Ping Pong 24: The Notable Problem
Perhaps the first problem that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century faced when they abolished (in differing ways) the idea of monarchy, was the old problem of the scrap merchant. In the idea of the monarchy was hidden a whole bundle of differing constituents parts, some of which could be safely allowed to die with the king, but others which had to be given a new life, and a new resonance in a different kind of state. The problem then being the exact nature of that life. Here the problem was surprisingly tricky. One might relatively easily define those parts of the royal prerogative that were useful for a republic, and those that were dangerous to it in itself, and yet that does not mean that one can simply allow those useful parts an independent existence of their own. For that independent existence will create its own context and people, equivalent to the monarch, a people who might then be free to abuse the powers which they have been given. For example, it is clear that a republic needs to take over the power of a monarch to suggest laws, and yet not clear exactly whether any free state can afford a group of people who are dedicated to the creation of such laws. However without such a group of people it is likely that any and every law will be badly drafted, and therefore be quite unworkable. Likewise it is not clear that the task of governing and enforcing the laws once passed, should fall to the same people who passed the laws in the first place. The lack of clarity here is very genuine. Why it is a bad idea that the same group enforce the laws they pass is obvious enough. The laws as they are enforced are a different beast from the theoretical niceties that are passed in legislative assemblies, and if the same group enforce the law as pass the law, the system opens itself up to cloud compelling, corruption and terror. However if the two are simply allowed to stand apart, that is if the body drafting the laws has nothing to do with their enforcing, then there is little hope that they will ever be able to pass viable laws in the first place.
A republic faces the immediate task of at once separating out powers, but also then defining how those powers once separated are also interlinked and intermeshed: A good republic is founded on a double alchemy; what was seamlessly united in the powers and the prerogative of the monarch, must be divided, and yet sympathies need thence to be opened up between these divided parts. The game is then to ensure that these sympathies are of the right kind and to the right extent. There are in this regard three viable solutions to this last problem of sympathy, all of which have some part to play in any constitution. Firstly one can establish formal connections between different elements of government. There are two obvious problems with this move. On the one hand, the constitution will tend to be rather static. Each group has and defends its own patch. It resents change, and might not want to allow for it (all the more so if that change strengthens other arms of government). On the other hand, such a system of contrasting powers will tend, particularly at times of strife to split into factional interests. Each group will accuse the other of cocking up or of the abuse of their powers, and government fracture, into myriad circumlocutions.
Secondly one might attempt to create an overarching concept or idea in whose name each institution carries out their task, and therefore for whose good the entire system ought to operate. This other good could come in a variety of forms from nationalism to a constitutional monarchy, just so long as it imposes an external necessity for accord between the differing competing wings of government. The problem of course is that this unity is very likely to remain theoretical, or to be confused with personal interests. Or rather, the betraying of such a unity will be for each element in the state what the other lot do all the time, and what oneself never does. Each then blame the other for the discord and do it in the name of the higher unity. The result is a strange conflict where all that unites are the terms of abuse that each party throws at the other. For each element of government all the others are necessarily unpatriotic, as they defend their own interests, while one’s own department of course always has a wider goal in mind… This odd ingestion of conflict is no doubt vital to the stability of any republic, as the conflicts here are potentially at least rather real and dangerous – and are thereby contained. Many a state which lacks this language of patriotism risks dissolving into a civil war which pitches the military against the politician against the police against the media. The ownership of the means of abuse is therefore vital to the continuance of the republic itself, even if it does not make good governance in itself.
The third possible link between elements of government lies in individuals. It is of course perfectly possible for the same individual to be a part of all the elements of government, and therefore open out links between each and every part. However there are here two complicating factors, that make the reliance on individuals rather problematic. On the one hand, if one simply relies on such individuals, then one risks simply re-inventing at a different level, the powers and privileges of the monarch. Any one individual’s power to link up the elements of government must therefore be curtailed and transitory, or at least subject to election. Thence the powers of the American president might be akin to the powers of the eighteenth century British monarch, but their ability to remain in control of those powers is limited and defined. On the other hand, as the state becomes complex, the ability of any individual to be able to embody the link between the differing elements of government becomes problematic. Differing individuals will therefore represent different agglomerations of interest, and differing possible links between elements of government. The problem is then to open out ways that each such individual can communicate to one another in the context of the wider government. A task that might be surprisingly tricky. That is, differing individuals might have very different takes on exactly how and why the differing elements of government could, should and do come together. And so if this problem is ever formally articulated, the possibility for any consensus, such as might be held to be necessary for a state, would slip into impossibility. A state would be replaced by a very large number of warring parties, and the only issue would be the exact extent of the war which each group would wage in the name of the state.
This last problem was one that the eighteenth century was no doubt more finely attuned to, than our own times. That is to say, accustomed as we now are to the notion of the state, we have become very much indifferent (or simply blind) to these slips into low level conflicts between very different individuals. Our own rule appears to be that a certain amount of violence (verbal or physical) is alright so long as it dos not engulf the entire system (or at least Us, whoever WE might be). Our Media therefore are free to declare war on elements of society, and lead real crusades where the niceties of the law and the rights of citizens are swept aside in a tide of moral outrage, and cod medicine (the hysteria about paedophiles being a case in point).
