In short: the story of the founding of the City is a set of poetic variations on the City's name.
Chapter Two
There is no need to reject such explanations by modern science, viewed in their own frame, in order to suggest from another perspective that the ancient peoples, who were not notably more foolish than we, were perhaps also communicating truths by their accounts of the origin of Cities, though admittedly they used a rhetorical system quite other than that of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The central truth is the insight that there is no adequate rational explanation for the existence and effective working of government, much less for good or fairly good government. (I rule out of the definition of "government" a dominion exercised directly and exclusively by physical strength—a social form which by the nature of the case cannot exist in a group that contains more than three or four human beings.) The universality of this insight is really attested by the scientific writers on society as much as by the ancients. Without exception they too introduce a myth in order to explain the origin of the City. The only difference is that post-Renaissance scientists use a less picturesque language. Instead of Cecrops or Minos or Romulus, they write of a "state of nature" (benign or horrific), an isolated Island with first one and then more than one resident, "primitive communism," the Dialectic, "challenge and response," the Zeitgeist, and a host of other mythic entities that have no substantial reality outside of the scientists' own lively but shamefaced imaginations.
Moreover, apart from a few gross and almost self-evident cases, no one has found a purely rational theory to explain why some governments, though very different from each other, do well, whereas others, though closely similar, do badly. When you drop scientist ideology, it becomes clear that you cannot explain the success of some and the failure of other governments without including a non-rational factor that we call, according to our metaphysical habits, chance, luck, accident, magic, or Providence.
Government is then in part, though only in part, non-rational. Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms. This is and must be so because the problem of government is, strictly speaking, insoluble; and yet it is solved. The double fact, though real and part of historical life, is a paradox.
Consider the problem of government from the point of view of the reflective individual. I, as an individual, do in fact submit myself (at least within certain limits) to the rule of another—to government. But suppose that I ask myself: why should I do so? why should I submit to the rule of another? what justifies his rule? To these questions there are no objectively convincing answers in rational terms alone.
Is he physically stronger than I? Granted that his strength might enable him actually to rule me (though I might of course outsmart him), does it give him the right to do so? Is he taller, fairer, swifter than I? Is one or the other of these a political credential? He is more intelligent? Very well; but in government may not character or experience or faith be more relevant than brains? And who decides the degree of his possession of any of these fluid qualities? He is rich? But do not riches corrupt? He is poor, then. If so, will he not be tempted the more?
Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machinations, or by confederacy with others. . . . And as to the faculties of the mind. . . . prudence is but experience; which equal time equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one's own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Is there a sign that the gods have chosen this man as ruler? Is he the first-born of a certain father? or named ruler by the voice of one-half plus one of the adults, or a designated class of the adults, of the City? We begin to reach, it will seem, arguments of more weight. "Arguments?" Axioms or sentiments, rather, which can indeed settle the problem of rule, if by an act of prior faith we share them: one of them, that is, and reject the others, because believing simultaneously in more than one might plunge us into contradiction. These are what Gugliemo Ferrero called "principles of legitimacy," belief in which can "legitimize" rule or government: the theocratic principle, the hereditary principle, and the democratic principle are respectively implicit in the three questions at the start of this paragraph. These principles are the Guardians of the City, which make it possible, when one of them is accepted by the community, for government to be something other than mere brute force.
But why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should such a principle justify the rule of that man over me? Does it prove him better than I because he had his father instead of my father, his color skin in place of mine, because his arts can win more votes than mine? I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been. This may be a sufficient and proper argument, but it is certainly not a rational one. Ferrero's countryman, Gaetano Mosca, used the term "political formula" for "principle of legitimacy," and explained in this way:
According to the level of civilization in the peoples among whom they are current, the various political formulas may be based either upon supernatural beliefs or upon concepts which, if they do not correspond to positive realities, at least appear to be rational. We shall not say that they correspond in either case to scientific truths. A conscientious observer would be obliged to confess that, if no one has ever seen the authentic document by which the Lord empowered certain privileged persons or families to rule his people on his behalf, neither can it be maintained that a popular election, however liberal the suffrage may be, is ordinarily the expression of the will of a people, or even of the will of the majority of a people.
