The State. Anthony de Jasay

say that neither can really be employed without some admixture of the other, the prevailing amalgam of repression and legitimacy in any state depending, as Marxists would say, “on the concrete historical situation.” However, between the poles of coercion and divine right there has always been another element which is clearly neither: consent, historically perhaps the least important type of obedience-eliciting relation between state and subject, but perhaps the most fertile of recent consequences, particularly unintended ones. In early states, one can think of consent as binding only some minute but special group of subjects to the locus of the state’s will. The war gang’s obedience to a tribal leader or that of the praetorian guard to the Emperor may be examples of consent which border on complicity. Whether it is augurs, priests or officers of the state security police, the obedience of such small groups of people is a condition of the state’s tenure of power; like a pulley for lifting great weights by small force, it can set off the processes of repression as well as those, never assured of success, of creating legitimacy. Yet their complicity and collaboration with the state’s ends derives as a rule neither from repression nor from legitimacy, but from an implicit contract with the state which sets them apart from other subjects and rewards them at the latter’s expense in return for their willing obedience and consent to the state’s power. Some intellectually quite intriguing, and in their effects most portentous, problems arise when the group thus set apart and rewarded, expands amoeba-like across society, with ever more people inside and less outside it, until in the theoretical limit everybody consents and everybody is rewarded for it but there is nobody left to bear the cost (cf. pp. 260-1).

      Consent for our purpose is best defined as an accord between state and subject, revocable with little advance notice by either party, whereby the subject adopts some appropriate and favourable attitude ranging from active militant support to passive allegiance, and the state furthers the subject’s specific ends up to limits which are constantly renegotiated and adjusted in the political process. It is very much less than the social contract, if only because it creates no new right or power for the state. It is not “social” because the civil party to it is never the whole of society, but merely the individual subject, group or class with motives and interests setting it apart from other individuals, groups or classes.

      While the social contract treats the subject’s life and property or (as in Rousseau) his general good, the contract of consent deals with his partial and piecemeal ends; both contracts attract the political hedonist, but in different ways. No continuing obligations are created by the contract of consent any more than by cash-and-carry transactions which do not bind the parties to repeat them.

      Let us revert to the rewards of consent. When nanny and the children practise the politics of consent by agreeing that if the children will be good children this afternoon, there will be strawberry jam for tea, strawberry jam is within nanny’s gift. In the short run, she can bestow it or not as she pleases. But the state has, generally speaking (and abstracting from such exotic and dated phenomena as strawberries grown on the royal domain) no rewards to bestow, no jam that is not already the jam of its subjects. Moreover, as I had occasion to point out in chapter 1, in the general case where its subjects are not unanimous in their conceptions of the good, the state can in the nature of the case only further its good which may, for all we know, be its conception of their good.

      We have also noted that progressive assimilation of people’s own ends to the ends selected and pursued by the state, i.e. the development of “false consciousness,” can erode and at least in principle fully dissolve this contradiction. As Professor Ginsberg puts it in his Consequences of Consent: democratic elections “erode the adversary relationship between rulers and ruled... encourage citizens to believe that expansion of the state’s power meant only an increase in the government’s capacity to serve,”⁷ and “modern democratic governments tend to increase their control over the public’s putative means of controlling their actions.”⁸ However, the spread of false consciousness is neither a strong nor a sure enough mechanism for always securing the allegiance the state requires. First, it is not something the state can be confident of engendering unilaterally, at its sole volition, and certainly not over a short enough period. After all, it took almost a century from Jules Ferry’s vast reforms creating universal lay state education to the emergence of a socialist electoral majority in France, and over the intervening turns and byways the ultimate result was at best only rather probable, never certain. Where an ideologically not quite inept opposition exists, it can spoil the fresh growth of false consciousness as fast as the state is promoting it. Secondly, relying heavily on false consciousness is like “doing it with mirrors.” The people the least likely to be taken in could well be the tough and hard-nosed sort whose support the state most needs.

      The common-sense perception that the state has no rewards to dispense that do not belong to its subjects anyway, so that it can only pay Paul by robbing Peter, is of course harmful for good-citizen false consciousness. By way of remedy, there stands the arguable assertion that the consent-generating transactions between state and subjects enhance social cooperation (and hence output, or harmony, or whatever good it takes social cooperation to produce) to the effect that the gains of the gainers exceed the losses of the losers. For well-rehearsed reasons, such an assertion is now generally taken to be a value judgement (it could be a statement of fact only in the special case where there are no losers, i.e. where all gains are net gains, and the latter are minor enough not to imply a significant change in the distribution of goods). It is the value judgement of the person who undertakes the adding up (with due regard to algebraic sign) of the gains and losses. No very good reason is on hand why his values should take precedence over anybody else’s who might get a different sum from the same addition. Recourse to the value-judgements of the gainers and losers directly involved settles nothing, for the losers might well value their losses more highly than they do the gainers’ gains, while the gainers are quite likely to do the opposite. Thus an impasse is reached. For equally well-rehearsed reasons, no gainer-to-loser compensation test seems possible which could “factually,” in a wertfrei manner prove the availability of a residual surplus of gains over losses, to be applied to the greater fulfilment of the gainers’ ends. Without such a surplus, however, there is no fund, created by the incremental contribution of the state to some index-number of total social end-fulfilment, out of which the state could bestow bits of end-fulfilment to selected subjects without damage to others.

      Nor would the production of a surplus of good and its bestowal be sufficient to earn consent for the state. If a given subject came to hold that the activities of the state do generate additional end-fulfilment for him, he would for that reason alone have no interest to support the state any more than he was already doing. As far as he was concerned, the state’s bounty might be falling from heaven and changing his own conduct vis-à-vis the state could not make it fall any thicker. If he became a more docile subject and a more convinced supporter of the “government party,” he may have done so out of admiration for good government, or gratitude, but not out of rational self-interest in the narrow sense, on which political calculus can be based. This is possibly the abstract and general common element in the political failures of Enlightened Absolutism, the reformist good governments of Catherine the Great, the Emperor Joseph II and (less obviously) Louis XV, each of which met mainly with stony indifference and ingratitude on the part of the intended beneficiaries.

      Rewards, to elicit self-interested support, must be contingent on performance. They must be embedded in implicit contracts of the “you will get this for doing thus” kind. Consequently, it is difficult to envisage the politics of consent without a type or types of political markets joining rulers and ruled, to enable bargains to be struck and revised. Democracy might be regarded as one or both of such types of markets functioning side by side. One is the majority-rule, one-man-one-vote type of pure electoral democracy, where the state at intervals engages in a competitive auction with (actual or potential) rivals for votes. The other, much older and less formal type of market, now usually called “pluralistic” or “group interest” democracy, is an endless series of parallel bilateral negotiations between the state and what one could, vulgarly but tellingly, call the wielders of clout within civil society. Clout must be seen not only as the capacity to deliver votes, but also as any other form of support useful for maintenance