The State by Anthony de Jasay (15 page)

administration, having to take on in civil war the minority, might not otherwise have retained the consent of the majority (which is precisely Acton's point about the potentially tragic implications of democracy in a non-homogeneous society). Consent was either votes or clout. Champions of the people tended to rely directly on votes. Others relied in the first place on the clout of those concentrations of private power, be they men or organizations, which stand between the state and the amorphous mass of the citizenry and provide society with structure.*59 The alternance between the two types of organizing consent, the direct and the indirect, used to play much the same role in American political life as did (and do) the alternance of ideologically marked tendencies, conservative and progressive, Christian and lay, monarchist and republican parties in other societies. With Theodore Roosevelt, alternance in this sense ended in the USA; two parties subsist but both have become champions of the people. If one is less of an adversary of capital and readier to make use of sheer clout than the other, the difference is but of slight degree, especially as clout is no longer well correlated with capital.

2.2.17 The American example, where material inequalities were for a long period more admired than resented and rich-to-poor and rich-to-middle-class redistribution has only recently become the central tool of consent-building, lends itself poorly to clarifying the relation of consent by vote to consent by clout. Take instead any "country" which is perfectly repressive to begin with, say a concentration camp. For its successful functioning according to the purposes of its commandant, the allegiance or support of its cowed and emaciated inmates is immaterial, no matter how numerous they are; that of the less numerous band of well-fed trusties is relatively more important; and that of the handful of well-armed guards is essential. Even if he could, the camp
commandant would be ill-advised to try and win over the inmates by promising to give them the guards' rations. The subset of camp society containing the commandant and the guards is essentially a pure electoral democracy in that, with all the guards about equally well armed, the commandant must find the support of a majority of them, and it is the headcount that matters (even if there is no formal voting). If a larger subset including the trusties were carved out, the greater clout of the guards would have to be used to sway the "vote" of the trusties and secure the consent of their majority to the commandant's way of running the camp. The implicit threat of throwing dissenters to the inmates would normally suffice. If, for some reason, the democratic subset were to be further enlarged and the rule of consent extended to the inmates, they would have to be divided and the support of one part obtained (if that was at all possible) by promising them the rations of another part. The less the clout of the guards and trusties or the less use one could make of it, the more the whole camp would approximate pure electoral democracy giving consent by headcount, with the majority getting the minority's rations.

1. It seems to be a strange confusion, and one suffered by many states no less than by their subjects, to want to have the state rely on consent and to be everybody's state, standing above classes and group interests, beholden to no group and impartially realizing its conception of society's greatest good.
   
 

2. When the state takes sides, not only is it building the required base of consent. Perhaps unconsciously and unwittingly, it is also "learning by doing." With every measure it takes to favour a subject or group of subjects, to modify the system of rewards and obligations which derives from past custom or voluntary contracts, to change social and economic arrangements that would
   

prevail but for its intervention, it acquires more knowledge of its subjects' affairs, a better and bigger administrative apparatus and, hence, an added capacity both to imagine and to carry out further measures. Two channels of unanticipated causation are dug in this manner, and end by forming a self-sustaining circuit. One leads from intervention to capacity for intervention, as physical labour leads to bigger muscle. The other leads from a larger state apparatus to an altered balance of interests in society, tilted in favour of more state intervention; for by self-aggrandizement the state increases the activist constituency.

1. These channels run within the state apparatus and not between it and civil society. Another and probably more potent circuit runs from state benefactions to a condition of dependence or addiction in civil society, calling for further benefactions. It is easier to grasp the mechanics of such circuits than to have confidence in their stability, in the capacity of built-in regulators ultimately to prevent them from getting out of control.
   
 

 

Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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2. The Adversary StateTinker's Licence

Utilitarianism favours activist government mainly because it is constructed to ignore a whole class of reasons for hastening slowly.

1. Judging things on their merits with an open mind fatefully attracts open minds.
   
 

2. It would be unhistorical and worse to imply that the state will in general just up and do whatever most efficiently ensures its political survival and the fulfilment of such other ends as it may have. On the contrary, it is, time and again, liable to choose relatively inefficient means to its ends, and even retard or hinder their attainment, for its feasible choices are to some extent pre-set for it by the Zeitgeist, the ethos of time and place. It cannot, without endangering the often delicate compound of repression, consent and legitimacy which it is aiming at worst to maintain and at best to strengthen, resort to actions for which it has, as it were, no ideological licence.
   
 

3. At the same time, in one of the chicken-and-egg sequences which seem to govern much of social life, ideology will sooner or later providentially issue the licence for precisely the sort of action which it is efficient for the state to undertake. Thus when we
   

speak of "an idea whose time has come" (the development of the "base" producing the corresponding "dominant ideology"), we must also bear in mind the equally interesting inverted version,

i.e.
that the time has come because the idea has called it forth (the"superstructure" bringing about a corresponding development of the "base"). This preliminary is offered to help put in perspective the reciprocal relations of the adversary state and utilitarianism.

