The State. Anthony de Jasay

long been the subjects of states, so we have no opportunity to observe how well they would cooperate in the state of nature. Hence we cannot even pretend empirically to assess the difference it makes to have a state. Would people honour contracts in the absence of an enforcing agent possessing the monopoly of last-resort force? It used to be held that since it is every man’s interest that all other men should keep their word and that he should be free to break his, social cooperation could not be maintained on a voluntary basis. In the technical language of decision theory, a properly constructed “prisoners’ dilemma” could not have a non-imposed cooperative solution. Recent contributions of mathematics and psychology to the social sciences teach us that if men confront such dilemmas repeatedly, this need not be so. Results teach them, and expected results induce them, to cooperate spontaneously. Any argument that, since the state must force them to cooperate, they would not have done so without being forced is, of course, a non sequitur.

      On the other hand, the longer they have been forced to cooperate, the less likely they are to have preserved (if they ever had it) the faculty to cooperate spontaneously. “Those who can, do,” but the converse, “those who do, can,” is no less true, for we learn by doing. People who have been made to rely on the state never learn the art of self-reliance nor acquire the habits of civic action. One of Tocqueville’s most celebrated insights (though he had more subtle ones) was in fact about English and American “government” which left both room and need for grass-roots initiatives and, by benign neglect, induced people to run their own affairs, and French “administration” which did neither. The habit-forming effects of the state, the dependence of people’s values and tastes on the very political arrangements which they are supposed to bring about, is a basic motif which keeps surfacing throughout my argument.

      Its other basic and recurrent element is the waywardness of cause and effect in social relations. State action may or may not achieve its intended effect, for its proximate incidence gives no sure clue to the ultimate one. Nearly always, however, it will also have other effects, possibly more important and longer-lasting ones. These unintended effects may, in addition, also be positively unwanted, unforeseen and, in the nature of the case, often unpredictable. This is what lends such a gooseflesh-raising quality to the bland view that politics is pluralistic vector-geometry, and that civil society governs itself and controls the state, which is just a machine to register and execute “social choices.”

      The argument of this book is arranged in five chapters, spanning the logical (though not the real-time) progression of the state from one limiting extreme, where its ends do not compete with the ends of its subjects, to the other where it has come to own most of their property and liberty.

      Chapter 1, “The Capitalist State,” first deals with the roles of violence, obedience and preference at the birth of the state. It then sets out to deduce the characteristic outline of a state which, if it existed, would not be in conflict with civil society. I call it “capitalist” to stress the decisive character of its treatment of property and contract. Its conception of good title to property is that finders are keepers. It does not interfere in people’s contracts for their own good (which also excludes its compelling them to conclude a comprehensive, omnilateral social contract designed to overcome their free-rider temptations). It does not indulge such compassion and sympathy as it may harbour for its less fortunate subjects by forcing the more fortunate to assist them. By the same token, it is also a policy-less, minimal state (“The Contours of the Minimal State”).

      It seems anomalous if not self-contradictory for the state both to have a will and to want to minimize itself. For this to be rational, its ends must lie beyond politics, and be unattainable through governing. The purpose of governing, then, is merely to keep out any non-minimal rivals (preventing revolution). There has of course never been such a state in history, though the style and overtones of one or two in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do faintly suggest it.

      The “political hedonist” who regards the state as the source of a favourable balance in the calculus of help and hindrance, must logically aspire to a more than minimal state and would invent it if it did not exist.³ Political hedonism on the part of the individual subject underlies the wish for a more comprehensive and less optional scheme of cooperation than the patchwork of contracts that arises from voluntary negotiation (“Inventing the State: The Social Contract”). On the part of a hypothetical ruling class, political hedonism is supposed to call for a machine assuring dominance (“Inventing the State: The Instrument of Class Rule”). Both versions of political hedonism presuppose a certain gullibility as to the risks of disarming oneself to arm the state. They involve a belief in the instrumental character of the state, made to serve the ends of others and having none of its own. Yet in any non-unanimous society with a plurality of interests, the state, no matter how accommodating, cannot possibly pursue ends other than its own. Its manner of resolving conflicts, and the respective weights it attaches to the ends of others, constitute the satisfaction of its own ends (“Closing the Loop by False Consciousness”).

      The questions whether political hedonism is sensible, prudent, rational, whether having the state around us makes us better or worse off, whether the goods the state, acting in pursuit of its interest, chooses to produce are what we should have chosen, are addressed again in chapter 2 in relation to reform, improvement and utility, and in chapter 3 in such contexts as one-man-one-vote, egalitarianism (both as a means and as an end) and distributive justice.

      While violence and preference may stand respectively at its historical and logical origins, political obedience continues to be elicited by the state through recourse to the old triad of repression, legitimacy and consent, the subject of the first section of chapter 2. Legitimacy is obeyed regardless of hope of reward and fear of punishment. The state cannot, except in the very long run, breed more of it at its choice. In getting itself obeyed, its alternatives are reduced to various combinations of repression and consent (though of course it will count the blessings of such legitimacy as it may enjoy). The consent of a minute fraction of society, e.g. the camp guards in a camp state, may suffice to repress the rest. Rewards, such as they are, then accrue thickly to the consenting minority; repression is spread thinly over the vast majority. A reversal of this pattern corresponds to greater reliance on consent.

      For reasons which look valid at the time, though in retrospect they may be regretted as weak or foolish, the repressive state usually finds it opportune over time to seduce some of those it used to repress and to lean more on consent (“Taking Sides”). This process combines steps towards wider political democracy and moves to do good, with an adversary, divisive role for the state, for it is now soliciting the support of broad sections of society by offering them significant rewards to be taken from other, perhaps narrower but still substantial sections. A by-product of this process of creating gainers and losers is that the apparatus of the state grows bigger and cleverer.

      It seems to me almost incontrovertible that the prescriptive content of any dominant ideology coincides with the interest of the state rather than, as in Marxist theory, with that of the ruling class. In other words, the dominant ideology is one that, broadly speaking, tells the state what it wants to hear, but more importantly what it wants its subjects to overhear. Rather than the “superstructure” of ideology being perched on the “base” of interest (as it is usual to place them), the two hold each other upright. There may well be no ruling class in a society, yet state and dominant ideology will thrive and evolve together. This view is advanced to justify the attention devoted to utilitarianism (“Tinker’s Licence” and “The Revealed Preference of Governments”), an immensely powerful though now mostly subconscious influence on past and present political thought. The utilitarian operations of “mending,” judging changes in arrangements by their expected consequences, and comparing utilities interpersonally so that the state can, in evaluating a policy, deduct the harm it does to some from the greater good it does to others and strike a balance of greater happiness, lend a moral content to acts of government. The doctrine which recommends such operations