Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (15 page)

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.

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.

Remote from our world as is this ideal image, we have had practical experience of anarchy—of absence of government; and frequently enough to learn what in fact it is like. Anarchy is found under two fairly common circumstances: in remote, scantly populated frontiers; and in the catastrophic stages of massive military defeat, revolution, and inflation.

The remote frontier is beyond the reach of government. There are no officials, courts, police, army, or jails. Instead there are gunmen, lynch gangs, brigands, the noose, knives, and assassins. The picturesque anarchy of the frontier is first-rate material for movies and romances of adventure. One may even add that for certain sorts of men—physically strong, egocentric, emotionally self-sufficient—it offers a good, even the best life. But the joys of the frontier are limited to trappers, explorers, prospectors, hunters and gatherers, bandits. For most men and all women the cost in narrowness and insecurity is too high. The frontier, by its definition, excludes civilization and all of the cultivated arts.

 
Every man is enemy to every man. . . . There is no place to industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan

Hobbes wrote this famous passage as a deduction from his principles rather than as a generalization from empirical data, but it is accurate enough as a description of the anarchic society of the remote frontier, and its grim tone is appropriate to the anarchic plunge into which society is often pushed by military defeat, revolution, or unbridled inflation. Family, home, Church, possessions, art, morality are consumed in the wild flames of shifting mass passions. With the inevitability of a physical law, the disintegration of government coincides with the spread of insecurity, immorality, and terror.

 
The specialty of rule hath been neglected: . . .
The unworthiest shows fairly in the mask . . .
What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states . . .
And, hark! what discord follows: each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

"Troilus and Cressida," Act I scene iii