The State by Anthony de Jasay (46 page)

No aspect of slave management was too trivial to be omitted from consideration or debate. Details of housing, diet, medical care,
marriage, child-rearing, holidays, incentives and punishments, alternative methods of organising field labour, the duties of managerial personnel, and even the manner and air assumed by a planter in his relationship with his slaves...*76

1. Most of the implications of having to run the state as a large, complex and self-reliant plantation, are fairly evident. Some are depressingly topical. They need not be laboured, but only touched upon. There has to be a degree of direction of labour to where it is needed rather than where it wants to go. Educational opportunity has to be allocated to raise and train the people needed to fill the future roles and situations the state expects to create. Armed force, surveillance and repressive capacity have to be doubled and redoubled, as they have to cope not only with political disobedience, but also with sloth, waste and free riding. The state cannot tolerate strikes. Nor can it tolerate "exit," voting with one's feet; the frontier must be closed for keeping its property in, and perhaps secondarily also for keeping any alien, discordant influence spoiling the condition of its property out.
   
 

2. Is this social system at last well-rounded, efficient in operation, perfectly consistent? Is no part of it geared to rub against, let alone clash with the working of another, ultimately breaking up vital innards? Does it deliver the satisfactions of governing-tempting the state to sit back and contemplate its finished design, concerned only with the enjoyment and preservation of its place within it, willing history to stop?
   
 

3. If there is a plausible answer to the question, another and equally speculative book would be needed to argue it. At first glance, however, the prospects for any definitive settlement of
   

outstanding affairs between state and civil society look doubtful-perhaps reassuringly so. In the event the state's striving for self-fulfilment were successfully to issue in a well-managed totalitarianism, the human types (the addict no less than the allergic) which such a system is apt to breed, would before long quite likely frustrate and disappoint the state's expectations. That may indeed be its inescapable predicament, just as it is probably the inescapable predicament of civil society to be disappointed in the state.

5.3.25

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Anthony de Jasay, The State
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NOTES, Chapters 1-3 Notes: Chapters 1-3 Notes: Chapters 4-
5

Introductio
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1. K. Marx, "The Jewish Question," Early Writings, 1975, pp.220, 226, 222.
   
 

2. As one of the founders of this school puts it, welfare economicsis about market failures, public choice theory is about government failures (James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, 1975, ch. 10). Note, however, the different tack adopted by certain public choice theorists, referred to in chapter 4, pp. 270-1, n. 38.
   
3. The term "political hedonist" was coined by the great LeoStrauss to denote Leviathan's willing subject.
   
 

1. Marx, "The Jewish Question," p. 219.
   
 

2. Chapter 1. The Capitalist State
   
 

4. Robert L. Carneiro, "A Theory of the Origin of the State," in J.
   

D.
Jennings and E. A. Hoebel (eds), Readings in Anthropology,3rd edn, 1970.

6.
A more succinct statement of the same point is found inMichael Taylor's excellent Anarchy and Cooperation, 1976, p. 130: "if preferences change as a result of the state itself, then it is not even clear what is meant by the desirability of the state." See also Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, 1973, pp. 123-4, for the related argument that since socialization adapts people to their environment, a heterogenous or pluralistic society is unlikely to turn homogenous and vice versa, although "only one generation has to suffer to create orthodoxy (as the absence of Albigensiens in France and Jews in Spain illustrates)."

However, Barry's use of the socialization argument seems to me somewhat lopsided. Must we exclude the possibility that the environment can generate not only positive, but also negative preferences for itself? Enough examples from second-generation socialist countries and even from third-generation Soviet Russia, attest to a virulent allergy to totalitarian ways and a yearning for diversity on the part of some unknown but perhaps not negligible part of the population. In the pluralistic West, there is a parallel yearning for more cohesion of purpose, for moral attitudes, an allergy to admass, to what Daniel Bell calls the "porno-pop culture" and the "psychedelic bazaar."

This is perhaps saying no more than that all societies tend to secrete corrosive elements (though in only some societies do the rulers suppress them). Yet it is not trivial to generalize the "endogenous preference" argument by admitting that social states may generate both likes and dislikes. Otherwise, the endogenous generation of preferences would ceaselessly cement any status quo and historical change would become even more mysterious, incomprehensible and random than it is anyway.

7.
In the luxuriant literature that has sprouted around John Rawls'sTheory of Justice, 1972, no objection appears to have been raised against the "original position" on this ground. The participants in the original position are devoid of all knowledge of their particular persons. They do not know whether they are representative white Anglo-Saxon men or representative Red Indian women, tenured philosophers or welfare recipients. They do not even know the age they live in (though this seems hard to reconcile with their knowledge of "political affairs and the principles of economics"). They are induced to seek a "cooperative solution" to their existence (in game-theory terms), which can be summarily interpreted as agreement on a social contract for a just state.

Failing agreement, in leaving the original position they would exit into the state of nature. They seek to avoid this outcome, because they know enough about themselves and the state to prefer it to the state of nature. They know their "life-plans" whose fulfilment depends on command over tangible and intangible "primary goods." They also know that the state, through the "advantages of social cooperation," entails a greater availability of primary goods than the state of nature. In technical language, the participants thus know that they are playing a "positive-sum game" in bargaining for a social contract (which is just in the sense, and only in the sense, that everybody is willing to stick to its terms).

