The State by Anthony de Jasay (13 page)

2.1.18 The common-sense perception that the state has no rewards to dispense that do not belong to its subjects anyway, so that it can only pay Paul by robbing Peter, is of course harmful for good-citizen false consciousness. By way of remedy, there stands the arguable assertion that the consent-generating transactions between state and subjects enhance social cooperation (and hence output, or harmony, or whatever good it takes social cooperation to produce) to the effect that the gains of the gainers exceed the losses of the losers. For well-rehearsed reasons, such an assertion is now generally taken to be a value judgement (it could be a statement of fact only in the special case where there are no losers, i.e. where all gains are net gains, and the latter are minor enough not to imply a significant change in the distribution of goods). It is the value judgement of the person who undertakes the adding up (with due regard to algebraic sign) of the gains and losses. No very good reason is on hand why his values should take precedence over anybody else's who might get a different sum from the same addition. Recourse to the value-judgements of the gainers and losers directly involved settles nothing, for the losers might well value their losses more highly than they do the gainers' gains, while the gainers are quite likely to do the opposite. Thus an impasse is reached. For equally well-rehearsed reasons, no gainer-to-loser compensation test seems possible which could "factually," in a wertfrei manner prove the availability of a residual surplus of gains over losses, to be applied to the greater fulfilment of the gainers' ends. Without such a surplus, however,
there is no fund, created by the incremental contribution of the state to some index-number of total social end-fulfilment, out of which the state could bestow bits of end-fulfilment to selected subjects without damage to others.

1. Nor would the production of a surplus of good and its bestowal be sufficient to earn consent for the state. If a given subject came to hold that the activities of the state do generate additional end-fulfilment for him, he would for that reason alone have no interest to support the state any more than he was already doing. As far as he was concerned, the state's bounty might be falling from heaven and changing his own conduct vis-à-vis the state could not make it fall any thicker. If he became a more docile subject and a more convinced supporter of the "government party," he may have done so out of admiration for good government, or gratitude, but not out of rational self-interest in the narrow sense, on which political calculus can be based. This is possibly the abstract and general common element in the political failures of Enlightened Absolutism, the reformist good governments of Catherine the Great, the Emperor Joseph II and (less obviously) Louis XV, each of which met mainly with stony indifference and ingratitude on the part of the intended beneficiaries.
   
 

2. Rewards, to elicit self-interested support, must be contingent on performance. They must be embedded in implicit contracts of the "you will get this for doing thus" kind. Consequently, it is difficult to envisage the politics of consent without a type or types of political markets joining rulers and ruled, to enable bargains to be struck and revised. Democracy might be regarded as one or both of such types of markets functioning side by side. One is the majority-rule, one-man-one-vote type of pure electoral democracy, where the state at intervals engages in a competitive
   

auction with (actual or potential) rivals for votes. The other, much older and less formal type of market, now usually called "pluralistic" or "group interest" democracy, is an endless series of parallel bilateral negotiations between the state and what one could, vulgarly but tellingly, call the wielders of clout within civil society. Clout must be seen not only as the capacity to deliver votes, but also as any other form of support useful for maintenance of the state's power over its subjects, as a substitute for outright repression by the state itself.

1. I have no formal theory to offer which would take stock of and systematically organize the general causes inducing the state to aim at securing power more by consent and less by repression (or, what seems as yet much rarer, vice versa). Perhaps no such theory is really possible, at least not one which would deduce the state's chosen policies from the assumption that it will select the means which lead efficiently to its ends. For it is arguable that the state relies on consent basically out of short-sightedness, weakness of will and the corollary liking for the line of least resistance. It usually seems easier to give than to withhold, to extend and dilute rewards than to restrict and concentrate them, to please more rather than less and to wear a bland rather than a stern face. Repression, moreover, has in fact often involved close identification of the state with an ally in civil society, a group, stratum or (in Marxist sociology, invariably) a class such as the nobility, the landed interest, the capitalists. Rightly or wrongly, states tended to judge that close alliance with some such narrow subset of society made them a captive of class, caste or group and negated their autonomy. As kings from medieval times sought to lessen their dependence on the nobility by soliciting the support of town burghers, so did the state in more modern times emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie by enfranchising and buying the votes of successively broader masses of people.
   
2. Taking these democratic ways out of the predicament which repressive government represents for the state (rather like committing the moral fault by which the protagonist tries to escape his fate in a properly constructed tragedy), entails its own punishment. "Punishment" for the state comes in the form of having to put up with political competition with rivals for power, whose consequences are ultimately destructive of the very ends the state was attempting to fulfil.
   
 

3. One logical issue out of this dilemma is resort to what is politely called people's democracy, where the state has ample means to repress political competition yet solicits a degree of its subjects' consent by raising expectations of future rewards once the building of socialism is sufficiently advanced. Some implications of open rivalry for state power, the multi-party system and of "clout" in civil society which may oppose the state unless bought off or reduced, will be more systematically treated in chapter 4, "Redistribution," and the state's rational response, principally the reduction of civil society's clout, in chapter 5, "State Capitalism."
   
