The State by Anthony de Jasay (40 page)

However, there is no operative meaning in this "would like to." Society cannot call a stop, nor can it make any other decision (though majorities can make a limited range of decisions in its name and the representatives of the majority can decide additional matters in its name, and the state may carry them out in their name, none of which is in dispute here). Should it find too much of its arrangements churned more than it feels is congenial or indeed tolerable, society has no obvious recourse against the democratic political process which yielded this result. It may respond with uncomprehending rage, with what former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing aptly called "morose turbulence" and sullen cynicism. Its frustration will obviously threaten the political survival of the state which, by inadvertence, line of least resistance and the pressures of the social structure called forth by its own consent-seeking, has pushed churning too far.

1. On the other hand, net goes with gross, genuine redistribution is accompanied by churning. If continued tenure of power dictates a certain genuine redistribution, a growing volume of churning on top of it is nearly certain to be induced for one good reason and another. Yet if the former is consistent with political survival, the latter may be excessive for it. There may consequently no longer be any possible political equilibrium position, not even one of unrewarding state drudgery. A genuine existential impasse may be reached: the state both must and must not redistribute.
   
 

2. It is this contradiction which conditions the mixed-up, disoriented split personality of many present-day democratic states.*34 Ideology must go hand in hand with interest. In recent years, the dominant ideology of Western democracy has been cautiously coopting a sprinkling of previously rejected elements of theoretical
   

anarchism, libertarianism and traditional individualism; before we know where we are, Herbert Spencer will be radical chic. On a less cerebral plane, deeply felt claims mount for "rolling back the state." As the quarter-turn of ideological fashion unfailingly signals, it has in a sense become clever policy for the state to roll itself back.

1. Torn between a rational interest to go on producing the "democratic values" that the beneficiaries have taught themselves to depend on (and at least to continue upholding if not furthering the group interests whose support it cannot afford to forgo), and an equally rational interest to respond to the mounting poujadisme, frustration and ungovernability of much the same people and much the same interests by doing virtually the opposite, the state twists and turns and explains away its own incoherent evolutions with incoherent rhetoric. In two minds, by fits and starts fighting its own nature, it resists its own attempts to make itself shrink.
   
 

 

Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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4. RedistributionTowards a Theory of the State

It would be rational for a state pursuing its own ends to escape from the treadmill where its power is used up in its own reproduction.

1. Did Plato's Republic "degenerate" on the way from democracy to despotism?
   
 

2. This is the place for drawing some of our threads closer together. Depending on the scale and perspective of the analysis, it is possible to regard the state in several ways. One is to take it as an inanimate tool, a machine. It has no ends and no will; only persons have ends. Explanation and prediction of its movements must, therefore, deal at one remove with the persons who wield the tool and shift the levers of the machine. Another is to merge the machine and the people who run it, and consider the state as a live institution which behaves as it would if it had a will of its own and a single hierarchy of ends; as if it could choose between alternatives and in doing so seemed to conform to the rudiments of rationality. We have throughout adopted the latter view, not because it is more realistic (neither is), but because it looks the most fertile in plausible deductive consequences.
   
 

Once we think of the state as having ends and a will of its own, theories and doctrines which have the state serve the interests of Hobbes's seekers after eminence, Rousseau's myopic deer-hunters or Engels's oppressor class, take on a strongly question-begging quality: for however convincing the accounts they give of how the state could or does serve such interests, they furnish no reason why it should serve them. Yet while the supposition that a will seeks the fulfilment of its ends can be taken as read (it is implicit in rationality; besides, it is hard to think of a will floating freely, not associated with any end), a supposition that it seeks to serve the ends of others needs justification, explicit support of some sort. There is, in my view, no such support for it in either the contractarian or the Marxist theory of the state. It may, in fact, be a misnomer to call either one a theory of the state, though they are both theories of the individual (or class) subject's interest in the state. Moreover, as I have contended in chapter 1, even if it had good reasons to, the state could not pursue the interests of its subjects unless they were homogenous. Its adversary relation to them is inherent in its having to take one side or the other between conflicting interests if it is to have any "policies" at all.