1. It is fairly conventional practice to discern three stages in the evolution of the state's functions (though they are better regarded as heuristic rather than as historical, real-time stages). In the first, a vaguely Hobbesian state resolves a basic prisoners' dilemma by enforcing respect for life and property, such enforcement being taken to include protection against a foreign state also. When political theory is handled as if it were economics, such a first-stage state can be assimilated to the single-product monopolistic firm making one public good, e.g. "order." The second or Benthamite sort of state would then resemble a multi-product firm which provides a diversified range of goods or services whose profitable free-enterprise production runs up against some prisoners' dilemma or at least a "free-rider" problem, and consequently requires coercion to cover its costs. (Voluntary arrangements lacking coercion would by assumption produce either distant substitutes, or different, possibly smaller, quantities of close substitutes of such goods.) What additional goods or services the state shall provide, or what additional functions it should undertake, is to be decided on their merits. In the third stage of the evolution of its functions, the state will undertake to produce the range of public goods thus selected and social justice as well.
   
 

There is no such dividing line between these stages as there is between the state of nature and the state. Each stage contains all of the "preceding" ones and is recognizable by the upsurge of one type of function without the abandonment of the others. When the balance of consent-seeking political advantage is in favour of the state restricting hours of factory work and laying down rules of safety, providing road signs, lighthouses and air-traffic controls, building sewers, inspecting abattoirs, obliging travellers to be inoculated, running schools and ordering parents to make their children attend them, teaching peasants how to farm and sculptors how to sculpt, adjusting a practice, reforming a custom, imposing a standard, the licence for undertaking these piecemeal improvements is provided by utilitarian doctrine. Its operation, by now often an unconscious habit of thought, is best understood as a sort of two-stroke argument, whose first stroke is a rejection of a priori conservatism, an implicit denial that existing arrangements contain a presumption in their own favour. Utilitarians reason, to pick up one of the pearls Michael Oakeshott is in the open-handed habit of casting before his readers,

as if arrangements were intended for nothing else but to be mended*60

as if everything could and should be looked at with an open mind, with a view to deciding whether it shall be tinkered with or not.

2.3.5 The second stroke of the argument (which could be so formulated as to subsume the first)*61 is that actions are good if their consequences are good. ("Act-utilitarianism" gets to this result directly, "rule-utilitarianism" indirectly.) Therefore, we ought to alter any arrangement which would be improved thereby. Despite his non-interventionist reputation, this was precisely J. S. Mill's position. He held that a departure from laissez faire involving an
"unnecessary increase" in the power of government was a "certain evil" unless required by "some great good"-greater than the evil in order that the balance of good and bad consequences should be good. He at least had the virtue of making it explicit that the general form of the argument for tinkering must provide for the offsetting of a possible bad consequence (if only as an "empty box"), a form which makes advocacy of reforming an arrangement a somewhat more exacting task, for the good consequence had then better be very good.

1. Judging actions by their consequences is a difficult and peculiar rule, as is easily seen by considering the intrinsic nature of consequences. If we do not know what consequences an action will bring, the rule means that we cannot tell a good action from a bad one until after its consequences have been duly produced. Apart from the absurd moral implications, such an interpretation renders the doctrine quite unhelpful. On the other hand, if we know, or even think we know, "for certain" what the consequences are, we do so because we think they must surely, predictably follow from the particular action. If so, they are functionally inseparable from it like death is from beheading. In such a case, if we were to say "this action is good because its consequence is good," we would really be saying no more than the action is good because, taken as a whole, it is good. This would be tantamount to recommending those reforms which improve arrangements-a wholly empty rule.
   
 

2. Utilitarianism does not, however, allow us to consider an action (say giving alms) to be good if its consequence (the beggar gets drunk on the money and is crippled by a passing car) is bad. Conversely, it requires us to approve an action if we would approve of its consequence. Between the limiting cases of not
   

knowing the consequence at all and of knowing it for sure, lies the huge problem area where utilitarianism is bound up with questions of imperfect foresight. Over this area, policies appear to have several alternative chains of consequences ("ex ante"), though only one of the alternative chains can materialize ("ex post"). The ex ante consequences appear to have greater or lesser probabilities. The proper guide to political action is thus no longer "maximize utility," but "maximize the expected value of utility." The instant we say this, however, we let loose an avalanche of problems, each of which is insoluble except by recourse to authority.

1. Each alternative consequence can perfectly well appear to have different probabilities to different persons. These persons, in turn, may be (a) well- or ill-informed, and (b) astute or stupid in converting such information as they have into a probability assessment. Given the (Bayesian) nature of the probability in question, does it make any sense to say that they use the wrong probability assessment in valuing uncertain consequences?
   
 

2. On the other hand, it must seem hard to accept that a policy should be judged in terms of the possibly ill-informed, illusory, naive or biased probability assessments of the persons who are to enjoy or suffer its consequences. What if they have been misled by propaganda? And if several persons are affected by a policy, whose subjective probabilities should be used to value the alternative consequences? Should each person value the consequence to him by his assessment of its probability? It is obviously tempting to discard some of these probability judgements, retain the "best" or calculate some weighted average of the several best ones, and use it in maximizing expected utility.*62 Whoever has authority to choose the "best" judgement,