The State by Anthony de Jasay (3 page)

question the deduction of principles of justice from democracy rather than the other way round ("How Justice Overrides Contracts"). In the section "Egalitarianism as Prudence" I challenge the alleged prudential character of a certain egalitarianism and the roles assigned to risk and probability in inducing self-interested people to opt for it. In passing, I reject Rawls's bland view of the redistributive process as painless and costless, and of the state as an automatic machine which dispenses "social decisions" when we feed our wishes into it.

1. Instead of contending, in my view unsuccessfully, that certain economic and political equalities produce final, uncontested values like utility or justice, liberal ideology sometimes resorts to a bold short cut and simply elevates equality itself to the rank of a final value, prized for its own sake because it is inherent in man to like it.
   
 

2. My main counter-argument ("Love of Symmetry"), for which there is perhaps unexpected support in Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and in a priceless outburst by Engels, is that when we think we are opting for equality, we are in fact upsetting one equality in making another prevail. Love of equality in general may or may not be inherent in human nature. Love of a particular equality in preference to another (given that both cannot prevail), however, is like any other taste and cannot serve as a universal moral argument.
   
 

3. Somewhat analogous reasons can be used against the case that democratic policies are good because, in levelling fortunes, they reduce the pain people suffer at the sight of their neighbour's better fortune ("Envy"). Very few of the countless inequalities
   

people are liable to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao's Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress and work alike if one is still luckier in love than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities. Envy will not go away once chateaux have all been burned, merit has replaced privilege and all children have been sent to the same schools.

1. Incentives and resistances, the exigencies of staying in power in the face of competition for consent and the character of the society whose consent must be elicited, should duly lead the state to adopt the appropriate pattern of policies for taking property and liberty from some and giving them to others. However, would not this pattern, whatever it was, be bound to remain hypothetical, and property and liberty inviolate, if the constitution forbade the state to touch them, or at least laid down fixed limits to what it may touch? It is to come to terms with the constitutional constraint on democratic policies that chapter 4, "Redistribution," starts with some remarks on fixed constitutions. It is suggested that the ostensible constraint of a constitution may be positively useful to the state as a confidence-building measure, but that it is unlikely to remain fixed if it does not coincide with the prevailing balance of interests in society. The prospective pay-off from amending it is available as an inducement for a coalition of the required size for passing the amendment (though this is not a sufficient condition for triggering off constitutional change).
   
2. The mechanics of obtaining majority support under democratic rules are first considered in a highly simplified abstract case in the section "Buying Consent." If people differ from each other only in how much money they have, and if they vote for the redistributive programme under which they gain most (or lose least), the rival programmes offered by the state and the opposition will be closely similar (one being marginally less bad for the rich than the other). Under the spur of competition for power, everything that can safely be taken from the prospective losers has to be offered to the prospective gainers, leaving no "discretionary income" for the state to dispose of. As a consequence, its power over its subjects' resources is all used up in its own reproduction, in merely staying in power.
   
 

3. A less abstract version ("Addictive Redistribution") where people, and hence their interests, differ in an indefinite variety of respects, and the society within which preponderant support must be obtained is not atomistic but can have intermediate group structures between man and state, yields results which are fuzzier but hardly less bleak for the state. Redistributive gains tend to be habit-forming both at the individual and the group level. Their reduction is apt to provoke withdrawal symptoms. While in the state of nature the integration of people into cohesive interest groups is held in check by (potential or actual) "free riding," the emergence of the state as the source of redistributive gains both permits and incites unchecked group formation to exact such gains. This is so in as much as state-oriented interest groups can tolerate the free riding among their members that would destroy market-oriented groups.
   
 

Each interest group, in turn, has an incentive to act as a free rider in relation to the rest of society, the state being the vehicle permitting this to be done without meeting serious resistance. There is no reason to expect the corporatist ideal of constituting very large groups (all labour, all employers, all doctors, all shopkeepers) and having them bargain with the state and with each other, greatly to alter this outcome. Thus, in time, the redistributive pattern becomes a crazy quilt of loopholes and asymmetrical favours along industrial, occupational or regional dimensions or for no very apparent rhyme and reason, rather than along the classic rich-to-poor or rich-to-middle dimension. Above all, the evolution of the pattern increasingly escapes the state's overall control.

1. In the section "Rising Prices" the group structure of society promoted by addictive redistribution is assumed to impart an ability to each group to resist or recover any loss of its distributive share. One symptom of the resulting impasse is endemic inflation. A related one is the complaint of the state about society becoming ungovernable, lacking any "give" and rejecting any sacrifice that adjustment to hard times or just random shocks would require.
   
 

2. The social and political environment resulting in large part from the state's own actions eventually calls forth a widening divergence between gross and net redistribution ("Churning"). Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, both Peter and Paul come to be paid and robbed on a growing variety of counts (much gross redistribution for a small and uncertain net balance); this causes turbulence and is destined to generate disappointment and frustration.
   
