narrower but still substantial sections. A by-product of this process of creating gainers and losers is that the apparatus of the state grows bigger and cleverer.
It seems to me almost incontrovertible that the prescriptive content of any dominant ideology coincides with the interest of the state rather than, as in Marxist theory, with that of the ruling class. In other words, the dominant ideology is one that, broadly speaking, tells the state what it wants to hear, but more importantly what it wants its subjects to overhear. Rather than the “superstructure” of ideology being perched on the “base” of interest (as it is usual to place them), the two hold each other upright. There may well be no ruling class in a society, yet state and dominant ideology will thrive and evolve together. This view is advanced to justify the attention devoted to utilitarianism (“Tinker’s Licence” and “The Revealed Preference of Governments”), an immensely powerful though now mostly subconscious influence on past and present political thought. The utilitarian operations of “mending,” judging changes in arrangements by their expected consequences, and comparing utilities interpersonally so that the state can, in evaluating a policy, deduct the harm it does to some from the greater good it does to others and strike a balance of greater happiness, lend a moral content to acts of government. The doctrine which recommends such operations represents the perfect ideology for the activist state. It provides the moral ground for policies adopted by the state when it has discretion in choosing whom to favour. However, when the question whom to favour is no longer discretionary, but is prejudged for the state by the rise of electoral competition, interpersonal comparisons are still implicit in its affirmations that what it is doing is good or just or both, rather than merely expedient for staying in power.
Social justice as the avowed objective, the ethical excuse for seductive policies, is seemingly a break with utilitarianism. A basic continuity between the two as criteria for justifying policies, however, results from the dependence of both on interpersonal comparisons. One compares utilities, the other deserts. Either comparison can provide a warrant for overriding voluntary contracts. In both, the role of the “sympathetic observer,” of the “discerning eye” performing the informed and authoritative comparison, falls naturally to the state. Stepping into this role is as great a conquest for it as is the derivative chance to favour, among its subjects, one class, race, age-group, region, occupation or other interest over another. However, the discretion to choose whom to favour at whose expense, which the state enjoys when it first sets out to assemble a base of support by reform and redistribution, is almost bound to be short-lived. The argument of chapter 4 offers reasons why it tends to vanish with political competition and with society’s progressive addiction to a given redistributive pattern.
A fully fledged redistributive state, at whose behest “the property-less come to legislate for the propertied,“4 and which in time transforms the character and structure of society in largely unintended ways, has its doctrinal counterpart, its ideological match. The development of neither can be very well conceived without the other. Chapter 3, “Democratic Values,” deals with the liberal ideology which is dominant when the state, depending increasingly on consent and exposed to competition for it, overwhelms people while serving their ideals.
In agreeing to and, indeed, aiding and abetting the advent of democracy as the vehicle for moving from rule by repression to rule by consent, the state commits itself to certain procedures (e.g. one-man-one-vote, majority rule) for the award of the tenure of power. The procedures are such that the state, in search of support, must proceed by a simple headcount. Its policies must, putting it crudely, simply create more gainers than losers instead of, for example, favouring the most deserving, those it likes best, those with more clout, or some more subtle objective. “More gainers than losers” can always be more lucratively achieved by condemning to the role of losers a number of rich people than the same number of poor people. This rule is, however, merely expedient. It may not command the approval of bystanders who do not expect to gain from its application. Some of them (including many consequential utilitarians) might prefer the rule “create more gains rather than more gainers” and forget about the headcount. Others might want to add “subject to respect for natural rights” or, possibly, “provided liberty is not infringed,” either proviso being sufficiently constricting to bring most democratic policies to a dead stop.
Consequently, it helps a good deal if the liberal ideology establishes a case or, to be on the safe side, a number of parallel cases, for holding that democratic policies do create democratic values, i.e. that political expediency is a reliable enough guide to the good life and to universally prized ultimate ends.
I look at four such cases. One, whose great advocates were Edgeworth (impeccably) and Pigou (more questionably), seeks to establish a strong presumption that equalizing income maximizes utility. My counter-argument (“Through Equality to Utility”) is that if it makes sense at all to add different persons’ utilities and maximize the sum, it is more reasonable to hold that it is any settled, time-honoured income distribution, whether equal or unequal, that will in fact maximize utility. (If there is a case for equalizing, it is probably confined to the new rich and the new poor.)
A more fashionable, if less influential, case constructed by John Rawls recommends a modified, tempered egalitarianism as corresponding to the principles of justice. I take issue on several grounds with the principles he derives from the prudential interest of people negotiating about distribution in ignorance of their selves and hence of any differences between them. I dispute the purported dependence of social cooperation, not on the terms which willing participants settle bilaterally among themselves in making actual cooperation unfold, but on the readjustment of these terms to conform to principles negotiated separately, in an “original position” of ignorance set up for the purpose. I also question the deduction of principles of justice from democracy rather than the other way round (“How Justice Overrides Contracts”). In the section “Egalitarianism as Prudence” I challenge the alleged prudential character of a certain egalitarianism and the roles assigned to risk and probability in inducing self-interested people to opt for it. In passing, I reject Rawls’s bland view of the redistributive process as painless and costless, and of the state as an automatic machine which dispenses “social decisions” when we feed our wishes into it.
Instead of contending, in my view unsuccessfully, that certain economic and political equalities produce final, uncontested values like utility or justice, liberal ideology sometimes resorts to a bold short cut and simply elevates equality itself to the rank of a final value, prized for its own sake because it is inherent in man to like it.
My main counter-argument (“Love of Symmetry”), for which there is perhaps unexpected support in Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” and in a priceless outburst by Engels, is that when we think we are opting for equality, we are in fact upsetting one equality in making another prevail. Love of equality in general may or may not be inherent in human nature. Love of a particular equality in preference to another (given that both cannot prevail), however, is like any other taste and cannot serve as a universal moral argument.
Somewhat analogous reasons can be used against the case that democratic policies are good because, in levelling fortunes, they reduce the pain people suffer at the sight of their neighbour’s better fortune (“Envy”). Very few of the countless inequalities people are liable to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress and work alike if one is still luckier in love than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities. Envy will not go away once chateaux have all been burned, merit has replaced privilege and all children have been sent to the same schools.
Incentives and resistances, the exigencies of staying in power in the face of competition for consent and the character of the society whose consent must be elicited, should duly lead the
