The State in Theory and Practice

Harold Laski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412808316
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473439
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Constitutions
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timeless classic by Harold J. Laski explains the nature of the modern state by examining its characteristics, as revealed by its history. The State in Theory and Practice is a work that grows in significance, rather than dwindles over time. This is because, as Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. points out, Laski helped develop and expound the foundational arguments of the political left.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, even on the hard left, few people thought of Marxism, at least in its classical formulation by Laski in the 1930s, as a political alternative. Much of the interest in Laski seeks to separate the early Laski of pluralist parliamentary arguments from the later Laski of Marxism. Laski's appeal rests on subtle aspects of his science of politics that require a detailed examination before their full significance can be understood. The state is a work that operates at several layers of assumptions and implications.The significance of Laski starts with the observation that among many intellectuals on the left, the political critique of liberal democracy remains as influential after the collapse of the Soviet Union as it was when Laski wrote. The leftist critique of classical liberalism is one of the touchstones of modern political thought and Laski remains part of that tradition. Laski is one of the links between what might be called the ""old left"" of the pre-World War II era and the ""new left"" of the 1960's and later.

I
THE PHILOSOPHIC CONCEPTION OF THE STATE

I

EVER since Plato denied that justice was the rule of the stronger, men have sought to justify the state by reason of the high purposes it seeks to protect. The human mind, indeed, revolts from the notion that the possession of coercive power can be defended regardless of the ends to which it is devoted. We argue, as with Aristotle, that the state exists to promote the good life. We insist, as with Hobbes, that there can be no civilization without the security it provides by its power over life and death. We agree, as with Locke, that only a common rule-making organ, to the operations of which men consent, can give us those rights to life and liberty and property without the peaceful enjoyment of which we are condemned to a miserable existence. Rousseau could find certain terms of statehood in which, by obeying its laws, men could be more free than in pre-civil society. “The state,” wrote Hegel in a famous sentence,¹ “is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth”; and he argued that all the worth of the human being is derived from his immersion in its activities.

Few institutions have received panegyrics more splendid than the state; and it is important to understand the grounds upon which they rest. They are rarely panegyrics of actual states; though there are occasions when the panegyrist has found his ideal embodied in an actual society. More usually, they are the defence of a system of purposes which the thinker deems good, and conceives as capable of realization only through the peculiar form of association we call the state. These purposes, in the history of political philosophy, have a fairly constant character. They are a search for the terms on which individual men and women may most amply fulfil themselves. They are a recognition of the fact that, because individuals move differently to the attainment of conflicting desires, a common organ is necessary in society to define the terms upon which that movement may legitimately proceed. Views differ violently as to the form that organ should take. The basis upon which it should act, the ambit of its authority, are questions upon which no unanimity has been attained. But, the philosophic anarchist apart (and in political philosophy he has been a curiously infrequent creature), the necessity of a coercive authority in society to define the permissible rules of social behaviour has been almost universally admitted. Granted the nature of men, the alternative appears to be a chaos of individual decisions fatal to the emergence of settled ways of life. With the state there comes security; and security is the condition upon which the satisfactions men seek to secure are capable of peaceful attainment.

But to argue that there is need in society for a coercive authority which is commonly obeyed begins and does not end a problem. Men do not obey that authority for the sake of obedience. They obey it for the purposes they believe to be secured by its operations. They submit to orders for the sake of what they believe those orders to imply. They scrutinize those orders in terms of the satisfactions they seek from life, and, from time to time, they reject them upon the ground that they are a denial of those satisfactions. Obedience, that is to say, is the normal habit of mankind; but marginal cases continually recur in which the decision to disobey is painfully taken and passionately defended.

These marginal cases make it clear that men obey the state not merely for the sake of order, but also on account of what they deem that order to make possible. They are, in fact, judging the state from the angle of satisfactions they think it should provide. Their judgments, no doubt, vary with time and place. Expectations of what is legitimate are always born of experience; and the demands of one society at one period will differ from those of another society at another period. But the implication is the clear one that the exercise of coercive authority in a society is never unconditional. It must act by rules. It must realize those purposes which the citizens who live by its activities deem to be fundamental. Any inquiry, therefore, into the nature of states, is at least as much an inquiry into the realized intentions of power as into the announced purposes by which their operations are justified in theory. For its citizens, a state is what it does; it is not justified merely because it is a state. It secures their assent to its actions by the judgment they make of the consequences. They concern themselves not with the philosophic purpose of the state as such, but with the results of its actual processes as these are experienced in their daily lives.

