Why Should I Obey the State?

 

Editorial note. This abridgement preserves Ian Johnston’s wording in the passages retained. Material has been omitted chiefly where the original lecture addresses its 2003 Grade XII audience directly, uses then-current political examples, repeats points already established, or moves into topical commentary that is not necessary to the central comparison of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. The original lecture was delivered in September 2003 and released into the public domain.

Let’s begin with a really fundamental question about what we call a state or a country—the basic political unit your studies are concerned with. What is its purpose? What is this political organization supposed to provide its citizens? Well, at the most basic level, the state has only two major functions.

The first is to protect its citizens from outside interference and oppression—that is, the state has to defend its independence and freedom to govern itself (otherwise it ceases to be a state and becomes a province in someone else’s empire). And the second is to establish and protect justice within the state.

Justice here does not mean simply a judicial system but something much more all-encompassing—a sense of fair allocation of the resources of the state, a idea derived from the Greek idea of justice as an “arrangement,” the proper distribution of economic, cultural, educational, and judicial services carried on in the community (the words fair and proper here, as we shall see, do not necessarily mean equal).

In order to carry out these two functions the state has at its disposal considerable power—physical power (in the form of police, judges, and soldiers), economic power, cultural power (including, most importantly, religion), and social power (especially public opinion).

And so the central issue of politics—the issue that, in one way or another, almost all important political theorists are seeking to address—becomes an attempt to answer this question: What is the best way to organize the power in the state in order to achieve the two goals of the state, freedom and justice? To whom should we entrust the power at the state’s disposal in order to achieve these goals? Who should rule, and who should obey, and how do we define, describe, and justify the relationship between them?

Any attempt to answer such questions requires a theoretical defense of the particular model being proposed, a comprehensive account which provides the citizens with an understanding of why a particular distribution of power and decision making is justified, is legitimate.

In other words, such an answer will have to provide a satisfactory and effective answer to the most basic question in political science, “Why should I obey the state?” An answer of some kind must be available to the citizens, since they have to put up all the time with state decisions which affect them and which often require them to do things they might not wish to do (like pay taxes). Unless most of them willingly obey most of the time, running the state may well become unworkable.

Before turning directly to these thinkers, let me pose this question: Why is it that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries political theory was such a hot topic? What happened that suddenly prompted such energetic and long-lasting public debate about the nature of the state? Given that major intellectual movements always arise in response to some previous arrangements, usually in cases where those arrangements have become problematic, we might well want initially to explore what crisis these writers were addressing in their concerted efforts to propose new political models.

The Old Order was, briefly put, a political organization of the state based on inherited rank, in which society consisted of a carefully graded hierarchy of value—the king and the major aristocracy and bishops at the top and the peasants at the bottom, with various degrees in between.

One’s position on the scale was determined, almost without exception, by one’s birth and the traditions of one’s community. Movement up and down the scale was extraordinarily difficult and certainly not encouraged. The distribution of power in the state corresponded to the scale: the higher one’s position, the greater one’s power.

What held this system together was a network of personal relationships among the rulers and the governed. Political life was overwhelmingly local, since the vast majority of people lived in very small and traditional agricultural communities where their families had lived for generations and where the power base had not changed for centuries.

The theoretical basis for this arrangement was twofold—the first was an appeal to traditions, “You should obey the state because that’s what we’ve always done around here.” The second was an appeal to religion—the hierarchical structure of the state was part of the natural order ordained by God. In such a system, justice and freedom in the state depended upon virtue in the rulers—because they were more virtuous than others, they knew best how to use power for the right purposes.

The challenge to the Old Order arose gradually out of several major conditions. One was the rising power of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which created, through trade, an increasing number of people with growing economic power but relatively little political clout.

This new business class began making demands for political power commensurate with its economic power, demands which the Old Order tended to resist.

Perhaps the most decisive factor, however, was the loss of religious uniformity, and the religious wars which followed, for this put into question the very heart of the Old Order, the nature of virtue itself. Once people could no longer agree about that and were prepared to defy their rulers or kill their fellow citizens over competing definitions of virtue in the name of the one true religion, the fabric of the Old Order was ripped apart.

The transformation of the Old Order was, for the most part, a slow process. What makes the political thinkers who followed so important is that they provided those people who were seeking changes in the Old Order alternative models and a different vocabulary. The most important thinkers are generally those who redefine the conversation, who put on the table new ways of thinking about old problems, and who thus help to channel the energies of others in new directions.

