The State by Anthony de Jasay (7 page)

guard. As he is like me, I have to fear him, and cannot prudently make the first step which would break the vicious circle if he were unlike me.

1. In modern decision theory, such situations are called "prisoners' dilemmas."*19 As set up, they have no spontaneous cooperative solution. Left to themselves, both "prisoners" must, if they are rational, seek to get the better of each other by "confessing" first, and both end up with a longer sentence than if they had both played "thief's honour" and refused to confess. In Hobbes, they both end up with a shorter and nastier life. Their sole escape is to abandon the state of nature and conclude a "covenant of mutual trust" whereby a designated sovereign is invested with whatever power it takes to enforce peace (or natural right). Thus nobody need fear that, by behaving trustingly, he will be taken advantage of by the others; therefore all can behave trustingly. The sovereign will, for some reason, use his absolute power only for obtaining this result. His subjects have no right to rebel but nor do they have any reason for doing so. It is not clear whether, if they did have cause, they would have a right to rebel.
   
 

2. The prisoners' dilemma implicit in Hobbes requires, for its proper study, the state of nature where no sovereign authority stops the participants from making themselves miserable if they are so inclined.*20 States are in a state of nature in that they retain the faculty of recourse to force against each other and do not transfer their arms and their sovereignty to a super-state.*21
   
 

3. I will consider, in this context, two Hobbesian dilemmas, those of war and trade. While I am at it, I will go on briefly to look at Rousseau's problem of general social cooperation also, though the
   

latter is quite different in nature (it is not a "prisoners' dilemma" and requires a special psychological assumption in order not to result in voluntary cooperation).

1. Let there be two sovereign countries (to borrow the language of army manoeuvres, "Blue" and "Red"). Both want "eminence" in Hobbes's sense. The order of their preferences is: (1) victory in war, (2) disarmament, (3) armed peace and (4) defeat in war. They must choose between two "strategies"-arming and disarming-without knowing what the other country chooses. The "pay-off matrix" resulting from this situation will then be as in figure 1.
   
 

2. Though Blue does not know whether Red will arm or disarm, he will choose to arm because by doing so he avoids defeat, gets peace at a cost as the worst-case pay-off and may get victory if Red is a sucker. Red is like Blue, and reasons similarly. He, too, chooses to arm. They end up in the southeast corner of the figure, in armed peace which is the "maximin" (the best worst-case) solution proper to hostile players. The northwest corner of costless peace is denied them, though they would both prefer it, because of their even greater preference for victory over each other. Once in the northwest corner, Blue would try to go into the southwest and Red into the northeast quadrant, i.e. the "cooperative solution" of costless peace would be unstable in the absence of a super-state enforcing disarmament.
   
 

3. This is, broadly, the result we actually find in the real world. States are most of the time in the southeast quadrant of the figure,
   

i.e.
they live in costly armed peace. From time to time they slipinto the southwest or northeast quadrant and make war. Whether this is by virtue of unequal arms, a freak cause, or for another of the innumerable historical causes of war, is beyond our present concern. Despite their preference for northwest over southeast, however, they do not surrender sovereignty. We must carefully note this fact and consider it presently.

1.5.9
The dilemma of trade is formally identical to the dilemma of war. Let there be the same two countries, Red and Blue. Each wants the other's goods. Both have the same order of preferences: (1) get foreign goods for free, (2) trade home goods for foreign goods, (3) retain the home goods (no trade), and (4) forgo the home goods and get no foreign goods (total loss, confiscation, expropriation, write-off). The two countries contract to deliver goods to each other (or to lend for later repayment, or invest for a return). As there is no enforcing super-state, they can either perform the contract or default, as in figure 2.

1.5.10 Game theory would once again predict that neither trader will give the other the chance to play him for a sucker, so that "maximin" is the dominant strategy for both and they end up not trading. The structure of their preferences and the structure of the pay-offs jointly deny them the benefit of trading in the absence of a contract-enforcer. This prediction, of course, is belied by the widespread fact of trade, investment and lending across national jurisdictions, which those who engage in them find on the whole worthwhile in the face of a certain frequency of bad debts and defaults of one kind or another. States are in certain circumstances
even prepared to give redress to foreign nationals and enforce performance by their own defaulting nationals; an altogether quixotic act by the standard conceptions of basic social contract theory. Equally quixotic is the voluntary submission, by medieval traders and bankers, of cases of default or disputed contract performance to the judgments of their peers appointed for the purpose but possessing no arms and commanding no police, especially when you consider the danger that the decision might have gone against them!

1. If history demonstrates that two ostensibly identical dilemmas regularly give rise to contrasting outcomes, the war dilemma resulting in armed peace (with occasional war) and the trade dilemma resulting in trade, the ostensible identity must hide some significant difference. Intuitively, war is more easily seen as a single isolated act than is trade. A war can even be fought "to end all wars," to have hegemony in peace forever after. Trade is typically an indefinite series of recurrent acts, which the participants fully intend to prolong. Everything that mathematics and psychology finds conducive to cooperative solutions in "iterated" prisoners' dilemmas applies to trade, much less of it to war. Neither dilemma and its real-world resolution, however, lends convincing support to the Hobbesian reason for inventing a state and escaping from the brutish misery of the state of nature, into its encircling arms.
   
