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<font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Verdana" color="#002864" size="5"><strong>Ten Books on the State</strong></font>
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<font size="4">by Alberto Mingardi</font>




<font size="2">[Posted August 30, 2002]</font>




<font size="2">[img][/img] The
main political divide of our time is between those who trust the state and
those who do not. We can argue without end about economics, regulation, trade,
and war, but we have not touched the core issue until we address the questions:
what is the state, and how much, if any, faith should we put in it?</font>




<font size="2">Here is an attempt&nbsp;to identify 10 essential readings on
the state, some in the field of historical reconstruction, some in the field
of&nbsp;political philosophy. The list is not comprehensive, and many
important works are not here, such as Franz Oppenheimer's The
State, Albert Jay Nock's Our
Enemy, The State, Martin van Creveld's remarkable The
Rise and Decline of The State, Ludwig von Mises's Omnipotent
Government, or Bertrand de Jouvenel's On
Power.</font>




<font size="2">I have preferred to concentrate on authors who are often not
well appreciated by libertarians, and/or whose recent, important work should
not be underestimated. Anyhow, this list may be a good starting point for
readers who are open to seeing the state for what it is.



(1) Carl Schmitt's <em><strong>Concept
of the Political</strong></em>&nbsp;(University of Chicago Press, 1996,
reprint)&nbsp;regarded by Leo Strauss as"an inquiry into the 'order of
human things,'" is fundamental. Schmitt conceptualizes the"political"
in terms of a primordial and definitive antithesis between"friend"
and"enemy" ("foe"). The very existence of the state rests
on this dichotomy. This means that, far more than being a third,"impartial"
actor, the state is always the expression of a particular group of individuals.
Schmitt teaches that no political order can be conceived as universal, but
always and only as a form that&nbsp;originates from a concrete partiality.
Against the manipulated justification of government by law, Schmitt's realism
demonstrates how, in reality, there are no abstract institutions, but only
clusters of men counterposed as"friends" and"enemies."



(2) Columbia University historian Charles Tilly's <strong>Coercion,
Capital, and European States</strong> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
develops a skillful analysis of how national sovereignty imposed itself as a
model for the whole of Europe. War played quite a role in this, since, as
Professor Tilly writes,</font>


<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">


<font size="2">"going to war accelerated the move from indirect to
direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay the
bill from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all
war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and conscript the means
of combat--including men--from reluctant citizens."</font>


[/i]


<font size="2">Among Tilly's many insights, it is especially important for
libertarians to understand&nbsp;how, in an increasingly violent world, the
political experiments that predominated were necessarily those which
facilitated the greatest access to resources needed to make war on a large
scale: this is the vicious circle of war and compulsory production of defense
(via taxation) that made the modern state the most successful collective
institution of our times.



(3) If Professor Tilly is a Marxist historian, Robert Nisbet was a well-known
and influential conservative sociologist. But his analysis of the state as
"nothing more, basically, than an institutionalization of the war-making
power" is extremely useful for libertarians. In his <strong>Twilight
of Authority</strong> (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1975] 2000),
Professor Nisbet explores in depth two surprisingly related issues, which he
has yet touched in other works such as the famous The
Quest for Community: first, the aggressive habits of power, and
second, the relationship between the decline of traditional morality and rise
of the state.</font>




<font size="2">According to Nisbet, breaking down the traditional
order--favoring at the same time a sort of egalitarian utopianism--was a condicio
sine qua non for the state to take off:"the thrust toward
equalitarianism inevitably led to a disintegration of old social unities, and
only the power of the state was left to fill this vacuum." It is true
that"the political state arose first in precisely those areas where the
traditional kinship and religious system of a given people broke down as the
result of strained imposed by warfare." We may understand the inherent
military nature of the state by looking at the fact that"primordially
military qualities such as centralization of command, unremitting discipline,
a chain of power from military chief straight down to individual soldier, even
communalism, were in course of time transmitted to the political state."



(4) This warmongering nature of the state resulted in some 174 million deaths
in the last century. This estimate is provided by University of Hawaii
Professor Rudolph J. Rummell. His <strong>Death
by Government</strong> (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994), far
from being a theoretical treatise, is seminal as an empirical account of the
magnitude of government mass murders. Professor Rummel called them"democides,"
referring to political murders committed in peacetime: the number of 174
million refers just to peacetime victims of government violence, compared with
about 36 million as a result of government violence in time of war.



(5) Robert Higgs's <strong>Crisis
and Leviathan</strong> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
focuses instead on the causes and events that have made the U.S. government
bigger and bigger. Professor Higgs, a well-known historian and editor of the Independent
Review, argues that it is when a crisis of major significance
occurs--something as large-scale and pervasive as the Great Depression or the
World Wars--that there is an overwhelming public demand for government to act.
In the 20th century, every national emergency has prompted the federal
government take unprecedented action to somehow allay the perceived threat to
national security.</font>




<font size="2">These actions have taken a wide variety of forms, but the
common ingredient is that they all entail&nbsp;increased exercise of power by
government over society and the economy: historically, a large proportion of
all government expansion has taken place as emergency or crisis action. What
Professor Higgs particularly emphasizes is the role ideology played in this
continuous enlargement of the state's scope and ambitions. The same idea that
a crisis must be"solved" by political means is a result of that
statist ideological vision that has pervaded society since the beginning of
the last century--namely, collectivism, in its various forms.