1. A successful theory of the state should not have to rely on the gratuitous assumption that the state is subservient to some interest other than its own. It should lend itself to the explanation of the state's role in political history in terms of its interest interacting, competing, conflicting with and duly adjusted to the interests of others.*35
   
 

2. What, however, is the proper view of the interests of the state? When do we say that it is using its power to fulfil its ends? I have from the outset reconciled the possibility of "minimalness" and rationality by laying down the "marker" that a state will choose to
   

be minimal ("capitalist," "policyless"-alternative terms I consider to have substantially the same effect as "minimal"), if its ends lie beyond politics and cannot be attained by the use of power-if they are not the satisfactions of governing. On the other hand, all the policies a non-minimal state does adopt are, tautologically, in its interest, in the fulfilment of its ends, except when it is being foolish. Some of these policies, however, can yet be told apart from the others. Into this split, the thin end of a theory of the state might be wedged.

1. Certain policies, and the specific measures they call for, can at least conceptually be singled out as having a common negative feature: they appear to contribute to no plausible end, satisfy no manifest taste, augment no conceivable enjoyment of the state other than the maintenance of its tenure. They just help keep it in power. They use power in order to reproduce it. If it is right to say that Roman senators felt no altruistic love for the plebs, yet gave them bread and circuses, they "must have" done so because it seemed to them necessary for the maintenance of the existing order. If one can take it that Richelieu did not actually prefer townsmen to nobles, yet favoured the former and sought to weaken the latter, he "must have" done so in order to consolidate royal power. (The "must have" is in inverted commas to invite the reader's complicity and indulgence. So much of historical explanation is, inevitably and I think properly, no more than the elevation of the least unreasonable hypothesis to the rank of the true cause.)
   
 

2. Some measures, in addition to reproducing the state's power, may contribute to its other ends as well. Their nature is such that no presumption stands to the contrary. When a President Peron or a contemporary African government pampers the urban masses, we
   

can say that it "must" be doing so because it has staked its political survival on their support (or acquiescence), but it is not absurd to allow that it likes them, too. Hence, it may be actually pleased to make workers, clerks and soldiers better off at the expense of haughty cattle barons or obtuse tribal villagers. The shape of these measures reveals their support-buying, power-maintaining function, yet it permits the supposition that some other end is being fulfilled, too. Much of the redistribution undertaken by the modern democratic state has this shape.

1. There is sufficient historical evidence, however, of a clear-cut class of other policies and acts of state which use state power without intelligibly, plausibly visibly contributing to its maintenance. The religious policies of James II, Charles XII of Sweden's campaigns or the profligacy of the Naples Bourbons have, if anything, weakened their hold on power. Gladstone's failed attempts to give Home Rule to Ireland, the Kulturkampf fought by the Second Reich, or American near-belligerence on Britain's side in 1940 used up some of the support enjoyed by the respective governments. Though they may have been the right thing to do, it is hard to argue that they were good politics. If such policies are nevertheless pursued, they "must" fulfil an end other than the prolongation of the tenure of power. When Peter the Great brought in Germans to run Russia, made himself odious and ruthlessly upset the old ways, he was using up power in the short run (he had a margin to spare) even if the longer-run effects strengthened the throne (which is arguable).
   
 

2. A parallel should make the distinction clearer still. Conceptually, we are used to the idea of "subsistence wages." Marx has built his whole unfortunate theory of value and capital on the idea of the labour-time "socially necessary" for the reproduction of labour.
   

Only a part of the labourer's time is used up to produce the subsistence he needs to go on labouring, and subsistence is all he gets.*36 No matter that subsistence turns out to be impossible to pin down. As an idea, it is simple and powerful and it leads straight to surplus value and the class struggle. In our framework, the use of the power necessary for its own maintenance takes the place of the subsistence wage spent on the maintenance of the labourer. The surplus value that his labour time has produced in addition, accrues to capital as the pay-off to domination. In our scheme, "surplus value" would correspond to whatever satisfactions the state can afford to procure for itself over and above the maintenance of its tenure of power. Another, less "analytical" parallel is that between income and discretionary income, power and discretionary power.

