• home
• chapters
• bio
• contact

• bibliography

TOP NAV

Home

Chapters

Bio

Contact

BOOK

Books

CHAPPIES

All

Beck/Graves

Hayek

Mises

Northrop

Novak

Paglia

Stark

Turner

Voegelin

Wilber

JV CHAPPIES

Beito

Boyd

Green

print view

Government and the Technology of Power

There is such a thing as society. It s just not the same thing as the state David Cameronⁱ

If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government. For the easiest way to imagine the future is one miraculously converted to your own vision: happy people living in a world designed by you. But what the social reformer doesn’t think about is the all-important question. How did the future get that way? Almost certainly it got that way by force.

The studies about society that come down to us are mostly apologies by a member of the governing elite. Occasionally they represent the visions of revolutionary activists who wish to conjure up a vision of a future government purged of the injustices of the present incumbents. The most revered analysts, the contract theorists, construct openly unhistorical and hypothetical narratives, like Plato in The Republic, about the best and the most just government. These special pleaders tend to put a showroom shine on their plans for the rest of us. Even the authors of The Federalist Papers, victors in a war of liberation, offered up a vision of government that was good for them and theirs, rather than good for the inhabitants of North America in general.

But what does government look like stripped of the adornments of the special pleaders? Here is the short version. It is the work of retired politician Norman Tebbit, once a minister under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance. It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors. It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful business freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade. Nothing else has to be provided only by the state. Health and education provision and physical infrastructure may be provided by or precipitated by the state or others, but they are not core functions of the state.ⁱⁱ

Tebbit is looking at a settled society in which the question of “who rules” has already been decided. But what about the actual founding of a state? What about guerrilla movements? What about civil war? What about conquest? What about an army marching across Europe? What exactly is the difference between and army and a government?

Jung Chang in Mao: The Untold Story paints a vivid portrait of the quasi-government run by Mao Tse-tung and Chou Enlai in central China in the 1930s. They commanded a “red base” in the province of Jiangxi, about 500 miles south-west of Shanghai, in the 1930s. Mao started out as a kind of bandit, supporting his Red Army troops by looting and raiding the local population. But Chou brought order and organization to the operation. Under Chou’s leadership:

The red state regarded its population as a source of four main assets: money, food, labour and soldiers, first for war, and ultimately to conquer China.ⁱⁱⁱ

Mao and Chou made money from the mining of tungsten using soldiers and “slave labourers.” Peasants paid a grain tax, and were pressured to lend grain to the red state. But men were drafted into the Red Army or as conscript labour, and pretty soon “women became the main labour force.”

[T]hey had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and minding clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves[.]^iv

There was no thought for the welfare of the subject population. There was no attempt to improve health, and secondary schools were closed down and commandeered by the party. Terror was necessary to keep the red state alive. Chou relaxed the purges for a while in 1931, but found that when people ceased to fear killings and arrests “they started to band together to defy Communist orders. It rapidly became clear that the regime could not survive without constant killings[.]”

In the 1930s, long before they stood above the Tienanmen gate in Beijing as rulers of all China, Mao and Chou ran a real government in a remote area of China. They had a territory and they defended it with an army. They supported their government with taxes and by exploiting natural resources for profit.

Conversations the author had with Guatemalan tourist guides in 2007 confirms this picture for Guatemala. During the long civil war from 1960 to 1996 both government forces and guerrillas taxed whatever population they controlled and seized young men off the streets to draft into their armies, and woe betide the deserter.

Stripped of narrative and apology, we are left with the following definition:

Government is an armed minority ruling over a subject people in some territory. It maintains itself in power by defending its territory from enemies foreign and domestic using resources requisitioned from the people living within the territory and/or supplied by a foreign power.

This reduces the definition of government even within the boundaries established by Tebbit; in this definition his core functions of justice, money, and infrastructure are optional. A government is still a government if it occupies a territory and merely requisitions resources to feed and supply its troops. It can do without money, law, and justice if it uses terror. A government is well advised to provide justice, money, and infrastructure to the subject population, and pose as the representative of the people because the cost of providing these services is returned to the governing elite in decreased chance for rebellion and increased wealth that can be farmed by the government. But you can do without all that so long as you have the stomach for terror.

We can abstract from the government of Mao in his red base to an even more basic form of government. Nicholas Wade has described this prototype human government in Before the Dawn. Chimpanzees, researchers have found, are very like humans. They are patrilocal, in that the males stay put and the females move to find mates in neighboring territory. They are also fiercely territorial. There is a good reason for this. Chimps feed on fruit from trees scattered throughout their territory. The bigger the territory, the shorter intervals between births. The way to establish and defend a territory is by warfare.

Chimp warfare takes the form of bands of males who patrol the border of their territory, looking for an individual of the neighboring community who has been rash enough to feed alone... Three against one is the preferred odds: two to hold the victim down and a third to batter him to death.^v

Government, for chimpanzees, is a male elite of warriors that defends and maintains a territory over which it rules. The males rule over the females. “Every adult male demands deference from every female, resorting to immediate violence if a submissive response is not forthcoming.”

The human past, according to Wade, is equally violent.

Warfare was a routine occupation of primitive societies. Some 65% were at war continuously... and 87% fought more than once a year. A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year[.]^vi

We like to think of our modern wars as uniquely savage. But Wade estimates that the war deaths in the 20th century would have reached two billion people if the wars of the 20th century had suffered the casualty rates of primitive peoples. In fact only about 40 million people, military and civilian, were killed in the bloodiest of all wars, World War II.

