       4. Redistribution

       “Fixed” Constitutions

       Buying Consent

       Addictive Redistribution

       Rising Prices

       Churning

       Towards a Theory of the State

       5. State Capitalism

       What Is to Be Done?

       The State as Class

       On the Plantation

       Index

Preface

      Though this book leans on political philosophy, economics, and history, it leans on each lightly enough to remain accessible to the educated general reader, for whom it is mainly intended. Its central theme—how state and society interact to disappoint and render each other miserable—may concern a rather wide public among both governors and governed. Most of the arguments are straightforward enough not to require for their exposition the rigour and the technical apparatus that only academic audiences can be expected to endure, let alone to enjoy.

      If nothing else, the vastness of the subject and my somewhat unusual approach to it will ensure that specialist readers find many parts of the reasoning in need of elaboration, refinement, or refutation. This is all to the good, for even if I wanted to, I could not hide that my object has been neither to provide a definitive statement nor to solicit the widest possible agreement.

      The reader and I both owe a debt to I. M. D. Little for scrutinizing the major part of the original draft. It is not his fault if I persevered in some of my errors.

      Paluel

      Seine Maritime

      France

      1997

Author’s Note

      The State is about the intrinsic nature of political power, constant in the face of changing contingencies, dictating the way forms of government evolve, rather than being dictated by them.

      The logic of using political power is the same as the logic of making choices in any other field of endeavour. Rational beings have objectives they seek to attain,