4.6.9
Discretionary power is what the state can use to make its subjects listen to Bach and not listen to rock; to change the course of mighty rivers and transform nature; to build presidential palaces and government offices in keeping with its taste and sense of proportion; to deal out rewards and privileges to those who deserve it and to keep down those who deserve that, regardless of political expediency; to do good and aid causes its subjects care little about; to pursue national greatness; to invest in the wellbeing of a distant posterity and to make others adopt its values.

4.6.10 Our theory would not be a social theory if it had no sting in its tail, no indirect, roundabout secondary effects and no "feedback loops." Thus, it is entirely likely that once the state has made people observe the cult of Bach, and they have in due course taught themselves to like it, they will "identify" better with the state which gave them their tastes. Likewise, the splendour of the presidential palace, the achievement of national greatness and
"being first on the moon" may in the end implant in the public consciousness a certain sense of the state's legitimacy, a perhaps growing willingness to obey it regardless of hope of gain and fear of loss. Hence, they may serve as a cunning and slow-acting substitute for buying consent. Like Peter the Great's administrative reform, however, they require a discretionary margin of power now even if they are certain to yield greater legitimacy or a stronger repressive apparatus or both later.

1. Instead of saying, tautologically, that the rational state pursues its interests and maximizes its ends, whatever they are, I propose to adopt, as a criterion of its rationality, that it seeks to maximize its discretionary power.*37, *38
   
 

2. Discretionary power permits the state to make its subjects do what it wants, rather than what they want. It is exercised by taking their property and liberty. The state can appropriate people's money and buy things (including their services) with it. It can also override their spontaneous intentions and order them to serve its purposes. When the state is defending its tenure in open competition, however, all the property and liberty it can take is, by the definition of competitive equilibrium, absorbed in the "reproduction" of power, i.e. in the maintenance of its tenure by redistribution. The existence of a discretionary surplus would contradict the assumption of competition, under which it is impossible so to rearrange or enrich the redistributive pattern as to obtain more support for it (cf. the earlier section of this chapter on the "profitless," break-even character of equilibrium). This condition loses some of its precision and rigidity as we move to lower levels of abstraction; we introduce fuzziness, a margin of error, but no novel set of reasons to render likely the emergence of an appreciable discretionary surplus.
   
3. At this point, the state has completed its unwitting transformation, from being the seducer freely offering utilitarian improvement, one-man-one-vote and distributive justice, to being the drudge only just coping with its self-imposed redistributive obligations. Moreover, it has entrapped itself in several predicaments at once. One is competition, being on the treadmill. Another is the changing character of society in response to its own redistributory activity, notably addiction to aid, free-rider behaviour by each interest group towards all others and progressive loss of control over redistribution. An extreme form of this predicament is to be up against an "ungovernable" society. Finally, as direct redistribution is overlaid by ever thicker layers of churning, in the ultimate democratic predicament there is no possible equilibrium: society both demands and refuses the state's redistributive role. The latter, in maintaining consent, ought both to go on expanding and to "roll itself back."
   
 

4. Were we to dismiss this terminal self-contradiction as mere dialectic word-play and allow equilibrium to persist, however, the latter would still not represent a proper maximum for the state, except in the tenuous sense in which the earning of the subsistence wage is a "maximum" for the labourer. With no, or negligible, discretionary power, the state is better off than in any other available posture, in each of which it would lose power altogether and be replaced by its opposition.*39 It is rational for it to cling to this position. It may well content itself with it and just soldier on. Nevertheless, if it could deliberately change some of the available alternatives, i.e. modify in its favour the social and political environment to which it adjusts when "maximizing," it could make itself better off. Recognition of some such possibility (though not necessarily any action to realize it) may in fact be