(6) An effective critique of collectivist dogmas is developed by Arthur Seldon,
in his short and witty <strong>The
Dilemma of Democracy, The Political Economics of Over-Government</strong>
(London: IEA, [1996] 2002). It is a kind of synthetical primer of the best
insights developed by the so-called"public choice" school of
economics. Seldon (who, with Ralph--later, Lord--Harris back in the '50s
founded&nbsp;London's Institute of Economic Affairs, the grandfather of all
the libertarian think tanks) explains how the notion of&nbsp;"public
goods" has provided the intellectual pretext for&nbsp;&nbsp;the expansion
of government-produced goods and services. But what Seldon comes to question
is the responsibility of democratic institutions in this process. According to
him, the historic failure of democracy--which he has defined as"government
of the busy, by the bully, for the bossy"--is that majority rule, and the
religion of the ballot box, wound up&nbsp;preventing or discouraging"the
people from learning from the discovery process of the market."



(7) James Dale-Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg go even further. In a neglected
book, <strong>The
Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition to the Information Age</strong>
(New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 1996), they define democracy as the"fraternal
twin of communism." Davidson, a venture capitalist, and Rees-Mogg, former
editor of The Times and now a director of the Private Bank of London,
dare to write that"seen dispassionately, democracy was superior to state
socialism as a recipe for enriching the state," not as a political system
to keep men free. Sovereign individuals are not particularly satisfied by this
status quo, which is why Davidson and Rees-Mogg devote a large part of their
book to investigating and testing possible loopholes and escape routes, to
allow people to live as sovereign individuals in the"natural economy"
of the information age.



(8) The ultimate account of what democracy really amounts to is presented in
Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe's <strong>Democracy,
The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and
Natural Order</strong> (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001). A
prominent libertarian scholar, Professor Hoppe recognizes not only that
political power does not transform political people into selfless saints or
all-wise seers, but also that the very structure of incentives that democracy
itself establishes brings some of the worst exemplars of&nbsp;&nbsp;mankind to
the very top of the political pile. Since political competition is a vehicle
for politically talented people to get power,"given that in every
society more&nbsp;'have-nots' of everything worth having exist than 'haves,'
the politically talented who have little or no inhibition against taking
property and lording it over others, will have a clear advantages over those
with such scruples." So, far from being a restraint upon political power,
democracy"virtually assures that exclusively dangerous men will rise to
the pinnacle of government power and that moral behavior and ethical standards
will tend to decline and deteriorate all-around."



(9) Some of the books I have listed so far not only provide a realistic
account of what the state is, how it has grown, and what it does do to survive
as a political institution, but they maintain the opinion that state
interventionism turns out to be quite dangerous for people and the economy.
The best book that explains what government has done to our (economic) life is
Murray N. Rothbard's <strong>Power and Market: Government &amp; the Economy</strong>
(Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, [1970] 1977—</font><font size="2">available
online</font><font size="2">).</font>




<font size="2">In this seminal work, Rothbard argues that no provision of
goods and services requires the existence of government, and he heavily
criticizes the so-called"public choice" school of economics for
assimilating state and market action when, by definition, government action
and voluntary market action are diametric opposites. He also rejects the
concept of"justice" in taxation and the very idea of
"neutral" taxation. It may look like a marginal point, but this
rejection plays a crucial role in demystifying the state, as did Carl
Schmitt's rejection of the concept of a neutral authority. This same idea of
neutrality is nothing more than"a benchmark to answer the question: why
do you want the state to step in and alter market conditions in this case?"



(10) Of these 10 books on understanding the nature of the state, I have kept
for last the one which I believe is perhaps the best essay ever written on the
subject: <strong>The
State</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1986] 1998),
by Anthony de Jasay. De Jasay starts his book with the notorious question,
"What would you do if you were the state?" which he answers in a
300-page-long systematic treatise. Among the most important lessons we may
learn from The State is de Jasay's total demystification of the liberal
illusion of constitutional government.</font>




<font size="2">First, he explains how a separation of powers does not work,
and how it tends to be"overcome by reciprocal swamps of functions and
attributions, if not by their unilateral usurpation." Second,
constitutionalism, traditionally portrayed as a generous act by political
power to limit itself (as if"government of law," instead of
government by men, were enough to preserve freedom), is more likely a product
of"historical conjectures where it is rational for the state actually to
suggest limits to its own power if its purpose is to maximize it."</font>




<font size="2">But here is the core of de Jasay's analysis:"instead
of saying, tautologically, that the rational state pursues its interests and
maximizes its ends, whatever they are," de Jasay proposes a more
realistic"criterion of its rationality, that it seeks to maximize its
discretionary power," which is the power that"permits to the state
to make its subjects do what it wants, rather than what they want."</font>




<font size="2">Anthony de Jasay's seminal account of the (basically
destructive) role the state plays in our life is not simple, cheerful reading
But it is a challenge and a good exercise for critics of the modern state, who
may remember that </font><em><font size="2">panem et circenses</font></em><font size="2">
(bread and circuses) was the typical formula Roman emperors used to keep
simple-minded citizens quiet during difficult periods. It is worth enduring
some difficult reading to open one's eyes finally to the real nature of
political power, rather than simply enjoying </font><em><font size="2">panem
et circenses</font></em><font size="2"> and thus keeping them hermetically
closed.</font>


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<font size="2">Alberto Mingardi is a student in political thought in Italy.
Send him mail&nbsp;and see his article
archive.


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