The State by Anthony de Jasay (48 page)

It seems to me difficult to affirm that the formation of political preferences is reversible. It may or may not be, and the historical evidence can be read either way. My intuitive inclination would be to regard it as irreversible, both in its adaptive and counter-adaptive manifestations. The question is of obvious importance if one form of government can, so to speak, "spoil the people forever" for another form of government.

Chapter 2. The Adversary State

1. Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, 1946, p. 78.
   
 

2. An application of this particular principle to the special case ofthe legitimacy of the use of force between states is Machiavelli's doctrine that war is legitimate when it is necessary, the state itself being the only possible judge of necessity. For illuminating remarks on the enforcement by states of the monopoly of war-making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, cf. Michael Howard, War in European History, 1976, pp. 23-4.
   
 

1. It may be reasonable to suppose that there is someprobabilistic feedback from an independent judiciary yesterday to good government and hence the toleration of an independent judiciary today, a virtuous cycle running counter to the vicious circle, if there is one, of state power changing society and the changed society providing the state with yet more power over itself. Clearly, however, the virtuous cycle has little stability; if it
   
2. is interrupted by bad government for whatever reason, the independence of the judiciary is soon taken care of.
   
 

3. Gilbert Ryle's famous term for referring to the whole when wemean the part, as in "The Russian occupation forces raped your sister."
   
 

4. The Oxford History of England, vol. V, Mary McKisack, TheFourteenth Century, 1959, p. 413.
   
 

5. Donald V. Kurtz, "The Legitimation of Early Inchoate States,"in Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (eds), The Study of the State, 1981.
   
 

6. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent, 1982, p.24, his italics.
   
 

7. Ibid., p. 26, my italics, cf. also pp. 215-6.
   
 

8. Chadwick did not think that he and his fellow civil servantpioneers were empire-building, promoting their own pet policies, fulfilling their own (selfless) ends or working for the (selfish) interests of a self-serving bureaucracy. No doubt sincerely, he felt that they were neutrally administering the law and thus, but only thus, serving the public. He did not see that they were largely making the law. In fact, he considered attacking a civil servant to be like hitting a woman-the analogy presumably residing in their common defencelessness!
   
 

9. Sir Ivor Jennings, Party Politics, 1962, vol. III, p. 412.
   
 

10. The estimates are those of G. K. Fry in his The Growth ofGovernment, 1979, p. 2.
    
11. Ibid., p. 107.
    
 

12. Leszek Kolakowski, the philosopher and eminent student ofMarx's thought, holds that civil society cannot have structure without private ownership of the means of production (Encounter, Jan. 1981). If so, the democratic drive (noted by Tocqueville) to break down structure, bypass intermediaries and appeal to one-man-one-vote, and the socialist drive to abolish private ownership of capital, are more closely related than is apparent.
    
 

13. Michael Oakeshott, "Political Education," in Peter Laslett(ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1956, p. 2.
    
 

14. For example, it could be stipulated that no arrangement mustbe tinkered with unless doing so produced a greater gain in utility than the loss, if any, entailed in the act of tinkering, where utility would include the value that one may attach to the mere non-disturbance of an existing arrangement in addition to its utility in the customary, narrower sense.
    
 

15. Frank Hahn, "On Some Difficulties of the UtilitarianEconomist," in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond, 1982, pp. 195-8, has a particularly lucid exposition of this question. Cf. also P. J. Hammond, "Utilitarianism, Uncertainty and Information," in the same volume.
    
 

1. It is only fair to remind the reader that Sir Karl Popper, in hisPoverty of Historicism, 2nd edn, 1960, approves of piecemeal (at least as opposed to large-scale) "social engineering" on the grounds that the piecemeal approach allows being "always on the look-out for the unavoidable unwanted consequences" (p. 67). Being on the look-out is certainly the proper attitude. It is
   
2. effective when the consequences are easy to identify and quick to appear; it is not when they are not.
   
 

16. William J. Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of theState, 2nd edn, 1965, p. 29.
    
 

17. A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law andPublic Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, 1905.
    
 

18. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, p. 495,quoted by Lord Robbins, Politics and Economics, 1963, p. 15; my italics.
    
 

1. A rigorous exposition of the types of interpersonalcomparisons required for various types of "social welfare functions" is provided by K. C. Basu, Revealed Preference of Governments, 1980, ch. 6.
   
 

2. I have borrowed the title of this perfectly dispassionate book to head the present section because its unintentional black humour conveys so well what I take to be the irreducible core of the utilitarian solution. The only preference which is ever "revealed" in the maximization of social welfare is that of the maximizer, of the holder of sovereign power over society.
   
 

19. A non-unanimous (e.g. majority) agreement to performinterpersonal utility comparisons in certain ways, would confer the same logical status upon the utility-maximizing quality of the public action selected on the basis of such comparison, as upon those directly selected, without benefit of any interpersonal comparisons, by any sort of non-unanimous agreement (vote, acclamation or random choice).
    
1. In the Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, 1889,Green takes off from ground next door to the Manchester School, and lands on the Hegelian cloud. Property arises out of the conquest of nature by unequal individuals, hence it is rightly unequal. It is owed to society because without the latter's guarantee it could not be possessed. All rights derive from the common good. There can be no property rights, nor any other rights, against the common good, against society. The general will recognizes the common good.
   
 

2. The individual's ownership of property, then, must be contingent on the general will approving of his tenure, a result which is as much Jacobin as it is Hegelian. Green did not make this conclusion explicit. His successors increasingly do.
   
 

20. "Owning" plainly excludes "possessing de facto butunlawfully," and "usurping."
    
