What a State Is For

The previous article asked whether a state has the right to command, and treated the state itself as a familiar object needing no description. That will not survive scrutiny either.

Almost everyone alive is subject to one, most people are subject to exactly one, and hardly anyone chose which. Given that, the question of what the thing is and what it is supposed to be accomplishing is worth more than the casual answer it usually gets.

Defining it by what it does

Max Weber gave the definition that has dominated the discussion since, in a lecture delivered in Munich in January 1919 and published as "Politics as a Vocation". A state, on his account, is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Three features of that definition repay attention. It is a definition by means rather than by ends, since it says nothing about what the state does with the force and covers tyrannies and republics alike. It says the state claims the monopoly, which is what allows a state whose claim is widely disputed to remain a state. And it is territorial, so that membership is determined in the first instance by where you are, not by what you have agreed to or who your parents were.

The claim is regularly misdescribed as a claim that only state officials may ever use force, which no state has ever made. Self-defence is permitted, parents restrain children, private security exists, and in some places private citizens are heavily armed. What the state claims is authority over the terms: force used within its territory is either force it licenses or force it treats as a wrong. The monopoly is over permission rather than over the activity.

Jean Bodin gave the concept its first systematic treatment in 1576, and it has two faces that need separating. Internally, sovereignty is supremacy over everything else inside the borders, so that no church, corporation, region, or family stands outside the state's jurisdiction. Externally, it is independence from other states, and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 is conventionally treated as the moment this became the organising principle of European politics.

Both faces have eroded, and noticing that is not merely a point about current affairs. States that are party to international human rights instruments have accepted external judgements about how they treat their own citizens. Members of the European Union have accepted that its law prevails over their own in defined areas. Whether these arrangements limit sovereignty or are exercises of it, and whether a concept built for the seventeenth century still describes what states are, is a live dispute rather than a settled matter.

The three standard jobs

The first job is order. Hobbes gave the argument its most uncompromising form in Leviathan of 1651. Absent a common power, people are roughly equal in their capacity to harm each other, they compete for the same scarce things, and each has reason to strike first against those who might strike first against them. The result is not constant fighting but a permanent readiness for it, in which nothing that requires time and confidence can be undertaken, and life is correspondingly impoverished. His conclusion was that almost any settled authority is preferable to that condition, which is why his argument delivers a very strong sovereign and has struck many readers as delivering rather too much.

The second job is defence. A territory without an organised capacity to resist invasion tends to acquire one or to be absorbed by a neighbour that has, and the historical record on this point is not ambiguous.

The third job is more interesting philosophically, because it explains why the state does not stop at courts and armies.

Paul Samuelson set out the modern analysis in 1954 in a paper of about two and a half pages. Clean air, a lighthouse, herd immunity, a legal system, and the deterrent effect of a navy all have this shape. Since nobody can be excluded from the benefit, no one has a self-interested reason to contribute, and everyone has reason to let others pay. If everyone reasons that way the good is not produced, and everyone is worse off than if they had all contributed.

The point is not that people are selfish. The argument goes through for people who genuinely want the good, because each individual contribution makes almost no difference to whether it exists while costing the contributor the whole of what they put in. That is what makes it a structural problem rather than a moral failing, and it is the most powerful argument in the state's favour, since it identifies something that people acting voluntarily and reasonably will fail to achieve.

The reply

Anarchism is not the view that rules are bad, and treating it as a synonym for disorder means declining to engage with it. Almost every anarchist tradition proposes rules, coordination, and sanctions. What it rejects is that these need to come from a body claiming supreme authority backed by a monopoly on force.

Two strands run in different directions and it is a mistake to run them together.

The individualist strand holds that everything the state does could be done by voluntary contract. Protection would be bought from competing agencies as insurance is bought now, courts would be arbitration services chosen by the parties, roads and other infrastructure would be privately financed. The coercion of taxation and conscription would go, and what remained would be the ordinary machinery of agreement.

The communal strand, which is the older and larger tradition, holds nothing of the kind. It regards the market as itself a system of domination, and proposes federations of self-governing communities coordinating through mutual aid and delegated recall-able representatives rather than through contract and price. Kropotkin's writings around the turn of the twentieth century are the reference point, and the tradition includes Proudhon in 1840, Bakunin, and Goldman.

Both strands face the public goods argument, and the honest thing to say is that it is a serious difficulty for both and not obviously a fatal one for either. The individualist has to explain why competing protective agencies would not simply consolidate. The communalist has to explain how a federation of communities differs from a state once it can enforce its decisions on members who dissent.

Next

Two articles have now asked what entitles the state to act and what it is for. Neither has asked what it should be aiming at once it is granted the right to act at all. The next article introduces the three demands that answer gets made in terms of, and the ways they pull against each other.