Such a state, then, will make few and simple laws and not enforce many of the laws it may have inherited. It will make it clear that it dislikes adjudicating claims against established situations resulting from people's freely negotiated contracts, will do so gingerly if it must but only as a last resort.
It will be reluctant to promote the good of society, let alone to order the more fortunate of its subjects to share their good fortune with the less fortunate, not because it lacks compassion, but because it does not consider that having creditable and honourable feelings entitles the state to coerce its subjects into indulging them. We must leave it at that, and not try to find out (nor could we if we tried) whether it is "belief in laissez faire" or some other, more subtle conviction about the proper role of the state which is holding it back, or simply indifference to the satisfactions that may be found beyond the limits of the minimal state.
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
Advanced Search 1. The Capitalist StateIf States Did Not Exist, Should They Be Invented?
People come to believe that because they have states, they need them.
Neither individual nor class interest can justify a state on prudential grounds.
We have derived some of the characteristic features of a state which would be "best" (alternatively, "least harmful") for capitalism, proceeding from the ideal conditions of capitalist ownership and exchange to how the state fulfilling these conditions might behave, and what reason it could possibly have for doing so. The image which is beginning to emerge is that of an unusual creature, bearing a relatively remote likeness to any real state that ever existed. The few real states I have alluded to in order to illustrate a point were chosen more for their style, flavour, and lack of governing zeal, than for being really close incarnations of the ideal being. The reverse procedure could, perhaps, be used to show that a less bizarre, more likely sort of state would really be more harmful to capital and capitalism, even if it was an unprincipled tool of the Two Hundred Families and
sent gendarmes or the National Guard to help grind the face of the poor.
The real-life states people are stuck with, more often than not because their distant ancestors were beaten into obedience by an invader, and sometimes due to Hobson's choice, to having to take one king so as to escape the threat of getting another, are not primarily "good for this" or "least harmful for that." They are not shaped to meet the functional needs of a system of beliefs, preferences, life-styles or "mode of production." This affirmation of the autonomy of the state and the separateness of its ends does not exclude all scope, over time, for some mutual adaptation whereby the state comes to conform to people's customs and preferences, just as they learn to accept and, from time to time, to enthuse about some of the state's demands upon them.
Any real state, given its de facto origin, is primarily an historical accident to which society must adapt. This is unsatisfactory to those who, by both training and inclination, see political obligation as resting either on moral duty or on prudential purpose. Instead of a trivial theory showing obedience to result from the threat of coercion, more interest will be shown in theories which derive the state from the subject's own volition, if only because it is intellectually comforting to find coherent reasons for believing that we actually need what we have.
There are, in particular, two rival theories with the identical basic thesis that if the state did not exist, we should invent it. Both, I shall argue, rest on self-delusion. One holds that it is people in general who need the state which alone can fulfil the function of turning general conflict into general harmony. People not only
need this, but are aware of their need, and by the social contract create the state and give it authority over themselves. The other theory proposes that it is the possessing class which needs the state as the indispensable instrument of class rule. The source of the state's political power is, in some fashion, the economic power which ownership confers upon the possessing class. The two powers, economic and political, complement each other in oppressing the proletariat. The purest, least ambiguous theorist of the social contract is Hobbes, and Engels is that of the instrument-of-class-oppression theory.
Both theories have an irreducible common core: both require people ("the people" in the one case, "the capitalist class" in the other), to abdicate a de facto faculty, the recourse to force. One and the other, each in the manner proper to it, confers a monopoly of the possession (and hence obviously of the use) of force upon Leviathan, the monarch or the class state. One's motive is fear, the other's greed; not moral but prudential reasons.
Neither provides any good ground for supposing that the state, once it has the monopoly of force will not, at times or forever, use it against those from whom it received it. Neither is a theory of the state in the proper sense, i.e. neither really explains why the state will do one thing rather than another. Why, in fact, should it stop people from killing and robbing each other rather than indulging in some robbery and, if need be, killing, on its own account? Why should it help the capitalists oppress the workers, rather than engage in the probably more rewarding pursuit of oppressing the capitalists? What maximand does the state maximize, what is its pay-off, and how does it go about getting it? The conduct of the state is assumed (it keeps the peace, it oppresses the workers) rather than derived from its rational volition.
The state, under either the contractarian or the Marxist hypothesis, has got all the guns. Those who armed it by disarming themselves, are at its mercy. The state's sovereignty means that there is no appeal against its will, no higher instance which could possibly make it do one thing rather than another.*18 Everything really depends on Leviathan giving no cause to people to rebel (Hobbes is assuming that it would not), or on the state oppressing only the right people, i.e. the workers.
There are certainly good reasons, both a priori and empirical, why such assumptions should, at least some of the time, be wrong. One cannot seriously expect people in general, or the capitalist class, to take such a gamble with an essentially unpredicted state for prudential reasons, though they might do so as an act of faith. The one plausible condition under which self-interest could induce rational people to take this risk is when the likely consequences of not disarming themselves in favour of the state look more dangerous still.
Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
Anthony de Jasay
Advanced Search 1. The Capitalist StateInventing the State: The Social Contract
Political hedonism requires a benign state or a conformist subject. Failing both, it is a foolhardy attitude.
Hobbes, who could be mischievous, saw that every man has reason to fear his fellow man if they are alike.
All men, needing self-approval, seek eminence over others. If I let my fellow man seek eminence, he will invade my property, therefore I must attack his first. Self-preservation must drive both of us to fight each other, and there will be "savage war for glory." Both our lives will become "nasty, brutish and short."
While self-preservation is said to be the spring of all Hobbesian conduct, it is clear that I would not have to worry about preserving myself if my neighbour, whether to become eminent or to forestall me, did not invade my property. Is there a way of persuading the neighbour to desist? Perhaps by letting him know that I am not seeking eminence over him and he has nothing to fear? If self-preservation no longer obliged him to keep up his guard, and he lowered it, I could pounce and gain eminence over him; and so could he if I agreed to let him be and lowered my
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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?)
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