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Anthony de Jasay on the State

I’ve been reading Anthony de Jasay’s magnum opus, The State, since before Christmas but haven’t gotten through it very fast. I don’t read it regularly or in large blocks of time, and it is a very deep book. Every passage impresses me with his analysis and logic, though.

I just finished the second section, “The Adversary State,” which is largely about utilitarianism and modern leftist theories of the State. I think he calls it the adversary state because it is used as a tool of the majority against the minority; that very democratic states necessarily pit divisive factions against one another, and all the factions perceive and use the State as the entity that will further their desires against the desires of factions with which they are in conflict.

(I’m not exactly sure what other, very different types of State there could be, at least according to a libertarian philosopher, but I guess I’ll find out.)

The underlying theme of the chapter is that in a society that is ruled by a State that is supposed to actively promote the benefit of all, to further the maximum utility of the maximum number of people, all kinds of scenarios logically lead to the result that the State simply does what it thinks is best and performs the functions it thinks it should perform, regardless of what a particular group of people actually want (including the majority), because so many different desires amongst all the people, not to mention the impossibility of knowing everyone’s preferences, make it impossible to even attempt to please everyone. So in the end the leftist, utilitarian argument is simply a recourse to the highest power, the State, to do what the State (i.e., the few who are in power) wants, regardless of the benefit this actually brings to any group or individual.

This doesn’t seem like a great feat of logic or philsophizing, but I assure you it is much more rigorous and insightful than I have rendered it here, and I don’t even remember and probably didn’t even catch every nuance of his arguments, because of the aforementioned lukewarm dedication to reading it consistently and in large blocks of time. The State is not a book you can just read, I’m finding; you have to study it.

The reason I’m posting about it is the last passage of chapter 2, which is quite astute. The last part of the chapter is about the trade-off between facing the unknown adversity of a free society (for instance, a free market) vs. the known, more-structured problems of dealing with the State. After returning to the theme of the chapter (everyone has different ideas about how much freedom is “too much” freedom and how much State intereference is “too much” State interference, so “there we go round and round, falling back upon the state…to decide how much state would suit people best”), he notes that if the State comes in to be the final arbitrator or authority on, say, conflicts between the different companies of an industry, then the conflicts between the various parties are taken care of by the State and conflicts with the State (the laws) take their place.

Note that without State edicts and mandates concerning individuals or companies, there is always the possibility of something higher than them to appeal to; a previously agreed-upon body or arbitrator or disinterested company (or all three rolled into one). When the State makes laws as to how individuals or companies must behave, these potential legal conflicts are replaced with the State’s final and absolute laws. (Well, ideally absolute.) This is possibly the foremost argument against anarchy that people all the way from socialists to Objectivists make: that there must be a final authority that decides, for better or for worse, what the laws are and what is right and wrong; a lack of authority or lack of a non-ultimate authority leads to chaos and, well, anarchy. However, when the State makes laws governing the interactions of individuals or companies, in the interest of smoothing out the vagaries and difficulties of a free society, many issues between individuals and companies actually disappear and are replaced with State issues, with potential conflicts with the State in place of the ones that would have existed.

On the sincere hope that that describes Jasay’s points well, this is what he concludes (italics in original):

In conflict with his own kind, he would have the faculty of appeal, of recourse to a superior instance. Freedom from conflict of like with like, however, puts him in potential conflict with the higher instance. In opting for the latter, the possibility of recourse is given up. The state cannot be seriously expected to arbitrate conflicts to which it is an interested party, nor can we invoke its help in our quarrels with it. This is why accepting private interference, no matter how much it resembles “Darwinist sweepstakes,” is a risk of a different order from that of accepting state interference. The prudential argument against putting public in place of private constraints is not that one hurts more than the other. It is the somewhat indirect but no less powerful one that doing so makes the state unfit to perform the one service for civil society which no other body can render—that of being the instance of appeal.

In other words, the very act of making the State the final legal authority makes it unfit to be a final legal authority.