The eighteenth century however could not accept the necessary levels of cynicism and dissolution, to allow this low level war to approach. In its place they suggested that one must define a perfect citizen. Or perhaps better, one must pitch a state at a certain group of people, who will naturally be best able to cope with the synthesis of powers that the modern constitution appears to require. According to the eighteenth century rules, this group was to be found within relatively small landowners. Small holdings became the principle for government. The reason for this move to property is complex. There are of course pragmatic reasons for such a jump. The propertied classes of the eighteenth century were the ones who had the time to study and to think. They were therefore the ones who might be expected to tackle the complex elements of government best. Likewise the argument was no doubt made, that this group of people were the ones used to governance, on a small scale, and used to taking the consequences of their decisions. Moreover the argument might well be made that land (as opposed to money) tied one to a nation and that that therefore tied one’s interests on a personal level, to one’s decisions in government: the rights and privileges of small land owners were then to be confused with the state itself (!). Finally the argument was made that the advantages of having such an independent group of people governing was that they were not dependant upon the state for their pay, and therefore could theoretically make decisions in the interests of the country and not their own individual interests.
Within this welter of apologism and mock-Aristotle, some of which at least is used in modern times to justify privilege, is a very real problem. There is a difference in kind between two of the ways in which we understand modernity and the liberalism that it is said to spawn: Capitalism and Democracy are the strangest of bedfellows, and there is no necessary need for the two to be ever simply reconciled (China might be right). Or if there is a need for the two to be interlinked, then that need is not given in the logic of either system, but rather in the nature of the individuals who live in the two worlds. It is these individuals who naturally appeal to a synthesis of these rather different branches of their lives. The landowning classes, therefore for the eighteenth century represent the best combination of these two worlds, as it created an individual enmeshed within each world, and yet independent from either.
To understand the nature of this independence, one briefly needs to consider the real differences between capitalism and democracy. Capitalism rests in a sense upon allowing and articulating the world on an a posteriori footing or response. A problem occurs, and a response is found to meet the challenge of that world, according to a single axis. The problem might be as diverse as personal debt or global warming, just so long as a paradigm can be found which allows one to articulate that problem within a single dimension - with debt that dimension is given in money, and with global warming, by the notion of carbon ‘foot-prints’. Once this dimension is created, a world of flows is envisaged, in which problems have certain effects, effects that then can be managed in an endlessly responsive system. It is the peculiar power of the overall system, that although it is officially formed after the individual problems it claims to solve, that it in fact comes to dominate the entire process. What had been a response, becomes then the aim of the system, whether that be to free up the money supply, or to create a world of carbon trading. Capitalism therefore triumphs at the moment that the world of the response takes on the power and privileges of that which it initially claimed to be responding to.
Democracy by contrast attempts theoretically at least to conjure up a future (and so initially claims not to be merely responsive). To elect a government is therefore to attempt to choose those people who will best articulate a certain future. Likewise the business of government appears on the face of it to be about ‘charting a course’ towards the future. And so it begins at least. The problem of course is that futures are notoriously volatile affairs, and every government will find itself being dragged into the world of responses. A world which will tend to be utterly indifferent to the hopes of the future that propelled a party to power (it might or might not accord with those hopes). The Rights of the future will thereby be transmuted into the pragmatic responses of the present.
Democracy starts in the idea of bright futures (and always claims to be about talking of the future) and ends in responses and pragmatics. Capitalism makes the opposite move, and the two only accord at certain points and not as a whole. The point of concord is of course, the individual wealth of the specific voters that any one set of politicians rely upon. One comes then, back to the problem of how one understands this last fact. Does one, as the eighteenth century did, insist that those best suited to vote (and govern) are the ones whose position makes them independent in themselves of politicians (and so best able to judge them)? That is, the attempt is thereby made to breed a class which embodies in themselves the juncture of democracy and capitalism, and so are best suited to govern their dual articulation. Or does one suspect that any such judgement will actually be made in the name of just another interest group, and that therefore there is no position beyond the meeting point of capitalism and democracy, from which to articulate a higher freedom from. But if this if the case, then one still has to cope with the fact that the meeting point of the two worlds of democracy and capitalism is volatile and highly flexible (wealth comes and goes and with it the politics that people require).
The point of course of this Rant is to remind us all of exactly how difficult it is to build a state. Or better, it is very easy to define a world of the division of powers, and so crystallize the perfect state, but is very difficult to define a viable paradigm for those individuals who must then reconcile this divided world. This problem is a very real one as endless abuses (be they fascism, corruption, the Mafia or communism) enter into this failure, and promise to make it good. In the eighteenth century, the solution appeared so simple. Simply restrict the voters to those with property, and so with the bottom to resist abuse. But once we have in the name of equality banished this defence, the problem becomes once again intense and troubling, and by no means solved by modernity, and it will be to another possible solution for it, that the next Rant will turn.
