Friday, August 22, 2008
The Social Contract And The State
From Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna, one of the true ornaments of the Blogosphere, comes this critical observation:
A man agrees to restrict his liberty in certain ways — to abide by the law and pay taxes — in order to live in an ordered civic structure, one in which all citizens may partake of the commonweal. A society in which the social contract does not function, in which there is no rule of law or civil society, is a dystopia in which life is nasty, poor, brutish, and short.All of this came to mind when reading Fjordman’s comment on this morning’s post about the disorder that has begun to grip Sweden:
I read a public comment from the Stockholm police saying that if somebody tries to rob you, you should just give them the money. There was just nothing they could do about the wave of robberies. So why should people still pay taxes? The country is totally out of control, as is much of the rest of Western Europe, yet people are supposed to pay some of the highest tax rates in the world and get demonized by the media and beaten up by left-wing extremists if they protest.The social contract in Sweden and other Western nations has failed. Some countries are worse off — Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden are probably in the more advanced stages of social disintegration — but all are affected.
This same process holds sway even where Islamization is not an issue, and even in countries which are not entirely Western.
Because of the suicidal US immigration policy, we often complain about Mexico in this space. But it’s important to remember that even though its middle class may be relatively small, there are still millions in Mexico who would live like other Westerners if they possibly could. They would prefer normal lives in a place where they could raise their families in a secure environment without violence and social degradation.
Unfortunately, their government, like Sweden’s and so many others, seems to be abdicating its most fundamental responsibility under the social contract: it is failing to offer basic protection to its citizens.
Dead on target and absolutely damning.
The great Isabel Paterson, in her book The God of the Machine, took pains to distinguish American society from other social arrangements; the United States, she emphasized, is a Society of Contract. Previous social structures had all reposed upon concepts of innate status, which determined the rights, privileges, and immunities of the several classes of a society, and by which they were distinguished. A Society of Contract relies upon contractarian thinking; a Society of Status relies upon effective power to "keep the groundlings in their places." Philosopher Jan Narveson went further, formalizing the contractarian precepts behind constitutionalism, the key American political principle, in his book The Libertarian Idea.
A contract's significance depends upon trust: the contracting parties' ability to trust one another to do as they've promised they'll do. Whether that trust relies upon character judgment, self-interest, or the looming presence of an irresistible enforcement power is ultimately irrelevant.
The Euro-Western adoption of American political principles, in the aftermath of our Revolution and the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, was tentative and partial. We like to think that the Old World is "free" in a meaningful sense, that its people and institutions can be counted upon to behave like proper Americans in the clutch. In truth, that's our wishful-thinking centers talking; the Europeans have never really surrendered the Society of Status, or any of the corollaries that flow from it.
One of the main implications of the Society of Status is that significant changes in the arrangements among men must be brought about through violence.
The State, in all rational analyses of social interaction, is defined as the monopoly wielder of legitimized violence. Whether contractarian or status-based, it exists to wield violence in pursuit of objectives other institutions would be required to pursue by peaceful means. Thus, the State has no special abilities beyond the sanctioned use of force.
Clearly, people would not countenance the existence of such an institution unless:
- The alternative arrangements were all worse, or:
- The State is inescapable, by reason of insufficient power to resist it.
Revolutions occur when private persons and institutions decide to resist the state a outrance. Whether a revolution is successful or not, its subtext is always the same: "This has become insupportable. Mass bloodshed and chaos is preferable, at least in the near term."
But there have been precious few revolutions where the revolutionaries' aim has been to topple the State and not replace it with a new one. Throughout history, and with very few exceptions, they who rise against the State do so with the fixed intention of installing a new one -- usually with themselves at the helm.
Herein lies the greatest of all the problems that confront the lover of freedom. Freedom and State power are complementary sets; where there is freedom, there is no State power, and where there is State power, there cannot be freedom. To be more specific, your freedom to choose among competing religions, zip codes, or brands of coffee implies that there is no State authority over these things. If the State could compel you to buy Maxwell House coffee (ugh), live in Albany, NY (ugh!), or become a Muslim (UGH!!), you could not claim to possess freedom in those dimensions.
But the overwhelming majority of persons who've ever lived believe that the State is a necessary institution -- that some institution must possess the legitimate use of force, if only to pursue and punish private wielders of violence. And once a State has been erected on that basis -- there is no other -- its inherent dynamic is to grow without limit:
Government Systems, acting in accordance with the laws of growth, Tend to Expand and Encroach. In encroaching upon their own citizens, they produce Tyranny, and encroaching upon other Government Systems, they engage in Warfare. -- John Gall, Systemantics
Should the Europeans, Mexicans, and others realize that their States are failing to uphold the most fundamental obligation of a State -- that is, deterring and punishing private wielders of violence -- they might rise up and overthrow their States, or they might passively collaborate in their downfall by withholding all support, but it is nevertheless certain that each fallen State would be replaced by another State.
Those new States would be infused with the same core principles as the old ones. After all, it's the society erecting the government that contributes the ideas upon which that government will be based. The peoples of Europe, Mexico, and so forth have nothing but the Society of Status to contribute; its premises are too deeply rooted among them.
It's accurate to say that, unlike the United States, these nations have never had a Society of Contract even in outline. Their constitutions, where such exist at all, either implicitly or explicitly place the State above the individual in all ways. The individual has no rights as Americans understand them; rather, he has latitudes: grants of permission by the State to do certain things, contingent on continuing State approval. But that premise is the golden door to tyranny, whether it arrives swiftly or slowly.
Baron Bodissey is correct in saying that the social contract has failed, but your Curmudgeon hastens to qualify his statement thus: It failed because in those lands where it has so visibly collapsed, it was illusory from the beginning. Unlike Tinkerbell, it could not be animated by the fervent beliefs of its promoters. Nor, given the welfare-fascist convictions of the peoples of Europe, Mexico, et alii would their replacement States perform any better.