And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man's social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and real importance.
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class
A familiar sophistry is often brought up to close the logical breach. By rational argument I can prove it desirable that there should be government in human society. I can in fact prove that government is essential for the satisfying of human interests and values that are all but universal. And if government is necessary, then there must be someone, or some group, to govern. Therefore. . . . Well, therefore just what? My rational argument is non-specific, and thus non-historical. I establish the rational necessity of government in general, in the abstract; I prove that there must be governors, rulers. But I have proved nothing whatever about this particular government here and now, nor that this particular man—myself or another—should be the one who rules.
This impasse is not mere theory. In historical fact we find that groups which do not accept a principle of legitimacy derived from tradition, custom, or faith always undergo a crisis in trying to solve the problem of succession, no matter how rational their pretensions. When the leader of such a group dies (normally by assassination), either the group disintegrates or a new leader must establish his position by unadorned force.
The death of Stalin provoked a grandiose recent test of this general law. The Soviet Empire is a revolutionary and nihilist society
, which in establishing its own existence abandoned all the principles that had formerly legitimized the governments of Russia and the ancillary nations. The new regime has not, however, replaced these principles with any other. First the Bolshevik Party and then Stalin gained de facto rule simply by force, direct and roundabout; nor, with power consolidated, did they succeed—or even seriously attempt—to construct a new political formula. At Stalin's death in 1953, which was probably hastened by his colleagues, the Soviet regime faced the logical impasse sketched above.
The members of the Soviet elite have studied the problems of power more seriously than any other men have ever done. Each communist in the leading stratum understood that the Soviet governmental structure was built as a pyramid with a single leader at the apex, and that its stability depended on installing an accepted replacement for the dead chief. Delay in finding a successor was bound to lead—and in the event did lead—to mounting conflicts and a weakening of the entire Soviet system.
The need for a successor and the damaging consequences of the failure to name one were rationally demonstrable. None of the principal communists (the members of the Presidium, for example) doubted the demonstration. But this did not at all solve the specific historical problem. Granted that there must be an accepted successor, a new No. 1, who is it to be, who is the man? Do not I (Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, . . . Suslov) have as good a claim as any other? To the specific question there was no rational answer; and there was no shared faith in a non-rational principle (inheritance, election under prescribed rules, drawing lots or whatever) that would have jumped the logical gap. Therefore the answer, if they were ever to find it, could only be obtained from the ultimate non-rational test of force.
Let me restate the argument of this section, so that it will not seem to say more than I intend.
Both the theory and the practice of government are incomplete without the introduction of a non-rational element. Without some allowance for magic, luck, or divine favor, we cannot give convincing explanations why this government does so much better than that, why this one succeeds and endures, and that one fails. Without acceptance by habit, tradition, or faith of a principle which completes the justification for government, government dissolves, or falls back wholly on force—which is itself, of course, non-rational.
Chapter Three
I have been referring without definition to "good," "worse," and "better" governments, to governments that "work" or "fail." What, then, is a "good government"? How do we recognize that a government is functioning properly? What is badness or evil in government?
Americans are fortunate in knowing the purposes of government, from which knowledge we may judge the quality of a particular government's performance. We know these purposes because they are stated as the preamble to the charter through which our government came into formal existence: ". . . to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . ."
The wording of this preamble is not so casual as might seem from the fact that it was prepared at the last moment, without instruction or explanation, by the committee on style and arrangement of the Philadelphia Convention, and adopted without debate as part of the final (September 14) draft of the Constitution. The absence of discussion meant that the Fathers were unanimously agreed to what the preamble said, and took also for granted that there would be no significant disagreement outside the Convention. The same doctrine had been often repeated in their previous writings, and in constitutions of the several States. The Massachusetts Constitution and Bill of Rights, for example, adopted in 1780 in a text largely by John Adams, affirmed:
The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body-politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life. . . .
At Philadelphia James Madison asserted even more summarily (on May 31) that "he should shrink from nothing which should be found essential to such a form of government as would provide for the safety, liberty and happiness of the community."