Machiavelli, who is often hailed as the first modern voice in political theory, pre-dates the Reformation, of course, and so his famous book The Prince (written in 1513) is more an anticipation of what was to come later. He is writing in direct response to the political anarchy in Italy, long characterized by what seemed never-ending and very bloody wars between the various rival ducal and papal states.

What makes Machiavelli interesting is not any comprehensive new theory of the state (which he does not offer) but his revolutionary insistence that the traditional emphasis on virtue in the ruler is a mistake. What the ruler should concentrate on is not doing the right thing but doing whatever is effective for protecting and ensuring his own power. And that necessarily requires that the ruler abandon any notion of adhering to virtue.

What Machiavelli recommends, above all, is an intelligent practical sense of what particular actions will work best in a given situation to make the ruler’s power more secure, combined with a ruthless willingness to undertake such action.

Machiavelli argues that this is, in fact, how successful rulers have always operated, and therefore this is how the modern prince ought to proceed. In his political world the end (protecting and increasing the prince’s power) always justifies the means. In modern times this attitude is often called Realpolitik.

Defenders of Machiavelli argue that he is right to see that politics has to be based upon the way people really behave and not how we might like them to be. Since the essential prerequisite for a political life is stability, Machiavelli correctly insists that the prince must be prepared to make sure his power is secure at all costs—and for that he has to be willing to use the full range of options without moral restraint.

A third group sees Machiavelli’s political vision as a satire, a work ridiculing those very things for which defenders of Machiavelli as a serious political thinker applaud him.

The first and most important response to the deficiencies of the Old Order was the work of Thomas Hobbes in the second half of the seventeenth century, immediately following the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War. Though by no means accepted immediately, Hobbes’ radical new vision established the theoretical foundations of modern liberal states.

Like Machiavelli, Hobbes begins with the recognition that virtue is an insufficient basis for justice in the modern state. He admires virtue but acknowledges that there’s not enough of it around, because human beings by nature are greedy, fearful, jealous, and quarrelsome creatures. The only way they can live peacefully together is if they agree to submit themselves completely to a sovereign power which will have the authority to make laws and enforce them equally on all the citizens.

Hobbes doesn’t define a particular version of the sovereign—he prefers monarchy, but what he has to offer works equally well with an assembly of delegates, like a parliament, or any other form of governing authority on which people can agree.

Hobbes thus proposes a radically new model of the state: a single all-powerful sovereign and a general population all equally obligated to obey the sovereign’s written laws, which are the only recognized authority people have to acknowledge. Old traditions, inherited customs, traditional religious attitudes, long-standing personal relationships, old systems of rank and privilege—none of these matters unless the sovereign’s law makes them matter. Our only obligation as citizens is to the sovereign’s law.

In an all-important sentence, Hobbes lays down one of most important liberal principles: What is not forbidden by the sovereign’s law is allowed.

We should obey the state, Hobbes argues, not because it’s established by God, but because it serves our self-interest to do so.

Hobbes begins by picturing what human beings are like without political organizations—in what he calls a state of nature. Here everyone is perfectly free—there are no laws and no morality—and each person has the right to grab and keep whatever he can for as long as he can.

This leads, in Hobbes’ most quoted phrase, to a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short,” a condition which sooner or later persuades people that they should submit to a common authority so that they can get some peace and quiet to enjoy their lives free of a constant fear of death. In effect, a group of free individuals agrees to submit to the unconditional authority of some outside party who will protect them from each other.

From this notion of an agreement comes the idea of a social contract—a legal arrangement among the governed to submit equally to a common authority. It’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this concept in modern politics, for it introduces a number of ideas absolutely fundamental to our modern political arguments. The first is that the individual has an identity and certain rights independent of the state.

The second vital principle this idea of the social contract puts on the table is the enormously important modern notion that the state exists by the consent of the governed, indeed, that the very legitimacy of the state requires such consent.

A third important concept here is the sense of equality under the law—all citizens, as equal partners to the contract, are equally bound to obey the sovereign. There is not one law for the rich or the righteous and another law for the poor or the profane.

And, most importantly, Hobbes’ system permits and promotes a new kind of freedom. Because in the Hobbesian state our only duty is to obey the law, we have freedom to do whatever the law does not forbid. Hence, where the law is silent, we acquire the freedom to do what we like, without the restrictions of public opinion or competing religious or community traditions.

