The State. Anthony de Jasay

must, if they are rational, seek to get the better of each other by “confessing” first, and both end up with a longer sentence than if they had both played “thief’s honour” and refused to confess. In Hobbes, they both end up with a shorter and nastier life. Their sole escape is to abandon the state of nature and conclude a “covenant of mutual trust” whereby a designated sovereign is invested with whatever power it takes to enforce peace (or natural right). Thus nobody need fear that, by behaving trustingly, he will be taken advantage of by the others; therefore all can behave trustingly. The sovereign will, for some reason, use his absolute power only for obtaining this result. His subjects have no right to rebel but nor do they have any reason for doing so. It is not clear whether, if they did have cause, they would have a right to rebel.

      The prisoners’ dilemma implicit in Hobbes requires, for its proper study, the state of nature where no sovereign authority stops the participants from making themselves miserable if they are so inclined.¹⁶ States are in a state of nature in that they retain the faculty of recourse to force against each other and do not transfer their arms and their sovereignty to a super-state.¹⁷

      I will consider, in this context, two Hobbesian dilemmas, those of war and trade. While I am at it, I will go on briefly to look at Rousseau’s problem of general social cooperation also, though the latter is quite different in nature (it is not a “prisoners’ dilemma” and requires a special psychological assumption in order not to result in voluntary cooperation).

      Let there be two sovereign countries (to borrow the language of army manoeuvres, “Blue” and “Red”). Both want “eminence” in Hobbes’s sense. The order of their preferences is: (1) victory in war, (2) disarmament, (3) armed peace and (4) defeat in war. They must choose between two “strategies”—arming and disarming—without knowing what the other country chooses. The “pay-off matrix” resulting from this situation will then be as in figure 1.

      Though Blue does not know whether Red will arm or disarm, he will choose to arm because by doing so he avoids defeat, gets peace at a cost as the worst-case pay-off and may get victory if Red is a sucker. Red is like Blue, and reasons similarly. He, too, chooses to arm. They end up in the southeast corner of the figure, in armed peace which is the “maximin” (the best worst-case) solution proper to hostile players. The northwest corner of costless peace is denied them, though they would both prefer it, because of their even greater preference for victory over each other. Once in the northwest corner, Blue would try to go into the southwest and Red into the northeast quadrant, i.e. the “cooperative solution” of costless peace would be unstable in the absence of a super-state enforcing disarmament.

      This is, broadly, the result we actually find in the real world. States are most of the time in the southeast quadrant of the figure, i.e. they live in costly armed peace. From time to time they slip into the southwest or northeast quadrant and make war. Whether this is by virtue of unequal arms, a freak cause, or for another of the innumerable historical causes of war, is beyond our present concern. Despite their preference for northwest over southeast, however, they do not surrender sovereignty. We must carefully note this fact and consider it presently.

      The dilemma of trade is formally identical to the dilemma of war. Let there be the same two countries, Red and Blue. Each wants the other’s goods. Both have the same order of preferences: (1) get foreign goods for free, (2) trade home goods for foreign goods, (3) retain the home goods (no trade), and (4) forgo the home goods and get no foreign goods (total loss, confiscation, expropriation, write-off). The two countries contract to deliver goods to each other (or to lend for later repayment, or invest for a return). As there is no enforcing super-state, they can either perform the contract or default, as in figure 2.

      Game theory would once again predict that neither trader will give the other the chance to play him for a sucker, so that “maximin” is the dominant strategy for both and they end up not trading. The structure of their preferences and the structure of the pay-offs jointly deny them the benefit of trading in the absence of a contract-enforcer. This prediction, of course, is belied by the widespread fact of trade, investment and lending across national jurisdictions, which those who engage in them find on the whole worthwhile in the face of a certain frequency of bad debts and defaults of one kind or another. States are in certain circumstances even prepared to give redress to foreign nationals and enforce performance by their own defaulting nationals; an altogether quixotic act by the standard conceptions of basic social contract theory. Equally quixotic is the voluntary submission, by medieval traders and bankers, of cases of default or disputed contract performance to the judgments of their peers appointed for the purpose but possessing no arms and commanding no police, especially when you consider the danger that the decision might have gone against them!

      If history demonstrates that two ostensibly identical dilemmas regularly give rise to contrasting outcomes, the war dilemma resulting in armed peace (with occasional war) and the trade dilemma resulting in trade, the ostensible identity must hide some significant difference. Intuitively, war is more easily seen as a single isolated act than is trade. A war can even be fought “to end all wars,” to have hegemony in peace forever after. Trade is typically an indefinite series of recurrent acts, which the participants fully intend to prolong. Everything that mathematics and psychology finds conducive to cooperative solutions in “iterated” prisoners’ dilemmas applies to trade, much less of it to war. Neither dilemma and its real-world resolution, however, lends convincing support to the Hobbesian reason for inventing a state and escaping from the brutish misery of the state of nature, into its encircling arms.

      Is there more force in Rousseau’s thesis, that people in the state of nature are unable to organize the social cooperation necessary for the realization of their common good (the general will)? His basic statement of the problem is in the Second Discourse, and is known as the parable of the Hunting Party.¹⁸ If (two) hunters stalk a deer, they are sure to catch it if only each one will stand faithfully at his post. They can in this way unconsciously acquire the idea of mutual obligation (which, for Rousseau, forms the passage from the state of nature to civil society), but only if their present and palpable interest demands it. However, they lack foresight and “hardly think of the morrow.” Therefore, if one sees a hare passing, he will quit the deer stalk and run off to catch it, depriving the other hunter of the deer and, indeed, of bagging anything at all. The pay-off matrix of their interaction will have the form of figure 3.¹⁹

      As both hunters prefer the deer, or even half of one, to a hare, neither has an incentive to “sucker” the other, leaving him standing while he runs off after the hare. Neither would, therefore, rationally opt for a “maximin” strategy (go for the hare in the southeast corner). The deer hunt, then, is critically different from the genuine, Hobbesian prisoners’ dilemma. Social cooperation is not a dilemma and does not for that reason require coercion. A problem (but not a dilemma) is only created for the hunting party by the myopia of one of the hunters who cannot see that a sure deer at the end of the hunt is better than a sure hare. (If both hunters suffered from such complete lack of forethought, they might “objectively” have a prisoners’ dilemma without feeling it. Neither would worry about the end-result of the party; they would not perceive the missed deer, let alone invent an arrangement, such as the social contract creating a state, enabling them to catch the deer rather than the hare, which is the only reason they would have for not letting the hunt take its course, with both hunters running off after the game, if any, they happen to see.)

      Supposing, then, that at least the second hunter is alive to the advantage of getting the first hunter to keep his place, what solutions are available for overcoming the latter’s myopia or fecklessness? The contractarian solution is to get him to become a party to the social contract,