 

2. Is there more force in Rousseau's thesis, that people in the state of nature are unable to organize the social cooperation necessary for the realization of their common good (the general will)? His basic statement of the problem is in the Second Discourse, and is known as the parable of the Hunting Party.*22 If (two) hunters stalk a deer, they are sure to catch it if only each one will stand faithfully
   

at his post. They can in this way unconsciously acquire the idea of mutual obligation (which, for Rousseau, forms the passage from the state of nature to civil society), but only if their present and palpable interest demands it. However, they lack foresight and "hardly think of the morrow." Therefore, if one sees a hare passing, he will quit the deer stalk and run off to catch it, depriving the other hunter of the deer and, indeed, of bagging anything at all. The pay-off matrix of their interaction will have the form of figure 3.*23

1. As both hunters prefer the deer, or even half of one, to a hare, neither has an incentive to "sucker" the other, leaving him standing while he runs off after the hare. Neither would, therefore, rationally opt for a "maximin" strategy (go for the hare in the southeast corner). The deer hunt, then, is critically different from the genuine, Hobbesian prisoners' dilemma. Social cooperation is not a dilemma and does not for that reason require coercion. A problem (but not a dilemma) is only created for the hunting party by the myopia of one of the hunters who cannot see that a sure deer at the end of the hunt is better than a sure hare. (If both hunters suffered from such complete lack of forethought, they might "objectively" have a prisoners' dilemma without feeling it. Neither would worry about the end-result of the party; they would not perceive the missed deer, let alone invent an arrangement, such as the social contract creating a state, enabling them to catch the deer rather than the hare, which is the only reason they would have for not letting the hunt take its course, with both hunters running off after the game, if any, they happen to see.)
   
 

Supposing, then, that at least the second hunter is alive to the advantage of getting the first hunter to keep his place, what solutions are available for overcoming the latter's myopia or fecklessness? The contractarian solution is to get him to become a party to the social contract, voluntarily submitting to coercion when needed. But it is difficult to see why he would see the advantage of the social contract if he does not see that of standing fast.*24 He is either shortsighted and sees neither, or he is not and the hunters don't need the social contract.

1. A more promising line of thought is to suppose that the hunters have hunted before and, as by happy chance no hare crossed their paths, they did catch the deer. The second hunter (the far-sighted one) has saved up a quarter. Next time out he dangled it before the myopic eyes of the first hunter, keeping him at his task and letting him have it at the end of the day while he kept the whole new deer they successfully caught together. (He has, of course, not forgotten once more to set aside a quarter, to maintain the "wage fund.") This, in a slightly abridged version, is the story of abstinence, capital accumulation, natural selection, the differential contributions and rewards of entrepreneurial initiative and wage labour, and in fact the organization of social cooperation and the determination of the terms on which the participants are willing to carry it on. (In "How Justice Overrides Contracts" [pp. 160-173], we will meet the claim that willing social cooperation is not a matter of the terms the participants agree, but of the terms being reasonable. If the terms that have proved capable of bringing about social cooperation need not, for that reason alone, be considered reasonable, difficulties arise about the very meaning of social cooperation. What, then, is cooperation on unreasonable terms?)
   
 

The story, however, does not naturally lend itself to the sort of happy ending which we have learnt to associate with the exit from the state of nature. It does not explain why rational persons, living in a state of nature, should have a preference for the state and seek to invent one (and it is silent on the civic preferences of persons who have been educated in and by the state and have never had occasion to try the state of nature).

1. Persons are in states, have been there for many generations, and would have no practical means of getting out if they wanted to. States are in the state of nature; many of them have known something approaching the security offered by the super-state when they were part of the Roman Empire, or a British colony; and if they wanted to surrender their sovereignty to a super-state, there are at least some practical steps they could take to try and organize one. They do nothing of the sort. They are quite content to listen to their own voice at the United Nations, leaving it the fatuous irrelevance that it is. Is it, then, beyond reasonable doubt that persons would rush and negotiate a social contract if, like states, they had the option not to do so?
   
 

2. States have known both peace and war throughout history. Some states have died as such because of war, though more states have been born. Most, however, have survived more than one war and continue to muddle through, without finding existence so "nasty and brutish" as to make life within a world state look enticing. Even the very particular prisoners' dilemma in which two nuclear superpowers are exposed to the threat of destruction and to the expense of maintaining a counter-threat, has not so far induced them to seek shelter and assured self-preservation in a Soviet-American contract.
   
3. On a less apocalyptic level, "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies in international trade seem to be a perfectly good practical illustration of the prisoners' dilemma as applied to states. Generally speaking, all states could be better off if, by cooperative conduct, they allowed the potential gains from trade to be fully realized, just as all prisoners would be better off if none betrayed the other by confessing. The "dominant strategy" of each state (as the "optimum tariff" argument demonstrates), however, is to engage in discriminatory trade practices, high tariffs, competitive devaluations and so forth. This strategy is "dominant" on the argument that if other states behave nicely and adopt free-trader conduct, the first state will reap advantages from its misbehaviour, while if other states misbehave, it would suffer by not also misbehaving. The supposed outcome of every state adopting its dominant strategy is an escalating trade war with everybody rapidly getting poorer and being unable to do anything about it in the absence of a super-state with powers of coercion. In actual fact, many states much of the time behave reasonably well in international trade. They either do not have a dominant strategy or, if they do, it is not to misbehave. Most states most of the time adhere to GATT rules (which stand for the "cooperative solution" in game-theory parlance). Trade wars are generally minor skirmishes, limited to a few products of a few states and instead of escalating as they should, they usually subside. Such "partial free trade" is achieved, just like "partial peace," without benefit of a state above states and the transfer of power to it. Complete free trade, like total peace, may from most points of view be more satisfactory, but the cost of the added satisfaction must appear prohibitive to the participants; states do not willingly submit to domination even if the dominant entity is to be called the Democratic Federation of Independent Peoples.