The State by Anthony de Jasay
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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 StateViolence, 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.
States generally start with somebody's defeat.
"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.
Consider in this light a well-regarded attempt at reconciling the (historically) violent origin of the state with the rational volition
of the subject which underlies the analytical type of ontologies such as the social contract.*5 In this essay, any person living in the state of nature forms an estimate of all future incomes he is likely to get in the state of nature and another estimate for all future incomes he would receive in civil society endowed with a state. The second estimate is taken to be larger than the first. The two estimates are discounted to present value. It takes time to get everybody else round to concluding the social contract that provides the passage from the state of nature to civil society. The high incomes resulting from the creation of the state are, therefore, some way off in the future and the present value of their excess over state-of-nature incomes is small. It may leave insufficient incentive for undertaking the task of getting everybody round to agree to the social contract. On the other hand, a state can be quickly created by violent means. The higher incomes engendered by the existence of the state thus begin to accrue quickly. They do not shrink so much when translated to present value. The comparison of the present value of incomes under a state formed slowly by peaceful negotiation of a social contract, with that of incomes under a state entering society by the short-cut of violence, must favour violence. If so, the income-maximizing rational person can presumably be expected either to welcome the violence done to him by whoever is bringing in the state, or himself resort to violence to organize it. The reader may either take it (though this cannot have been the author's intention) that this is the reason why most states were not created by peaceful negotiation but by violence or that, whatever was the historical cause in any particular case, this theory of rational motivation is at least not inconsistent with it.
1.1.3 Like the contractarian theories before it, this sort of theory invites the careless conclusion that because states have come into being by violence, and flourished, and because it can make sense for people serenely to submit to violence leading to the creation of the state which they desire but cannot manage to achieve, people did welcome state-creating violence after the event. The underlying assumption is that the state, regardless of its peaceful or violent origin, helps people in the pursuit of their good.
Astonishingly, this assumption is hardly ever cast in a more general form, for instance by allowing for algebraic sign. If it were, it should read "the state helps/hinders," with the actual balance of the expression depending on the empirical content of the terms "help" and "hindrance." More informatively, the assumption could be cast in a form like "the state helps/hinders some people, hinders/helps others and leaves the rest unaffected." The affected are helped and hindered in different ways and to different extents. Unless by a fluke the hindered set is empty (i.e. everybody is either helped or left alone), the algebraic sum is a matter of comparisons between the helped and the hindered. Running up against interpersonal comparisons so early is a sign that our reflections are at least headed in the right direction, towards the central questions of political theory.
If ever there were people in the state of nature, and as a matter of repeated historical fact it took violence to impose a state upon them, it seems pertinent to ask, Why does standard political theory regard it as a basic verity that they preferred the state? The question really breaks down into two, one "ex ante" and the other "ex post": (i) Do people in the state of nature prefer it to the state? and (ii) Do people, once in the state, prefer the state of nature to it? These questions very sensibly allow for people's preferences to be related, in some way, to the political environment in which they actually happen to live.*6 However, once they are framed in this way, they are seen to have a peculiar character. When social
scientists say that they know that Smith prefers tea to coffee because he just said so, or because he has revealed his preference by taking tea when he could have taken coffee, they deal in objects which are presumed to be both familiar and accessible to Smith. When Smith is talking about his preferences for things he can at best know from hearsay, difficulties begin to arise. They are compounded when he could not possibly translate his avowed preference into a practical act of choice, because some alternatives are simply not feasible. People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other. It is often a historical anachronism and an anthropological absurdity to suppose such movement. On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature?*7
1.1.6 It appears that among certain South American Indians (though conceivably elsewhere, too) an increase in the size of the demographic unit is recognized as favouring the likelihood of the creation of a state, possibly because of the changed scale and kind of wars that this entails. A war chief supported by his quasi-professional warrior followers can coerce the rest of the people into durable obedience. In a book by Pierre Clastres which should prominently figure in any bibliography of the social contract,*8 it is reported that the Tupi-Guarani people used to abort this process by swarms of them seceding, going off to distant and fearsome lands on prophet-led flights from the greater dread of subjection, of the state which they identify with evil. The American Indian people studied by Clastres typically live in the state of nature, a condition which has little to do with the level of technical civilization and everything to do with political power. Their chiefs can exhort but not command, and must rely on oratory, prestige and liberal hospitality to get their way. Their prestige depends in part on seldom risking interference in a matter where their exhortation is liable to go unheeded. There is no apparatus among them for enforcing obedience and the Indians would not dream of voluntarily contracting to obey, though they may choose to agree with the chief on a case-by-case basis.