 

21. I find "personal endowments" better to use than the "naturalassets" employed among others by Rawls, because it begs no unintended question of how a person has come by his endowments, "naturally" or not-whether he was born with them, worked for them or just picked them up as he went. In my scheme, personal endowments differ from capital only in that they are not transferable; "finders are keepers" rules out questions about their deservedness and "provenance."
    
 

22. Cf. Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, 1973, p. 159,for the suggestion that there are enough people who enjoy, or would enjoy, doing professional and managerial jobs to enable the pay of these jobs to be brought down to that of teachers and social workers.
    
23. It is tempting to ascribe the early liberal respect for property tothe Lockean tradition in Anglo-American political thought, with its close identification of property and (political) liberty. In a different culture, a different explanation would have to be found: why did the Abbé de Sieyès, a liberal in the Dewey mould who did not care a fig about Locke, think that everything should be equal except property?
    
 

24. It is a gross fallacy to suppose that the rule "it is publicopinion, or the majority of voters, who shall determine whether somebody is a Jew" is morally or rationally of a superior order to the apocryphal Hitler rule. Note, however, that "the majority of voters shall determine whether a contract is free, and whether distributive shares are just" is widely accepted by the general public.
    
 

25. I am indebted to I. M. D. Little for the suggestion that "endlessiteration" is not the unavoidable fate of this social process. Convergence towards a state of rest is logically just as possible. Nor is there an a priori presumption that endless iteration is more likely to be the case. However, the historical experience of actual societies supports the hypothesis of endless iteration and does not support that of convergence towards an equilibrium where no new state commands, prohibitions and aids are forthcoming.
    
 

26. The reader may think that between the above lines there lurksa dim shadow of some "social trade-off between justice and liberty" which, side by side with the other trade-offs between pairs of society's plural ends, is at the base of "pluralist" political theory. No such shadow is intended. As I fail to see how a society can be thought of as "choosing," I would object to a social trade-off intruding its woolly head here.
    
27. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960, p. 444, myitalics. The quotation repays study. First, we learn that what may have been true then is not true now that we control the state. Second, we are encouraged to embrace unintended effects, to make them into intended ones, positively to will second, third and nth rounds of state expansion and deliberately to push along the process of iteration engendered by the self-feeding feature of these effects. Used as we are to the contemporary state being overwhelmed by demands for "extending its functions" and "enlarging its operations" to help deserving interests, it may well strike us as funny that Joe Chamberlain saw a need for whetting people's appetites for the state's benefactions.
    
 

28. The corollary could, for example, take this form: "Thestronger the blows it can deliver to smash the class enemy, the better the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat can fulfil its historic function." Needless to say, the liberal ideology is quite unready to accept a corollary of this sort.
    
 

29. Benjamin R. Barber, "Robert Nozick and PhilosophicalReductionism," in M. Freeman and D. Robertson (eds), The Frontiers of Political Theory, 1980, p. 41.
    
 

Chapter 3. Democratic Values

1. I am alluding to S. M. Lipset's frequently quoted cri de coeur(Political Man, 1960, p. 403), that democracy is not a means to the good life, it is the good life.
   
 

2. Notably by the state drafting potential muggers into the armyand leading them to pillage rich foreign towns in the manner of Bonaparte in 1796. The conflict arises later, in the follow-up: Bonaparte soon came to require, as he put it, "an annual revenue of 100,000 men" ("une rente de 100,000 hommes").
   
1. Cooperative solutions are best understood as outcomes ofpositive-sum games with no losers. A game, however, may have losers as well as gainers and yet be considered to have a positive sum. In helping some by harming others, the state is supposed to be producing a positive, zero or negative sum. Such suppositions in strict logic imply that utilities are interpersonally comparable.
   
 

2. It may be said, for instance, that robbing Peter to pay Paul is a positive-sum game. If we say this, we affirm that the marginal utility of money to Paul is higher. Instead of saying this, it is perhaps less exacting to assert that it was only just or fair to favour Paul; that he deserved it more; or that he was poorer. The last argument may be an appeal either to justice or to utility, and thus has, like fudge, the strength of shapelessness.
   
 

3. Is the liberal intellectual better off in the state of nature, orunder state capitalism? If he just cannot tell, and if he is the sort who must nudge society, which way should he nudge it?
   
 

4. A simple, undifferentiated community in this context means notonly that all its members are equal (before God, before the law, in talents, influence, wealth or other important dimensions in which equality is customarily measured), but that they are all about equally concerned by any of the issues which come up to be democratically decided on behalf of the community. A community of equals in the customary loose sense may have members of different occupations, sex and age groups. They will not be equally concerned by issues which impact occupations or sex or age groups differentially; most issues do.
   
 

1. It is an interesting fact that German and French company lawmake important provision for "blocking minorities"
   
2. (Sperrminorität, minorité de blocage), while British company law and American corporation law do not.
   
 

5. Cf. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 2nd edn,1980, p. 19. For Schelling, the secret ballot protects the voter. This is undoubtedly true. However, it is also true that it transforms him into a bad risk. Corrupting, bribing him becomes a sheer gamble.
   
 

6. Majority rule, with votes cast entirely according to interest,would inevitably produce some redistribution, hence some inequality in a society of equals. In a society of unequals, there would likewise always be a majority for redistribution. As Sen has remarked, a majority could be organized for redistribution even at the expense of the poor. "Pick the worst off person and take away half his share, throw away half of that, and then divide the remainder among the rest. We have just made a majority improvement." (Amartya Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, 1982, p. 163.) Competition, however, ensures that the majority has more attractive, richer redistributive alternatives to vote for,