The fact is that modern humans are different from chimpanzees. We are different from primitive hunter-gatherers. We are even different from our agricultural ancestors. We are not just territorial animals. We are also trading animals. The emergence of food surpluses in the agricultural age created the opportunity for trade between political units, and that set off an argument that has persisted to this day. How should trade relate to the state? Should it be government regulated, government owned, government controlled, or what? In Nicholas Wade’s narrative, the story of humans is a tale of progressive “gracilization” or domestication. This has physical markers, such as skull thinning, reduction in tooth and jaw size, and also cultural markers identifying the decline of violence. Humans defend their territory, but they also thrive by the reciprocal gifts of trade.

The question that returns again and again is the question of force. Within the simple village group of hunter-gatherers, government force does not extend much beyond the headman, “with few powers beyond personal persuasion.” But with the agricultural age, specialization and investment in irrigation required coordination, and that coordination was achieved by converting personal persuasion into institutional compulsion. To defend its territory against aggression, a state needed to requisition some of the product of food production and trade. Yet this governmental protection became an equivocal blessing. For what, to the peasant family, is the difference between a far-away government that collects a portion of the harvest for defense, and marauding bandits that sweep into town in a dawn raid and demand tribute? Should a besieged city declare itself an “open city” and buy off an army with tribute, or should it defend itself and risk a defeat and the pillage and rapine of a “sacking?”

In the early modern era at the end of the agricultural age, governments faced a particularly acute problem. The development of firearms made warfare much more expensive. Kings and princes in Europe found that they could not obtain enough resources to maintain their armies by customary methods of taxing intermediaries such as guilds and corporations. But money the king had to have, else the neighboring prince would overwhelm his underfunded army. The solution was the absolute monarch and the state bureaucracy. James J. Sheehan describes how the princes in the German lands solved their problem.

Money—for whatever purpose—was the dominant force behind the construction of the modern state... To support their courts and pay their soldiers, rulers needed a steady, inexhaustible supply of income... Taxation required that rulers penetrate their territories more deeply then ever before, and thereby cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects.^vii

In order to tax their subjects, governments needed to know more about them.

They had to know how many men were available to service in their armies, how much grain could be levied, and how much money passed through a merchant’s hands.^viii

The solution was the state bureaucracy, a corps of professional information keepers, and the bureaucrat became, by the end of the eighteenth century, the personification of state power. Elites now rule by gathering information about their individual subjects and taxing them with bureaucracies.

Paralleling the development of the state bureaucracy, states learned how to articulate their armies. As armies became bigger and bigger they needed exact and uniform types of formation. The brigade was invented by Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War of 1628-48; the division was invented by the French in the mid 18th century, the army corps by Napoleon. All governments adopted the new military organizational revolution; they understood the imperatives of power.

As the eighteenth century came to a close governments discovered a new technology of power. The British government began to appreciate the power that the new textile technologies gave to the British state. The government forbade the export of textile technology and the emigration of technicians with textile knowledge. This was an action that all governments could understand. Technology was power; it should be sequestered and hidden from dangerous foreigners. But the revolutionary political economy doctrines of the Scottish Enlightenment brought the traditional power doctrine into question. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith developed a new idea that the health of the state depended upon the free flow of ideas, goods and services. In other words, the government that wanted to maximize its power would need to walk a line between power and freedom. A free economy would create much more wealth than an economy tightly controlled by government to maximize government power.

All these themes came together in the political career of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a child of divorce born and raised in the British West Indies and began work at age 11 in the office of an import-export merchant in St. Croix. But by the time that Hamilton attended the constitutional convention as a delegate from New York in Philadelphia in 1787 at age 30 he had made himself an expert on the new political technology in everything from constitutions to central banking and the importance of manufacturing over agriculture.

As a brilliant young chief of staff to General Washington during the Revolutionary War Hamilton knew first hand about the agony of trying to fight a war without an effective financial system. Britain’s power, he wrote in 1781 to Robert Morris, revolutionary Superintendent of Finance, depended more upon its credit than upon its ships and its soldiers.^ix Hamilton was a leader in the fight to ratify the US Constitution in 1787, writing most of The Federalist, a sophisticated apology for a strong central government. Then he amazed the world with his extraordinary performance as the first Secretary of the Treasury. In his “First Report on the Public Credit” he proposed bolstering the strength of the state by issuing bonds to pay off the debts incurred by the Continental Congress and the states during the revolutionary war using revenues from federal import tariffs and excise taxes. In his “Second Report on the Public Credit” he proposed a central bank modeled on Britain’s Bank of England. He knew how the Bank had helped finance Britain’s rise to world power in the 18th century. In his “Report on Manufactures” he proposed a mercantilist program to encourage manufacturing in the United States by tariffs and subsidies. All these policies became law one way or another and helped the United States federal government become a preeminent power in the world.

By 1800 humans had developed new technologies of power that challenged the monopoly of the ancient power of armed force. Bureaucracies could penetrate through the shield of traditional social structures and control individual subjects by taxation and conscription. Government-controlled finance and credit could influence and often control the entire universe of economic relationships by placing the government’s financial instruments at the center of the economic life of a nation. Governments would learn to use all these technologies ruthlessly as the modern state grew to adulthood in the 19th century. By the 20th century, government was armed against its people and the world with the triple threat of armed force, bureaucracy and finance.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

To email the author, click here.

 TAGS

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close