Theirs are, according to Clastres, true affluent societies, easily capable of producing surpluses but choosing not to do so, a two-hour working day being sufficient amply to provide for what they consider adequate subsistence. Though there is little or no production for exchange, there is private prop
erty; there could be no private hospitality, no invitations to feasts without it. There is no obvious obstacle to the division of labour and hence to capitalism, but the goods that the division of labour may provide are not prized. Work is held in contempt. Hunting, fighting, storytelling and party-going are preferred to the sort of goods labour could produce. The question is staring us in the face, Is it because of their preferences that the Indians abhor the command-obedience relation inherent in the state, and choose to stay in the state of nature? Or is it living in the state of nature which predisposes them to like, above all else, the tangibles and intangibles that typically go with it?
Marx would no doubt frown at the role tastes and preferences are allowed to play in this way of posing the question, and would presumably decide that subsistence agriculture, gathering and hunting were phenomena of existence, of the "base," while the institutions of the state were those of consciousness, of the "superstructure." It was thus the former which must have determined the latter. Clastres, for one, asserts the contrary.*9 Analytically (as distinct from historically), both views are true in the same sense as "the chicken caused the egg" and "the egg caused the chicken" are both true. My contention here is that
preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others. If so, theories that people in general (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), or the ruling class (Marx, Engels), mount the political arrangements that suit them, need be approached with much mistrust. Conversely, the view (Max Weber's) that historical outcomes are largely unintended, deserves a préjugé favorable as the more promising approximation to many of the relations linking state and subject.
1.1.9
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
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1. The Capitalist StateTitle and Contract The state is a capitalist state if it does not demand ownership to be justified, and does not interfere for his own good with a person's contracts.
The origin of capitalist ownership is that "finders are keepers."
This is the acknowledgement that permits the passage from possession to ownership, to good title to property, independently of its particularities, of who the title-holder may be and also of the use he may or may not make of the property. The state which recognized title to property on this ground (though it may do so on other grounds as well) fulfils one of the necessary conditions of being a "capitalist state" in the sense I am using here (a sense which will become very clear as I proceed). The title is not invalidated by scarcity, is contingent neither upon merit nor status, and entails no obligation. The reference to scarcity may need some elucidation. What I mean is that if a man can own an acre, he can own a million acres. If his title is good, it is good regardless of whether, in Locke's famous words, "enough and as good" is left for others. Ownership is not invalidated by the scarcity of the things owned nor by the non-owners' desire for it, so that in a capitalist state access to scarce goods is regulated by price and substitution and not by sovereign authority, however constituted.
Those brought up on the notions of primitive accumulation, division of labour and appropriation of surplus value as the source of continuing accumulation, might balk at this manner of approaching the origin of capital and the essence of the capitalist state. No doubt very little capital has ever been "found" and a lot has been accumulated. Moreover, to both Marxists and perhaps
most non-Marxists it might look like putting the cart before the horse to proceed from the "relations of production" (which, as Plamenatz has demonstrated, mean relations of ownership "if they are to have any identity at all")*10 to the "means of production," the things owned. Yet it is not, or at least not generally, a change in the means of production or in the techniques applied to them, that transforms them into capitalist property. Land held by any major French or German noble family down to the Thirty Years' War was owned by it in the most tenuous sense only. It was a means of production but assuredly not capitalist property in the manner of English or Italian land. Land owned by the English nobility and gentry from the sixteenth century on, can rightly be regarded as capital and has in fact served as the main springboard of English capitalism. Shipping and other mercantile accumulation of capital got off to a flying start in late Tudor and Stuart times due, in great part, to the stakes put up by landowners. Non-capitalist (I am advisedly avoiding the term "feudal") tenure of land usually originated in service and continued on the strength of a (more or less well founded and realistic) expectation of future service. This was true of the landlord who was supposed to owe service, directly or indirectly, to the sovereign, and of his serfs who owed service to him.*11 It is characteristic of English social evolution that land tenure became so rapidly unconditional, and that such (light, and unwritten) conditions as remained, concerned local justice and charity where the landlord supplanted rather than served the state.
