of the “enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery” put in place by the regime it had overthrown. “This appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy.... The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power.... The first French Revolution... was bound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun: centralization, but at the same time the extent, the attributes and the agents of governmental power. Napoleon perfected this state machinery.”13 Thus, it is not the state that mistrusts itself and would rather not have levers or powerful tools lest it should misuse them. It knows that it could not possibly be tempted to misuse power. It is its rivals for state power who would, by the nature of their ambition, misuse it. (The minimal state may even be aware that if it was succeeded by a rival with contestable ends in mind, the latter would need but a little time to put in place the rudiments of an apparatus of non-minimal government. However, even gaining a little time, and hence hope, would be better than handing it a ready-made system of pulleys and levers.) Seeking, as it does, aims which positive government is incapable of promoting, and fearing its capacity for wrong-doing in profane hands, the capitalist state is rational in adopting the contours of the minimal state.
Recalling the regimes of Walpole, Metternich, Melbourne or Louis Philippe (only more so), with a blend of indifference, benign neglect and a liking for amenities and comforts, the capitalist state must have sufficient hauteur not to want to be bothered by petty disputes among its subjects. The more quietly they get on with their business, the better, and it may occasionally, and a little reluctantly, use a heavy hand to make them do so. Its distance from the mundane concerns of its subjects does not, on the other hand, imply the sort of heroic hauteur which a Nietzsche or a Treitschke wished to find in the state, which reaches out for some high purpose, risking in avoidable war the life and property of the subject; nor the hauteur of utilitarian ethics, which sees the subject and his property as legitimate means to a greater common good. In a seeming paradox, the capitalist state is aristocratic because remote, yet with enough bourgeois overtones to recall the governments of the July Monarchy of 1830-48 in France. At any event, it is a state which is very unlikely to be a republic. As a digression, it is worth remembering, though it may not prove much, that Alexander Hamilton was a convinced royalist. His is a good example of how little the essence of capitalism is understood by the public. If people were asked who was the most capitalist American statesman, some may be tempted to say “Grant” and think of railroad land grants, “Garfield” and think of the Gilded Age, perhaps “McKinley” and think of Mark Hanna and tariffs, “Harding” and the Teapot Dome scandal and the Ohio Gang. Such answers miss the point. These Presidents caused or condoned corruption and scandal by favouring some interests over others, which means using state power for their ends. If any American statesman was good for capitalism, which is not evident, it was Alexander Hamilton.
Such a state, then, will make few and simple laws and not enforce many of the laws it may have inherited. It will make it clear that it dislikes adjudicating claims against established situations resulting from people’s freely negotiated contracts, will do so gingerly if it must but only as a last resort.
It will be reluctant to promote the good of society, let alone to order the more fortunate of its subjects to share their good fortune with the less fortunate, not because it lacks compassion, but because it does not consider that having creditable and honourable feelings entitles the state to coerce its subjects into indulging them. We must leave it at that, and not try to find out (nor could we if we tried) whether it is “belief in laissez faire” or some other, more subtle conviction about the proper role of the state which is holding it back, or simply indifference to the satisfactions that may be found beyond the limits of the minimal state.
If States Did Not Exist, Should They Be Invented?
People come to believe that because they have states, they need them.
Neither individual nor class interest can justify a state on prudential grounds.
We have derived some of the characteristic features of a state which would be “best” (alternatively, “least harmful”) for capitalism, proceeding from the ideal conditions of capitalist ownership and exchange to how the state fulfilling these conditions might behave, and what reason it could possibly have for doing so. The image which is beginning to emerge is that of an unusual creature, bearing a relatively remote likeness to any real state that ever existed. The few real states I have alluded to in order to illustrate a point were chosen more for their style, flavour, and lack of governing zeal, than for being really close incarnations of the ideal being. The reverse procedure could, perhaps, be used to show that a less bizarre, more likely sort of state would really be more harmful to capital and capitalism, even if it was an unprincipled tool of the Two Hundred Families and sent gendarmes or the National Guard to help grind the face of the poor.
The real-life states people are stuck with, more often than not because their distant ancestors were beaten into obedience by an invader, and sometimes due to Hobson’s choice, to having to take one king so as to escape the threat of getting another, are not primarily “good for this” or “least harmful for that.” They are not shaped to meet the functional needs of a system of beliefs, preferences, life-styles or “mode of production.” This affirmation of the autonomy of the state and the separateness of its ends does not exclude all scope, over time, for some mutual adaptation whereby the state comes to conform to people’s customs and preferences, just as they learn to accept and, from time to time, to enthuse about some of the state’s demands upon them.
Any real state, given its de facto origin, is primarily an historical accident to which society must adapt. This is unsatisfactory to those who, by both training and inclination, see political obligation as resting either on moral duty or on prudential purpose. Instead of a trivial theory showing obedience to result from the threat of coercion, more interest will be shown in theories which derive the state from the subject’s own volition, if only because it is intellectually comforting to find coherent reasons for believing that we actually need what we have.
There are, in particular, two rival theories with the identical basic thesis that if the state did not exist, we should invent it. Both, I shall argue, rest on self-delusion. One holds that it is people in general who need the state which alone can fulfil the function of turning general conflict into general harmony. People not only need this, but are aware of their need, and by the social contract create the state and give it authority over themselves. The other theory proposes that it is the possessing class which needs the state as the indispensable instrument of class rule. The source of the state’s political power is, in some fashion, the economic power which ownership confers upon the possessing class. The two powers, economic and political, complement each other in oppressing the proletariat. The purest, least ambiguous theorist of the social contract is Hobbes, and Engels is that of the instrument-of-class-oppression theory.
Both theories have an irreducible common core: both require people (“the people” in the one case, “the capitalist class” in the other), to abdicate a de facto faculty, the recourse to force. One and the other, each in the manner proper to it, confers a monopoly of the possession (and hence obviously of the use) of force upon Leviathan, the monarch or the class state. One’s motive is fear, the other’s greed; not moral but prudential reasons.
Neither provides any good ground for supposing that the state, once it has the monopoly of force will not, at times or forever, use it against those from whom it received it. Neither is a theory of the state in the proper sense, i.e. neither really explains why the state will do one thing rather than another. Why, in fact, should it stop people from killing and robbing each other rather than indulging in some robbery and, if need be, killing, on its own account? Why should it help the capitalists oppress the workers, rather than engage in the