 

The state has, at this stage, completed its metamorphosis from mid-nineteenth-century reformist seducer to late twentieth-century redistributive drudge, walking the treadmill, a prisoner of the unintended cumulative effects of its own seeking after consent ("Towards a Theory of the State"). If its ends are such that they can be attained by devoting its subjects' resources to its own purposes, its rational course is to maximize its discretionary power over these resources. In the ungrateful role of drudge, however, it uses all its power to stay in power, and has no discretionary power left over. It is rational for it to do this just as it is rational for the labourer to work for subsistence wages, or for the perfectly competitive firm to operate at breakeven. A higher kind of rationality, however, would lead it to seek to emancipate itself from the constraints of consent and electoral competition, somewhat like Marx's proletariat escaping from exploitation by revolution, or Schumpeter's entrepreneurs escaping from competition by innovation. My thesis is not that democratic states "must" all end up doing this, but rather that a built-in totalitarian bias should be taken as a symptom of their rationality.

I.37 Autonomy of action in the passage from democracy to totalitarianism need not be regained in a single unbroken move, planned in advance. It is, at least initially, more like sleep-walking than conscious progress towards a clearly perceived goal. Chapter 5, "State Capitalism," deals with the cumulative policies likely to carry the state step by step along the road to "self-fulfilment." Their effect is so to change the social system as to maximize the
potential for discretionary power, and to enable the state fully to realize this potential.

1. The agenda for increasing discretionary power ("What Is to Be Done?") must first address the problem of decreasing civil society's autonomy and capacity for withholding consent. The policies the democratic state managing a "mixed economy" tends to drift into will unwittingly erode a large part of the basis of this autonomy, the independence of people's livelihoods. What the Communist Manifesto calls "the winning of the battle of democracy" in order "to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state" is the completion of this process. The socialist state thus puts an end to the historical and logical freak of economic power being diffused throughout civil society while political power is centralized. In centralizing and unifying the two powers, however, it creates a social system which is inconsistent with, and cannot properly function under, the classical democratic rules of awarding tenure of state power. Social democracy must evolve into people's democracy or the next best thing, the state now being powerful enough to enforce this development and ward off systemic breakdown.
   
 

2. "Systemic constants" versus the variables of the human element are considered in the context of private and state capitalism ("The State as Class") to assess the place of the managing bureaucracy. As the thesis that separation of ownership and control really means loss of control by the owner is untenable, it must be accepted that the bureaucracy has precarious tenure and its discretionary power is limited. The nice or nasty disposition of the bureaucrats manning the state, their "socio-economic origin" and whose father went to which school, are variables, the
   

configurations of power and dependence characterizing private and state capitalism respectively are constants; in such phrases as "socialism with a human face," the weight of the constants of socialism relative to the variables of the human face is best seen as a matter of personal hopes and fears.

1. In state capitalism more inexorably than in looser social systems, one thing leads to another and, as one inconsistency is eliminated, others emerge, calling in turn for their elimination. The final and futuristic section of this book ("On the Plantation") deals with the logic of a state which owns all capital, needing to own its workers, too. Markets for jobs and goods, consumer sovereignty, money, employee-citizens voting with their feet are alien elements defeating some of the purposes of state capitalism. To the extent that they are dealt with, the social system comes to incorporate some features of the paternalistic Old South.
   
 

2. People have to become chattel slaves in relevant respects. They do not own but owe their labour. There is "no unemployment." Public goods are relatively plentiful, and "merit goods" like wholesome food or Bach records, cheap, while wages are little more than pocket money by the standards of the outside world. People have their ration of housing and public transport, health care, education, culture and security in kind, rather than receiving vouchers (let alone money) and the corresponding onus of choosing. Their tastes and temperaments adjust accordingly (though not all will become addicts; some may turn allergic). The state will have maximized its discretionary power, before eventually discovering that it is facing some new predicament.
   
3. An agenda for a rational state gives rise, by implication, to an inverted agenda for rational subjects, at least in the sense of telling them what must be done to help or to hinder it. If they can purge any inconsistent preferences they may have for more liberty and more security, more state and less state at the same time-probably a more difficult undertaking than it sounds-they will know how far they want to assist or resist carrying out the state's agenda. On such knowledge must depend their own stand.
   
 

 

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

1. The Capitalist State
Violence, Obedience, Preference

Preferences for political arrangements depend on people's conception of their good as well as on the arrangements that are supposed to be preferred.

1. States generally start with somebody's defeat.
   
 

2. "The origin of the state is conquest" and "the origin of the state is the social contract" are not two rival explanations. One deals with the origin of the state in real time, the other with logical deduction. Both can be simultaneously valid. Historical investigation may establish that, to the extent that we can learn about such things, most states trace their pedigree to the defeat of one people by another; more rarely to the ascendancy of a victorious chief and his war gang over his own people; and nearly always to migration. At the same time, widely acceptable axioms will also help "establish" (in a different sense of the word) that rational people, in pursuit of their good, find it advantageous to subject themselves to a monarch, a state. Since these two types of explanation of the state deal in unrelated categories, it is no use trying to relate them or accord priority to one over the other. Nor is it sensible to infer that because states have come into being and flourished, it must have been rational for people who pursued their good to subject themselves to them-otherwise they would have put up more of a fight before doing so.
   
 

3. Consider in this light a well-regarded attempt at reconciling the (historically) violent origin of the state with the rational volition