of the social contract), or too interested in the beneficial results of coercion (which is the broader basis of the social contract, laid by Rousseau).21 I believe this is how one should read the cryptic and profound observation of Leo Strauss (few others have thought more powerfully and deeply about these matters), that Hobbes “created” political hedonism, which transformed life “on a scale never yet approached by any other teaching.”22 It is a not very important detail that instead of pleasure (as hedonists are supposed to seek), Hobbes spoke of self-preservation as the end which explains action.23 Since Hobbes, it is tacitly treated as a self-evident truth that people need, or want to have, the state because their hedonistic pain-and-pleasure calculus is ipso facto favourable to it.
Recent research into the prisoners’ dilemma, both deductive into its logical structure and experimental into actual behaviour in such situations, has established that acceptance of coercion by the participants is not a necessary condition for their finding a “cooperative solution.”24 Some of the crucial steps toward getting this result are: (a) to admit that the dilemma can be confronted more than once (it can be an iterative or sequential “game”), so that reliance on single-stage rationality may not correctly predict the moves of rational players; (b) to make a player’s move depend in part on the other player’s move in a previous stage of the sequential game, or in some other game altogether (i.e. to make it depend on experience), either player taking account of the reputation established by the other for toughness or softness; (c) to make him play as he ought to if the other player were playing tit-for-tat; (d) to introduce some regard for the relative value of present and future; and (e) to let the increased pay-off of a cooperatively solved game teach people to go for the cooperative solution in subsequent games. It is intuitively plausible that in a state of nature where people do not instantly club each other to death in a single-stage non-cooperative performance of the dilemma game, but where they survive for some time and have both occasion and incentive to assess and heed each other’s capacity for retaliation, vengefulness, mutual protection, gratitude, fair play, etc. the prisoners’ dilemma becomes both very much more complicated and loses much of its inexorability.
Nor need one limit the application of this result to the sole bellum omnium contra omnes. Hobbes makes people choose Leviathan to produce order out of purported chaos. But people need not have chosen Leviathan, since some kind of cooperative solution, some kind of order emerges in the state of nature, too, though it may not be the same kind of order as that produced by the state. Both qualitative and quantitative differences are possible, indeed extremely likely, though it is very hard to form sensible hypotheses about what the voluntary solution would exactly be like. Whether the voluntary product, in turn, is inferior or superior to the state product, will have to remain a matter of taste. The important thing is not to confuse the question of how we like either product, with the far more vital question of how we like the entire society in which order is state-produced, compared to the entire society (the state of nature) in which it is a voluntary arrangement.
What goes for order goes, by simple extension of the argument, for other public goods as well, whose production was supposed to have been altogether prevented by a rigidly interpreted prisoners’ dilemma and the related, rather looser free-rider problem.25 Once a public good, say clean air, paved streets or national defence, gets produced, people cannot be excluded from enjoying it regardless of whether they have paid their share of the cost of producing it. (We shall have occasion in chapter 4, pp. 234-6, to question what “their share,” in the sense of the part of the cost that a particular person ought to bear, can possibly mean.) Therefore, many will choose not to bear “their share” and the public good will not get produced or maintained, unless the state steps in to coerce all would-be free riders to pay, at the one hit both overcoming “isolation” by making each individual act as he would if all had one common will, and providing “assurance” to each individual who pays that he is not a lone sucker, for all others pay too.26 If the general dilemma is conceived of as a sequential game, a society’s perpetual learning process, it seems obvious that it can have a solution for each intermediate stage, and arbitrary to rule out the likelihood of at least some of the solutions being cooperative, so that as a general proposition, at least some quantities of some public goods will get produced on a voluntary basis.
“Some quantities” of “some public goods” as a result of non-coercive spontaneous solutions, sounds insufficiently affirmative. The reflex reaction of capitalism’s adversary may well be that, because of external economies and diseconomies, only an all-embracing compulsory arrangement, i.e. a state, can ensure that the right amount of public goods gets made. In this view, the prisoners’ dilemma would represent one limiting case, that of total failure to “internalize,” and the state would be the other limiting case in which the entire benefit of an external economy gets internalized from the state’s aggregative point of view. The in-between case of the voluntary association, the spontaneously formed interest group, would stop short of complete internalization and as a consequence would typically tend to fall between the two stools of the unresolved prisoners’ dilemma and state provision of the right amount of the good. Nor is it, of course, always true of any and all levels of output that if the state has in fact chosen that level, it considered it (given all constraints, scarcities and competing claims) the “right” one. If the claim that the output of a public good chosen by the state is the right output, is to be more than a tautological statement of the state’s “revealed preference,” it must somehow be related to some independently derived standard of the optimum.
In the case of individually consumed goods, this standard is, by and large, the Pareto-optimum reached by equating the marginal rates of substitution and transformation between any two goods. But as it is nonsense to speak of a marginal rate of substitution between a public and a private good (a person cannot decide to give up a dollar’s worth of chocolate to get a dollar’s worth of clean air, law and order or paved street), this standard does not work. When the post-1981 Polish state imports one more water-cannon and reduces chocolate imports by the corresponding sum, the decision can hardly be related to the marginal Polish chocolate-eater’s relative liking for law and order and chocolate. If it expresses anything, the decision must express the state’s balancing of the real interests of society that it considers important, in proportion to the importance it attaches to each. The individual chocolate-eater is obviously unable to attach the proper weights to the interest of the vanguard of the working class, of the Organs, of proletarian internationalism, etc. How much tax to surrender to the state so it may buy law and order or clean air for the use of the individual taxpayer in question is not a matter of any taxpayer’s choice. The state cannot buy a collective good for him.
A standard which will do for “collective choice” (if we must resort, for the sake of argument, to this question-begging concept) what Pareto-efficiency does for individual ones, can always be contrived by supposing either (a) that society has but one will (e.g. a will manifested by unanimity, or possibly the general will), or (b) that the several more-or-less divergent wills (including, arguably, the will of the state itself) which are present in society can, by a system of weights attached to each, be expressed as one will (what Robert Paul Wolff disdainfully calls “vector-sum democracy”).27
Whoever fixes the relative weights to be attached (i.e. makes the interpersonal comparisons, or reads the general will, or whichever way the reader prefers to phrase it), fixes the “right” output of public goods with respect to the standard he has thus set up for himself. Whatever he decides, he will, therefore, always be in the proud position of having fixed the right output; for there can never be independent proof to the contrary. It is a redundant apology for the state to say “by reading the general will,” “by balancing the merits of conflicting claims,” “by duly considering public need against the background of its disinflationary policy,” etc. it has determined the right output of public goods. For, whatever the output it chose on whichever considerations, it would not have been, according to its own lights, the wrong one, and no one can ever say that somebody else’s lights would have led it to a more nearly