1.2.3 The peasant in the North and Central Russian "repartitional" village held land because of who he was and because he had so many adults in his family. His title, such as it was, could be argued to have depended on status, need for and capacity to use, the land. Every so many years, when the cumulative change in the needs of his and other families in the village demanded it, the caucus of influential peasants who ran the obshchinnoe might take away his strips of land and deal him out other, inferior strips. Nobody, however, could sell out or buy into the village; if they could have done, the land would have become capital. The land the American farmer "found" on the frontier, or "proved up" under the 1862 Homestead Act, or got from somebody else who did, was capital. The premises, tools and stock of materials of a master of a craft guild, were not capital. The physically very similar premises, tools and materials of his successor, the small entrepreneur-artisan under Gewerbefreiheit were the very essence of capital.*12 Unlike his guild predecessor, he could be anybody and could run his shop the way he saw fit. It is not the scale of the undertakings nor the fact of employing the labour of others which makes the first pre-capitalist and the second capitalist. Both generated "surplus value" and enabled their owner to appropriate it. However (except perhaps in Italy north of the Papal States), the guild master's title to his business was contingent not only upon constraints on output, price and quality, but also upon who he was and how he lived.
Ownership which does not have to be born into, lived up to, served and atoned for, but just is, is of course no less an ideological phenomenon for that. Its recognition is a distinctive mark of the ideology defining the capitalist state, just as ownership which is contingent upon its conformity to some principle of social utility, justice, equality or efficiency and which is forfeit or at least forcibly adjusted if it does not so conform, satisfies an ideology which is variously called democratic, liberal, socialist or combinations of these words.
Unsurprisingly, the relation connecting the finders-are-keepers principle of ownership to the capitalist state runs both ways. Like
other implicit functions which mostly make up the base of the social sciences, it does not feature an independent and a dependent variable, an unmistakeable cause and an effect. The relation really asserts that it takes the capitalist state to accept and uphold such a quintessentially positivist, non-normative principle of ownership, and that it takes such a severe, contingent-upon-nothing kind of ownership to make the state a capitalist state.
There is a second necessary condition of capitalism, which is inevitably bound up with the first without being part of the same thing. It is the freedom of contract. When, as in most of medieval Europe, the tenure of property involved onerous obligations and was open to persons of a defined status or other defined characteristics, alienation by free contract could not have been countenanced by the sovereign. Even the marriage contract was subject to state approval and for really prominent fam
ilies remained so into the eighteenth century. Property came gradually to be governed by contract rather than status, partly because servitudes in kind were commuted into money and partly because, from being the obligations of the owner, they became those of the property-of the marquisat rather than of the marquis-so that the state interest was not harmed by letting it pass into the hands of any upstart tax farmer or venal magistrate. Much the same mutation led from a man's debts, which he had to discharge or go to prison, to the no-recourse mortgage on property and to the liabilities of an undertaking which permitted its changing hands, even before formal limited liability became widespread.
Freedom of contract, as a necessary condition for the state to be a capitalist one, can be construed as the freedom of the finder not just to keep what he found, but to transfer all his rights in it to another on whatever terms he chooses, and by extension the
freedom of the latter to transfer it to yet another. The capitalist state must let freedom of contract prevail over both ideas of status and propriety, and ideas of just contracts (fair wage, just price).