Hobbes’ state thus consists of two worlds: the public sphere in which the sovereign’s control is all-powerful and the citizens’ duty requires obedience to the law, and a private sphere in which the citizen is free of obligation to anyone. This concept of Negative Liberty—personal freedom to do whatever we want in our private space—is at the centre of what we call Liberalism.

Another vital new principle Hobbes’ liberal vision introduces is the legal nature of political obligations. Whereas, in the Old Order political power and obedience were closely linked to particular people, families, inherited relationships, and old traditions, in Hobbes’ vision, power and obedience are linked only to the legally established office rather than the person.

John Locke, writing about half a century after Hobbes, adopts his vision of the liberal state in all its most important basic principles. He does, however, make some important and influential adjustments by ameliorating Hobbes’ very reductive vision of human nature and by seeking to deal with what many perceived as the most dangerous feature of Hobbes’ vision of the political state, the excessive power in the hands of the sovereign.

Where Hobbes is seeking, at all costs, to limit the ability of citizens to fight each other, Locke is more concerned to protect citizens against the tyranny of the government.

Hence, for Locke, when individuals living in a state of nature enter into a social contract to form the society, they do not surrender all their rights and submit themselves unconditionally to the law of the sovereign. They retain certain key entitlements (rights) which act as permanent limits to the control the government can exert over them. Thus, there is still a contract and the consent of the governed and the rule of law, but the contract is more complicated.

Negative liberty, with Locke, has some built-in guarantees, and these guarantees are enshrined in the document which establishes the social contract, namely, the constitution.

The most famous examples of what Locke is proposing are the documents his ideas did so much to shape, the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.

Such a document enables a citizen to challenge the government’s authority to enact and enforce a particular law and thus to limit that citizen’s ability to do as she likes. In a state where citizens have constitutional rights, their private space is protected against government interference much more clearly than in a state where such rights do not exist.

Before leaving these two enormously important liberal thinkers, it’s important to make one further point. Neither of them is particularly interested in whether the citizens are happy in their personal lives in a political system that encourages personal freedom and competition at the expense of communal traditions. Nor are they concerned with the moral quality of citizens’ lives.

What matters is obedience to the law, not adherence to any particular moral code. Finally, neither of them is particularly concerned with equality—other than the important idea of equality under the law.

The Liberalism of Hobbes and Locke is designed to promote individual economic activity in a spirit of competition, within the boundaries established by laws binding on everyone, an arrangement that virtually guarantees that some citizens will be very much richer than others and that some citizens will fail in their economic activities.

Rousseau begins by adopting Hobbes’ basic metaphor: human beings originally existed in a state of nature; this ended with a social contract which established civil society. But he drastically alters the emphasis. For Rousseau, man in a state of nature was perfectly happy, independent, free, and self-sufficient (a “noble savage”).

The social contract was a disaster because, in setting up society, human beings inevitably introduced inequality—some people ended up with more property or more esteem than others, and this brought about all human unhappiness and oppression, which arise, most importantly, not merely from material differences but also from psychological states. Inequality makes people feel unhappy, because they cannot help comparing themselves with others who have more goods, more talent, or more honours.

Rousseau has three major objections to what Hobbes and Locke are proposing. First, Rousseau argues that in such a modern liberal state, human beings will end up trading the complete freedom they enjoyed in a state of nature for a small and insufficient fraction of freedom given by the state.

Second, he sees in the inequality produced by liberal competition a source of material and psychological oppression. Rousseau is particularly sensitive to how people who have a certain political freedom can become economic slaves to the market place and psychological slaves to the images of the materially good life. And third, he objects strongly to the reductive view of human beings basic to Hobbes’ theory.

If human life is to be worth anything, Rousseau argues, a person has to have a moral worth as an independent individual capable of making rational decisions about his own life for moral reasons, rather than operating merely as an economic agent whose only duty is to obey the sovereign’s law without question.

Rousseau realizes that there’s no going back to a State of Nature, no matter how utopian that existence may have been. Human beings now have to live in society, among other human beings.

So the challenge to the political theorist is to find a way to organize a state in which human beings are as free as they were in a state of nature and in which they feel that they are fully equal, without any psychologically crippling sense that they are better or worse than anyone else in any way.

And finally, the political arrangements should encourage the full moral development of the individual citizen as a self-governing, independent, rational moral being.