 

4. When it is a question of obtaining tenure of the state in the first place, or not losing it, first things come first, with any considerations of how to use power once it is secured, coming obviously second in logical order if not in value. Assembling a broad enough base of consent can both earn power, and pre-empt the political ground which a narrower base would leave dangerously vacant and open for others to invade. Whether or not the rulers of a democratic society have the acuity to foresee the ultimately frustrating character of rule-by-consent (as compared to the disciplines of rule-by-repression, and the state of grace which
   

is rule-through-legitimacy), the logic of their situation-drift-the politics of small steps drive them on in the democratic direction. They must deal with the immediate consequences of their previous weaknesses regardless of what the more distant future may call for, because, in the unforgettable phrase of a famous British consent-seeker, "a week is a long time in politics."

1. Some of these considerations may help explain why, contrary to the early schoolbook version of disenfranchised masses clamouring for the right to participate in the political process, the drive for widening the franchise often came as much from the ruler as from the ruled. This seems to me the realistic view to take of Necker's electoral initiatives for the French provincial estates in 1788-9, of the English reforms of 1832 and 1867 and of those of the Second Reich after 1871.
   
 

2. Rewards, finally, do not spontaneously grow on trees, nor are they generated and distributed to good citizens by good government. They are bargaining counters which the state acquires for distribution to its supporters by taking sides. A presumptive adversary of all in civil society, to obtain the support of some, it must become the actual adversary of others; if there were no class struggle, the state could usefully invent it.
   
 

 

Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay

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2.
The Adversary StateTaking Sides

The rise of partisan democracy in the nineteenth century served to build both mass consent and a bigger and cleverer state apparatus.

1. In a republic of teachers, the capitalist ends up as the political underdog.
   
 

2. The foundations of the lay Western welfare state were probably laid in England's 1834 Poor Law, not because it was particularly good for the welfare of the poor (it was in fact bad in that it abolished outdoor relief) but because, at the same time as concerning itself with the poor, the state transferred the larger part of the administrative responsibility for them from the dilettante and independent local authorities to its own professionals in what was then starting to take shape as the civil service. The foremost author and promoter of this scheme of building state muscle and governing capacity was the great practical utilitarian Edwin Chadwick, without whose intense drive much of the intervention of the English central government in social affairs might have
   

taken place several decades later than it did. However, there he was, his zeal speeding up historical inevitability by twenty years or so, clearly recognizing that if the state is effectively to promote a good cause, it must not rely on the goodwill of independent intermediaries whom it does not control.*55 When subsequently he addressed his energies to public health, he obtained the creation of the General Board of Health with himself as its first Commissioner, only to have the Board peter out on his retirement in 1854, demonstrating how much depended, at that incipient stage of historical inevitability, on the commitment of a single individual. It was not till 1875 that the state got round to recreating an administrative body in the Public Health Act and in doing so, incidentally committing "the largest invasion of property rights in the nineteenth century."*56 It is surprising, in view of the authority the state was acquiring over the subject in other areas of social life, that education remained facultative until 1880.

1. On a lower level of eminence than Chadwick, the inspectors created by the first Factory Acts had a somewhat analogous role as spearheads, at one and the same time, of social reform and of the aggrandizement of the state apparatus. In supervising the observance of the successive Factory Acts, they in perfect good faith kept finding further social problems for the state to solve. As these problems were in turn tackled, they found that as an incidental by-product, their own authority and the number of their subordinates had also increased. There was, in fact, a first major wave of expansion of the state's concerns and, parallel with it, of its apparatus, from the Reform Act of 1832 to 1848, as if meant to secure the allegiance of the new voters; then followed a relative lull from 1849 to 1859, coinciding with the decade of conservative reaction on the Continent; and a rush of increasing activism ever since.
   
2. It has been estimated that over the period from 1850 to 1890 the number of British government employees grew by about 100 per cent and from 1890 to 1950 by another 1000 per cent; public expenditure in the nineteenth century averaged about 13 per cent of GNP, after 1920 it never fell below 24 per cent, after 1946 it was never less than 36 per cent and in our day it is, of course, just below or just above the half-way mark depending on how we count public expenditure.*57 Statistical series over longish periods are rightly mistrusted because their context is liable to change in important ways. For similar reasons of non-comparable contexts, international statistical comparisons, say, of GNPs absorbed in public sector consumption and transfers, should be treated with some reserve. Nevertheless, where the relative numbers show vast differences either over time or between nations, one can safely draw at least the modest conclusion that government in England in the last century and a half increased several times over, or that among the major industrial countries, no government leaves as much of GNP for private purposes as the Japanese. It is perhaps appropriate at this point to recall again Walpole's lack of governing zeal and relate it to the fact that his government had all of 17,000 employees, four-fifths of them engaged in the raising of the revenue.*58
   
 

3. I will not deal a second time with the irrefutable dialectic argument that when in a situation of conflicting class interests the state sides with the working class, it is really siding with the capitalist class, for whoever has at his command the invincible adjective "real" must win any controversy over this, as over anything else. I merely note that in areas of possible concern which the earlier English state (the Hanoverian even more resolutely than its Stuart predecessor) largely ignored, the nineteenth century saw public policy playing an increasing role
   

which was at least prima facie favourable to the many, the poor and the helpless. The passage from the state's absence and unconcern to its progressive predominance had (in part predictable) consequences for the freedom of contract, the autonomy of capital and how people came to view their responsibility for their own fate.