The philosopher may, like Burke, think of the state as a partnership in all virtue and all perfection; the common man thinks of it as a way of being ruled which satisfies his expectation of legitimate satisfactions. The philosopher, that is, has, in the main, been satisfied to construct an ideal form of state and to transfer its implications to the actual experience of states. That ideal form has been, very largely, the philosopher’s personal conception of what is desirable in the light of his experience; he has externalized his autobiography into a programme and criterion of reality. Hobbes’s theory of the state is, at bottom, built upon the insistence, intelligible enough in an epoch of civil war, that order in itself is the highest good, without regard to what that order makes. Hegel’s assertion that the personality of the state is incomplete without a monarch chosen by primogeniture is clearly less a universal truth than it is the elevation to that plane of Hegel’s own preference for the Kingdom of Prussia as the highest form in which a state can clothe itself. Unless we take the view that, as Bosanquet argued, “the state is a brief expression for states qua states”¹; that, therefore, the theoretic purpose is always being realized in living fact; that the failures we encounter are to be attributed not to the state as such, but to non-state sources which the state is seeking to purify; it is obvious that a theory of the state must be a way of valuing the achievement of actual states, a criterion of measurement, rather than a statement of reality. We cannot say, with Hegel, that the individual’s “highest duty is to be a member of the state”¹ until we have judged the quality of the actual state of which he is a member.

I shall seek, in this book, to set out as best I can that philosophic justification of the state which has, I believe, exercised, in the last century, the main influence upon Western civilization. I shall then examine that justification in the light of the states we encounter in our daily lives. This will lead me to a formulation of a theory of the state more related, as I shall suggest, to the facts we know than that which is commonly accepted at the present time. Finally, in the light of that formulation, I shall seek to draw some practical inferences by which we may predict—since prediction is the ultimate test of a true social theory—the probable course of events in the future.

My argument throughout will be based upon a single assumption. I shall assume that the justification of coercive authority, the only title upon which it can claim the obedience of those over whom it is exercised, is in the measure of its satisfaction of maximum demand. It is not, that is to say, its intention merely to achieve this end that is its title to allegiance; a theory of intention can never be the basis of an adequate political philosophy. It is not the purpose announced, but the purpose realized, when this is set over against the reasonable possibilities of realization, that can alone be the criterion of value in human institutions.

II

We have to begin with definitions; not a little of the barrenness of political philosophy is due to the failure of men to agree upon the meaning of their terms. We find ourselves living in a society with other men; that society, in relation to all other forms of human association, is integrated into a unity we call the state; as a state, its affairs are administered by a body of persons we call the government. What do these terms mean?

By a society I mean a group of human beings living together and working together for the satisfaction of their mutual wants. The basic wants they have to satisfy are economic in character; they must earn their living before they begin to live well. But, beyond bare economic need, there is every variety of want, religious, cultural, domestic, the satisfaction of which becomes possible through the social instinct of man. Theoretically, there is no reason why this group should not be equivalent to the totality of human beings; and, actually, as I shall show later, the implications of our methods of economic production make it necessary to regard that equivalence as having profound institutional significance. But for various historical and geographical reasons, into which it is impossible here to enter, the societies with which we are concerned are those such as England, France, Germany, the United States, and Russia—groups of human beings differentiated from other groups by sharing in certain traditions, political, psychological, linguistic, or whatever they may be, which separate them in an identifiable way from the rest of mankind. The societies with which we shall be here mainly concerned are those which, over a long period of history, have assumed the form of a national state.

By a state I mean a society of this kind which is integrated by possessing a coercive authority legally supreme over any individual or group which is part of the society. An examination of any national society will always reveal within its boundaries not only individuals, but also associations of men grouped together to promote all kinds of objects, religious, economic, cultural, political, in which they are interested. Such a society is a state when the way of life to which both individuals and associations must conform is defined by a coercive authority binding upon them all. The French state, for example, is a territorial society, divided into government and subjects, whether individuals or associations of individuals, whose relationships are determined by the exercise of this supreme coercive power.

This power is called sovereignty; and it is by the possession of sovereignty that the state is distinguished from all other forms of human association. A municipality is a territorial society divided into government and subjects; so, also, may be a trade union or a church. But none of them possesses supreme coercive power. Each must normally subordinate its habits to those defined as legitimate by that supreme coercive power. Its will is, formally, an unchallengeable will, since, otherwise, it could not be supreme. For the same reason, its will can suffer neither division nor alienation; as Bodin said, the state is sovereign because it gives orders to all and receives orders from none. Its orders are therefore law and, as such, binding upon all who come within the ambit of its jurisdiction.

It is important to realize that the attribution of sovereignty, in this fashion, to the state connotes merely a formal source of reference and nothing more. It is the description of a structure, not an inference of valuation. It says nothing of the wisdom or the justice that may or may not be inherent in the will of the state; it only says that the state is supreme over all other forms of association because it is formally competent to bind them to obedience without itself being bound. It may, in fact, be unwise or unjust in what it commands; but neither unwisdom nor injustice makes any difference to the formal legal right of the state to exact and enforce obedience to its orders.