To begin with, Rousseau rejects any form of government other than a majoritarian democracy in which all citizens participate equally at all times in the decision making (hence the state must be relatively small).

If the citizens are educated enough to see the reasonableness of this arrangement, they will come to understand that in following the decisions of the majority of all the citizens they will be following the General Will of the state.

Rousseau argues that an arrangement like this would enable people to obey the state without any sense of a loss of freedom, because they would be following what their reason told them was the right thing to do, and self-imposed rules do not register as a loss of freedom. In effect, they would be obeying themselves (“You should obey the state because you are the state”).

It’s important to notice a couple of things about Rousseau’s proposal. First, he’s emphatic about how important it is that people have to be educated into understanding an arrangement like this.

Where Hobbes and Locke settle for people as they are, warts and all, and seek to channel their natural vices into useful economic activity, Rousseau wants people to be better than they typically are, to develop more fully as happy, independent, free, rational moralists, and they will have to be educated to do that if his system is to work.

Rousseau’s vision has been immensely influential, especially among those who don’t like the spirit of economic competition at the heart of traditional liberalism and who think that a political system has some responsibility for the personal happiness and the moral stature of its citizens—and, most importantly, among those who believe that there is an important priority that liberalism not only ignores but subverts, namely equality.

The most penetrating, influential, and long-lasting challenge to the liberal tradition established by Hobbes and Locke came in the mid-nineteenth century from Karl Marx, who directed his formidable intellectual powers into a thoroughgoing critique of liberal capitalism as it had developed on the basis of the political models advocated by those earlier thinkers.

Marx admired many things about liberal capitalism, especially its ability to generate fabulous wealth and to sweep ancient traditions out of the way. But Marx was genuinely horrified by the staggering inequalities created by that system. When he looked around him he saw increasing numbers of people who in theory enjoyed so-called liberal freedoms but who were, in fact, abject slaves to an economic system which barely enabled them to survive.

Was this really freedom? What use were the celebrated liberal freedoms if a majority of the citizens, including children, had no economic freedom and were forced into a short and brutal life of exploitation to make the fabulously rich factory owners even richer?

This response led Marx to a long and detailed study of capitalism. Marx makes a very strong case that free-market capitalism is, over time, an extremely destructive enterprise, because the conditions for free competition inevitably make fewer and fewer people richer and richer and leave more and more people out of work or living desperately near subsistence level.

Over time, Marx argues, these conditions will encourage in those at the bottom a collective awareness of their common plight (in his words they will develop a “class consciousness”) and, with a new understanding of the reasons for their distress, they will revolt against their capitalist owners, take over the means of production, and distribute the enormous wealth generated by the productive forces of capitalism more justly.

Hence, the inherent problems of capitalism will lead to a new political structure, Communism, in which everyone owns the means of production and benefits equally from the wealth generated.

People will be free of economic wants and will thus be able to take charge of their lives in a spirit of free cooperation, without the need for one citizen to oppress another. They will obey the state because, once again, they are the state.

This process, according to Marx, is historically inevitable, but it requires the development of a new understanding in people about the nature of society and their own role within it.

Marx’s analysis of liberal capitalism is extraordinarily acute.

He may very well have been wrong about the time line, and he almost certainly underestimated the ability of capitalism to adjust in order to defuse the revolutionary potential of those injured by the system, but his analysis about the inevitably dislocating and self-destructive effects of free-market capitalism is still a very prescient way of understanding social disruptions.

Marx provides both theoretical coherence and a practical program of action for those who wish to offer some political alternative to the liberal models of Hobbes and Locke. Under that influence, most Western countries have developed a strong and influential socialist tradition, whose major aim is to pressure society to recognize the importance of equality in the face of the growing gap between rich and poor.

Marx may have misjudged the march of history and the extent to which human beings are capable of developing class consciousness in the way he describes, but capitalism still has to find an entirely satisfactory answer to his analysis of its built-in deficiencies.

For all their significant differences, the thinkers very quickly reviewed above had one thing in common: they believed that modern political thinking must be based on reason, on a rational analysis of human nature and of the conditions necessary for freedom and justice, in states maintained by the consent of the governed.

Ian Johnston, “Why Should I Obey the State?” Lecture delivered to a Grade XII class at Cowichan High School, Duncan, British Columbia, in September 2003. Johnston released the text into the public domain for use in whole or in part, provided the source is acknowledged.