In order to fulfill these purposes, a government must be possessed of two distinguishable qualities. If it is to "provide for the common defence" and "insure domestic Tranquility," then a government must be strong. If it is to "establish Justice,. . . promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty," then a government must be just. In briefest definition, then, a "good" government is a strong and just government.
What is the relation between these two qualities, strength and justice? Does one have priority over the other in defining the "goodness" of a government? To avoid confusion in the answer, one more distinction must be carefully made.
In their relation to goodness or excellence in government, strength has a causal priority; justice, an ethical priority. Unless it is sufficiently strong, a government cannot exist at all, and therefore cannot be good. It must be strong enough to defend the organized society (the nation) which it directs from enemies both external and domestic. Otherwise the nation will be destroyed or dissolved. In the causal order, therefore, a government must first be strong, must be strong in order to be. From this there follow consequences that are not always accepted by those who do not like to check ideas by fact.
We might set up the following ratio: strength is to a government as food is to an individual human organism. Causally, food has a priority over intelligence and beauty, say, in a human being, because without food a human being cannot exist at all. And as a human organism can have too much food (too much for its own goodness, that is), so can a government have too much power.
Strength is causally prior to justice in constituting the goodness of a government, but few persons assign much positive value to strength, or power, in and of itself. Ethically, justice takes hardly questioned priority over strength. To exist, a government must be strong (strong enough to survive); to be good, it must be just.
But the relationship between strength and justice in government is more subtle, as we may see if we ask, not what is good or the best government, but what government is worst? Now the worst government is the one that in relation to its own citizens is absolutely weak or absolutely strong, no-government or all-government: that is, an anarchic or a totalitarian society. The well-being of the organism is destroyed by either starvation or gluttony.
The evil of total government has been thoroughly annotated in our day, when the theoretic limit of totalitarianism has been closely approached by Nazism and communism. There is still some dispute as to whether the same effects must follow from the same causes: whether the indefinite extension of the internal power of government will invariably bring elsewhere the same kind of evil human consequences that came in Germany and the Soviet Empire. But even socialists have tempered their orthodox call for the governmental absorption of political, economic, and social activities.
There is no longer much dispute outside communist circles about the evil of all-government, but there are still many, of otherwise diverse views, who cling to an ideal of no-government, who believe that anarchy is the best form of society. In principle, this is the doctrine of communists, in spite of their contradictory current practice. Communists contend that the dictatorship of the proletariat, which they advocate and exercise, is only a transitional social form that will evolve into a classless, non-violent society in which the state will have withered entirely away. This ultimate communist society is the same in descriptive outline as the society proposed by the anarchists proper. Right wing and conservative "libertarians," moreover, like the late Albert Jay Nock and his laisser faire successor, Frank Chodorov, project from a very different starting point an ironically similar vision.
In the abstract—divorced, that is, from an existential context in history—the anarchist ideal of no-government has always been attractive.
Human beings voluntarily associated together, freely cooperating in the accomplishment of shared goals, uncoerced by law, police, or army . . . The picture is so idyllic as to seem almost inevitably the goal of mankind. If we inspect the canvas more carefully, we may still feel the picture to be charming, but we will see that it has nothing to do with men.
Anarchism's departure from the real world is symbolized by the myths in which the anarchic ideal is usually expressed. Rousseau's serene anarchic savages, on whom the chains of society have not yet been fastened, live in a Golden Age that Rousseau well knew to be outside of history. The anarchic Paradise of Adam and Eve was also, and markedly, before true history, which could not begin until sin had come to the world. Both Marxism prehistoric "primitive communism" and his post-historic "ideal communism" are products of sociological fantasy unhampered by fact. The anarchic world of the avowed anarchists like Prince Kropotkin, wherein each, shorn of selfishness, envy, and the will to power, willingly finds his own happiness in loving cooperation with all, becomes moderately credible only because angels instead of men are tacitly assumed to be its inhabitants. "If men were angels," wrote James Madison, "no government would be necessary"; and only, he made clear, in that event.
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