The State. Anthony de Jasay

as one whose composite maximand consists solely of the individual maximands of all of its subjects, great and small, rich and poor, capitalist and worker alike in a spirit of true unity and consensus. Comic as the idea may look when set out like this, it should not be laughed out of court too fast, for (set out in softer lines) it represents most people’s notion of the democratic state, and as such it is a very influential one.

      By virtue of having to weigh them—for there is no other way of fusing them into a single magnitude, an index to be maximized—the state must, its unselfishness and impartiality notwithstanding, transform its subjects’ ends, assimilating them into one of its own, for the choice of weights to be applied to each subject’s end is nobody’s but the state’s. There is a quite unwarranted belief that in democracy, the state does not choose the weights, because they are given, incorporated in some rule which the state cannot but follow as long as it stays democratic.

      A typical rule of this sort would be one-man-one-vote, which assigns a weight of one to every elector whether the state likes him or not. The fallacy of this belief consists in the passage from votes to ends, maximands. The tacit assumption that a vote for a political programme or for a team in preference to another is approximately the same thing as an expression of the voter’s ends, is gratuitous. The existence of a social mechanism, such as elections, for choosing one out of a severely limited set of alternatives, such as a government, must not be construed as proof that there exists, operationally speaking, a “social choice” whereby society maximizes its composite ends. This does not invalidate the simple and totally different point that being able to express a preference for a political programme and for a person or team to wield power in the state, is a valuable end in itself.

      If the state, in pursuit of impartiality, were to borrow somebody else’s system of weights (to be applied to the several ends desired by its subjects), for instance, that of the sympathetic observer, the same problem would reappear, albeit at one remove. Instead of choosing its own weights, the state would choose the observer whose weights it was going to borrow.

      None of this is new. It is merely a particular way of reiterating the well-known impossibility of aggregating individual utility functions into a “social welfare function” without somebody’s will deciding how it should be done.⁴¹ The particular approach we have chosen to get to this conclusion has the merit, however, of showing up fairly well the short-circuit going straight from the state’s power to the satisfaction of its ends. If the state were its subjects’ father and its sole end were their happiness, it would have to try and reach it by passing along a “loop” consisting, in some manner, of the several happinesses of the subjects. But this is made inherently impossible by the “layout” (plurality and conflict among the subjects, combined with the state’s power to decide conflicts). The layout inevitably contains a short-circuit. Thus the state’s end-fulfilment is quite direct, bypassing the loop going the long way round, via the social contract or via class rule and the satisfaction of the subject’s ends.

      The capitalist state, as I have argued (pp. 32-3) is one to which it is logically possible (but only just) to attribute some imprecisely defined maximand (“butterflies”), lying outside the realm of goals which can be attained by making its subjects do things. For the essentially negative reason that it is best not to erect an apparatus for exerting power lest it should fall into the wrong hands, such a state would govern as little as possible. Since it would take an austere view of demands for public goods and of claims by third parties for amending, supplementing or otherwise overruling the outcomes of private contracts, there would be little common ground between it and the political hedonist who wants to get his good out of the state.

      If a subject is to be contented, in harmony with a capitalist state, it would help him to be imbued with a certain ideology whose basic tenets are: (1) that property “is,” and is not a matter of “ought” (or that “finders are keepers”); (2) that the good of the contracting parties is not an admissible ground for interfering with their contracts and the good of third parties only exceptionally so; and (3) that requiring the state to do agreeable things for the subject greatly augments the probability that the state will require the subject to do disagreeable things.

      The first tenet is quintessentially capitalist in that it dispenses with a justification for property. Some say that Locke has provided an ideology for capitalism. This seems to me off the mark. Locke taught that the finder is keeper on condition that there is “enough and as good” left for others, a condition calling out for egalitarian and “need-regarding” principles of tenure as soon as we leave the frontier and enter the world of scarcity. He also taught that the first occupier’s right to his property springs from his labour which he “mixed” with it, a principle on a par with the several others which make the ownership of capital contingent upon deserts: “he worked for it,” “he saved it,” “il en a bavé,” “he provides work for many poor people.” (If he did not do any of these meritorious things, what title has he got to his capital? Already the case of “his grandfather worked hard for it” becomes tenuous because it is twice removed from such deserts.) To the extent that the rise of capitalism was accompanied by no political theory which sought to separate the right to property from notions of moral worth or social utility, let alone succeeded in doing so, it is true that capitalism never had a viable ideology. This lack, in turn, goes some way towards explaining why, in the face of an essentially adversary state and its accompanying ideology, capitalism has shown so little intellectual vigour in its own defence, and why such defences as it has managed to muster have been poor advocacy, lame compromises and sometimes offers of honourable surrender.

      The second basic tenet of a proper capitalist ideology should affirm the freedom of contract. It must affirm it in particular against the idea that the state is entitled to coerce people for their own good. On the other hand, it would leave it ragged at the edge where it could cut into the interests of people not party to the contract whose freedom is being considered. The raggedness is due to a recognition of the indefinite variety of possible conflicts of interest in a complex society. It would leave the contract unprotected against a certain indefiniteness of right, of either too much or too little regard for the interests of those outside, yet affected by, a given contract.

      This danger, however, is to some extent taken care of by the constraint arising out of the third tenet. The demand of A to have the state protect his interest which is affected by a contract between B and C, should be tempered by his apprehension of the consequential risk of finding himself under increased subjection as and when the claims of others are being attended to, for that is liable to mean that his contracts will be interfered with. These offsetting motivations can be more formally expressed as two imaginary schedules present in people’s heads. For every person A, there should be a schedule of benefits (in the widest sense) that he would expect to derive from the state’s progressively increasing degrees of concern for what could be called third-party interests in the deliberately neutral vocabulary I am attempting to use in discussing contracts. Another schedule should list the negative benefits (costs) which he would fear to suffer as a result of the state’s escalating solicitude for the well-being of others. It is, of course, vain to pretend to empirical knowledge about such schedules even if it is admitted that they express something which is liable to exist in the heads of rationally calculating people. However, it could be suggested that poor people (and not only poor ones), people who feel helpless, who think they usually get the worst of any bargain, would have a schedule of expected benefits from state intervention which was, at any practicable level of the latter, always higher than the corresponding schedule of expected costs. In other words, they could never get too much help from the state, and never mind the restrictions, servitude and pain that this may entail. Conversely, rich people (but not only the rich), resourceful, self-confident people who think they can shift for themselves, could be regarded as carrying in their head a sharply rising schedule of negative benefits which soon mounts above the schedule of positive benefits at any but the most minimal scale of government activity.

      I advance no hypothesis about the scale and shape of the cost-benefit schedules which describe real people’s attitudes to these questions, nor about the ones they “ought to” have if they all had the very highest order of political wisdom, insight and understanding. The implication of this duality is that the