This means that if the cooperative solution is reached, more primary goods can be distributed than if it is not.

The comparison of two bundles of primary goods, however, requires indexing, and the weights adopted for the index (for instance, the relative valuation of time off against real income), cannot help but reflect a logically prior preference for a type of society. In other words, people in the original position cannot say that the bundle of primary goods available in the state of nature (containing, for instance, much leisure) is smaller than that available under the state (containing, for instance, many tangible consumption goods) unless they already know that they prefer to live in civil society. Comparison of the state-of-nature bundle and the state bundle presupposes the very preference which it is employed and required to explain.

The state-of-nature bundle of primary goods contains more of the things which people living in the state of nature are used to and have learnt to appreciate. It is, for them, the bigger bundle. The converse is true of the bundle available under conditions of social cooperation. It is the bigger bundle for people who have learnt to like what it contains and not to mind its constraints. But can people in the original position really tell which bundle is bigger?

1. Pierre Clastres, La société contre l'état, 1974; Englishtranslation, Society against the State, 1977.
   
 

2. Ibid., ch. 11.
   
 

3. John Plamenatz, Man and Society, 1963, vol. II, pp. 280-1.See also his German Marxism and Russian Communism, 1954, ch. 2.
   
4. Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of PossessiveIndividualism, 1962, p. 49, for the view that without unconditional ownership, there can be no market for land. The same argument must hold for any other "means of production," including labour. (For Macpherson, no less than for Marx, the rot set in when the individual was acknowledged to own his labour and came to sell it rather than its products.) In Russia, service tenure of land meant that serfs ("souls") could not, prior to 1747, be sold off the land because they were needed to maintain the landlord's capacity to serve the state. The transferability of "souls" (hitherto regarded as managed by the landlord on behalf of the ultimate owner, the state) was a symptom of social progress, a sign that private property was taking root in Russia. The reader must bear in mind that the Russian nobility had no title to its lands prior to 1785 and that its service tenure was quite precarious. In view of the recent nature of private property as a social institution, the progress of capitalism in Russia in the short run-up to 1917 was most remarkable.
   
 

5. Gewerbefreiheit, the freedom to engage in a particular craft orcommerce, was introduced in Austria-Hungary in 1859 and in the various German states in the early 1860s. Prior to it, a cobbler needed a state licence to cobble and even a mercer needed one to sell thread. The licence was granted, or not, at the state's discretion, ostensibly on grounds of proficiency and good standing, in fact as a means to regulate competition. At all events, because of the licence, the goodwill of the business could not be easily negotiated.
   
 

1. One must not confuse injustice and cheating. An unjust manwill, if he can, hire you for wages you cannot be expected to work for. (What this may precisely mean is a large question. As I am not concerned with substantive questions of justice, happily I can
   
2. pass it by.) A cheat will not pay you the wages he said he would. The capitalist state must, of course, go after the cheat.
   
 

6. The answer consistent with the capitalist ideology whosecontours I am trying to sketch, might run like this: "Yes, a man should be left free to sell himself into slavery; there is no more competent judge than he of his reason for doing so." The state has nonetheless the duty to withhold legal protection from the institution of slavery, contributing to its removal as an option available under contractual freedom. Contracts under which slave-traders sell captured Africans to slave-owners obviously violate the Africans' rights. If plantation-bred third-generation slaves, for reasons which will always remain debatable but which are their reasons, do not seek freedom, we have to think again. Note that the British government first prohibited the slave trade without prohibiting slavery. The state must simply ensure that if he wants to walk off the plantation, he should not be prevented from doing so, i.e., it should not help enforce a contract under which the planter owns the slave. This is patently not an abolitionist position. It is doubtful whether it would have been an acceptable compromise to Calhoun and Daniel Webster.
   
 

7. This assumes that the arrangement requires unanimity. If itdoes not, and the arrangement continues to produce its benefits after the withdrawal of the person who failed to get his way in bargaining, the well-known free-rider problem arises and might destabilize the arrangement. If the non-cooperator benefits as well as the cooperators, an incentive is created for the latter to defect. As each successive cooperator becomes a free rider, ever fewer cooperators carry ever-more free riders and the incentive to defect keeps increasing. Various devices, some practicable in some situations and others in others, can be conceived to hinder this outcome and give the arrangement some stability. (Cf. pp. 23739.)
   
8. The reader will have spotted that while one type of statewould have an interest in proceeding as above, other types of state might want to do the precise opposite, to make their subjects appeal to them as frequently as possible; this may well coincide with the interest and the perhaps-unconscious wish of the legal profession. Laws breed lawyers who, in turn, breed laws.
   
 

9. K. Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in
   

K.
Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, 1968, p.169.

18.
Locke, seeking to oppose Hobbes and to present a morepalatable doctrine, saw that if people's natural right was to remain inviolate (i.e. if the state was not to trespass upon property which, in turn, was coextensive with liberty), sovereignty could not be absolute. It had to be limited to the upholding of natural right (Second Treatise, 1689, section 135). Subjection of the executive to a strong legislature was to safeguard this limit.