The state, then, is a way of organizing the collective life of a given society. It is, indeed, legitimate to regard it not as the society itself in its manifold complexities, but as an aspect of the society in which the totality of its life is, at least contingently, embraced. For since the coercive power of the state is supreme, there is, in theory, no activity within its jurisdiction the character of which it may not seek to define. Anyone who considers for a moment the extent of the functions of the modern state will not be tempted to underestimate the reality of its sovereign power. Defence and police; the control of industry; social legislation, including functions so far-reaching as education and insurance against sickness and unemployment; the encouragement of scientific research; the operation, with all its immense consequences, of a system of currency; the power of taxation; the definition of the terms upon which men may, for their various purposes, associate together; the maintenance of a system of courts in which the state’s own legal principles will be given effect n0 matter what person or body of persons may be involved; merely, it is clear, to take a rapid view of its outstanding functions is to realize the degree to which it pervades and permeates the individual life. The modern citizen is enmeshed at every turn in the network of its operations.

But it is vital to realize how the individual citizen encounters the state. All institutions must act through persons. The power they exercise cannot operate in any other fashion The state, therefore, needs a body of men who operate in its name the supreme coercive authority of which it disposes; and this body of men is what we term the government of the state. Now it is one of the fundamental axioms of political science that we must distinguish sharply between state and government. The latter is but the agent of the former; it exists to carry out the purposes of the state. It is not itself the supreme coercive power; it is simply the mechanism of administration which gives effect to the purposes of that power. It is not, we are told, sovereign in the sense in which the state is sovereign; its competence is defined by such authority as the state may choose to confer upon it; and if it oversteps that authority it may, where such provision exists, be called to account. The idea of a government responsible for the commission of acts beyond its allotted powers is the central idea of every state where legal rule has replaced arbitrary discretion as the basis of political action. Louis XIV could, not unjustifiably, identify his private purpose with the will of the state; but even a ruler so powerful as the President of the United States must find authority for the exercise of his will either in the Constitution or in some power legally granted to him thereunder by the Congress of his country. There are even countries, of which the United States is itself an example, in which the state expressly forbids its government, by the Constitution under which that government must act, to take certain types of power or to exercise others in certain ways.

The purpose, it is said, of the distinction between state and government is to emphasize the limitation upon the latter so to act that it pay proper regard to the end for which the state exists. That end, however variously defined, is the creation of those conditions under which the members of the state may attain the maximum satisfaction of their desires. The expedients of limitation—a written constitution, a bill of rights, the separation of powers, and so forth—are all methods which experience has suggested to prevent abuse of the state’s sovereign power by the government which acts in its name. For every government is composed of fallible men. They may deliberately exploit the authority they possess for their own selfish purposes. They may, with the best intentions, but quite unreasonably, mistake the private interest of a few for the well-being of the whole community. They may be ignorant of the position they confront, or incompetent in handling it. Circumstances such as these have occurred in every political society at some period of its history. The value of the distinction between state and government is the possibility it offers of creating institutional mechanisms for changing the agents of the state, that is, the government, when the latter shows itself inadequate to its responsibilities.

Yet it must be said at once that the distinction between state and government is rather one of theoretical interest than of practical significance. For every act of the state that we encounter is, in truth, a governmental act. The will of the state is in its laws; but it is the government which gives substance and effect to their content. We say that the British state went to war with Germany on August 4, 1914; but those who brought the sovereignty of Great Britain into action on that day were its government. We say that the British state returned to the gold standard in 1925 and abandoned it in 1931; but in each case it was the government which made the decision. We say that the Russian state went communist in the November Revolution of 1917; we mean in fact that a body of men became its government who were able to use the sovereignty of the Russian state for the purposes we broadly call communist. Whenever a state acts in some given way, it is invariably because those who act as its government decide, rightly or wrongly, to use its sovereign power in that given way. The state itself, in sober reality, never acts; it is acted for by those who have become competent to determine its policies.

By those who have become competent; and here we have to ask what, again in sober fact, gives them their competence. We may say that their power derives from the law. But the law, after all, is only a body of words until men give it the substantiality of enforcement. We may say that it is the consent of those over whom they rule which gives them the power to get their will obeyed. There is a truth in this view in the sense that Hume emphasized when he insisted that all governments, however bad, depend for their authority upon public opinion.¹ But this cannot be regarded as the whole truth for the effective reason that there are times and places when men are ruled by a state from the policies of which their consent is actively withheld. It is hardly a proper use of language to say that the Tsarist state before 1917, or the state of Fascist Austria today, can be regarded as built upon the consent of their citizens; for, in each case, many of those citizens sought to change the policies of the state by revolt against the government responsible for them.

I think, therefore, that we have to say that, in the last analysis, the state is built upon the ability of its government to operate successfully its supreme coercive power. It is true (and it is, of course, important) that when the members of a state are fundamentally at one about the purposes embodied in its policy, the coercive aspect recedes into the background. It is even true that in a constitutional state which offers the critics of the government a fair chance of replacing it in power at the end of its allotted term, the coercive aspect will not appear predominant ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to The Transaction Edition
• 1 The Philosophic Conception of the State
• 2 State and Government in the Real World
• 3 The State and the International Community
• 4 The Outlook for Our Generation