Virtù, Selfishness, and the Limits to Government
I. Virtù and Selfishness. Machiavelli called it virtù: Successful polities, he argued, possessed a sense of public-mindedness that brought their citizens to do what was right for the state even when it contravened their private interests. Sometimes translated as civic virtue, public spirit, or just plain virtue, virtù was Machiavelli's chief explanation for the success and failure of political enterprises from antiquity to the Renaissance. Societies possessing virtù would sacrifice their wealth, their comfort, and even their sons so that good government would continue. And paradoxically, through sacrifice they would usually prosper.
The trouble with virtù, however, was that it was almost intrinsically fleeting. Societies kept their virtù only so long as they resisted the temptation toward softness: While virtù brought strength, strength brought wealth. In turn, wealth brought luxury, vice, and effeminacy. In other words, virtù contained the seeds of its own destruction. For
Machiavelli, history could be explained as an ongoing battle between virtù and decadence. (Yes, there's a painfully obvious gender angle here. I may eventually discuss it in another post.)
Machiavelli shocked his contemporaries in part because his idea of virtù was audaciously pagan: It had little or nothing to do with Christian ideas of virtue, positing that perhaps the best interests of the Church did not always coincide with those of the state. Virtù may have had nothing to do with selfishness, but it had still less to do with Christian humility.
As Bernard Crick put it in his introduction to Machiavelli's Discourses (the relevant portion of which can be read here):
'Civic spirit' is probably the best simple translation—if by 'spirit' one means spirited action, like the arete of the early Greeks -- as in Homer's description of Achilles as being 'a doer of deeds and a speaker of words'; and in Machiavelli's relishing the significance of Achilles' tutor having been a centaur, 'half-beast and half-man'. Lastly, while he often uses the term in a hortatory way -- people should recover their virtù' while there is time, or should not have let it idle away into ozio (indolence or corruption) -- its force is as often empirical. Does a state have virtù among its inhabitants or not? Are there, in a word, citizens? If there are no or too few citizens, one is doomed to personal or princely rule; but if many, then a republic can flourish, and will prove — the by now familiar argument — the stronger form of state. Look around the modern world. It is a reasonably precise criterion. To give one dangerous example. Leave aside the rights and the wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Is it not obvious that the weakness, for all their numbers and arms, of the Arabs is related to the historical lack and the slow development of a class of citizens -- men who combine individual initiative with collective discipline? And that much of the strength of Israel is related to its citizen culture?
(Two complete asides: My own edition adds the words"as well as to foreign subvention" before the final question mark, which dilutes the argument considerably. I would have left them off. Elsewhere, Crick also makes a howling error about the French Revolution, claiming that universal manhood suffrage was never imagined by the men of 1793; in reality, the French Constitution of 1793 made France the first European polity ever to adopt the measure. But aside from this error, I found Crick's introduction to the Discourses to be one of the most stimulating pieces of writing I have encountered for many
weeks.)
In England, Machiavelli's ideas would later animate many of what are now termed the classical republican thinkers, men like Algernon Sidney and John Milton. Cato's Letters (excerpts here), from which the Cato Institute takes its name, are likewise typical of this strain of republican and proto-libertarian thought.
The classical republicans also exerted a strong influence on the founding of the American republic. When Benjamin Franklin famously declared that the Constitutional Convention had given America"a republic, if you can keep it," the second half of his epigram was a clear reference to the civic virtue that our founders hoped would sustain the American experiment. Many of the Federalist Papers are also informed by an appreciation of how difficult it is to maintain a republic. While present-day Americans may think that liberal democracy is one of the easiest and most natural things in the world, our founders thought it could only be won -- and maintained -- through tremendous sacrifice.
Yet even in the late eighteenth century, an intellectual revolution was already underway, and classical republicanism was on the wane. Inspired by thinkers like Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith, those who prized human liberty increasingly declared that neither freedom nor progress demanded very much in the way of civic virtue or self-sacrifice for the good of the polity: Prosperity, good government, and even virtuous individual character might instead arise through the pursuit of fundamentally selfish goals. In his poem"The Fable of the Bees," Mandeville wrote,
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.
This was the State's Craft, that maintain'd
The Whole, of which each Part complain'd:
This, as in Musick Harmony,
Made Jarrings in the Main agree;
Parties directly opposite
Assist each oth'r, as 'twere for Spight;
And Temp'rance with Sobriety
Serve Drunkenness and Gluttonny.
The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury.
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more.
Clearly we are far removed from Machiavelli's understanding of how a republic endures; the intellectual revolution of which Mandeville was part turned on its head one of the key tenets of classical republicanism. Most subsequent classical liberals have idealized commerce and selfishness to almost the same degree that classical republicans vilified them. And while Franklin quipped of having given America a republic, if it could keep it, many of his other writings reveal him have had inordinate difficulties on the question of pride -- which he knew from experience to be a great motivator. Here he discussed his famous list of practical virtues:
My list of virtues contain'd at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show'd itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc'd me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list giving an extensive meaning to the word.
I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it... When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
The influence of Mandeville -- a sometime friend of Franklin's -- is clear: The appearance of virtue may well be enough, and pride may well be the engine that drove all of Franklin's legendary hard work. Franklin seems to demand of himself not Christian virtue, nor even virtù, but a crafty self-interest and a pleasant demeanor.
Especially in the twentieth century, something like Mandeville's position won a decisive victory among libertarians: From Ayn Rand, who extolled the virtue of selfishness, to Friedrich Hayek, who argued that a wide array of helpful social systems arose through amoral and shortsighted transactions, to Robert Nozick, who even offered an invisible hand explanation for the state, civic virtue is nowhere to be found -- except for those rare occasions where it is argued against. (It is easy to see how Rand, who fled the communists, and Hayek, who fled the Nazis, might have come to reject the notion of self-sacrifice for the good of a government, purely for personal reasons. Yet both participated in a trend that had begun well before them and would continue to the present.)
II. The Limits of Government To ensure the properly selfish life, Rand, Hayek, and many others demanded sharp limits on the power of government. Across many different lines of modern libertarian thought, government is conceived as an obstacle to self-fulfillment, understood either as man's proper aim in life or as the creator of most of our other beneficial social attributes. More often than not, government gets in the way because it introduces inauthentic motives, distorts the proper relationships among individuals, and even tempts people toward a worship of the collective at the expense of the self. Broadly speaking, this is the libertarian account of fascism and communism, and it has always seemed to me one of the areas where libertarian political thought rang the truest.
We are to expand the realm of the individual, because -- in Rand's formulation -- the individual, and not society, is the prime mover of the world, or because -- in Hayek's -- we do not understand and cannot possibly understand the complex honeycomb that we all create through the pursuit of our own self-interests. In either case, the prescription is roughly the same.
How, though, are we to achieve our goal? A wide variety of tactics have been suggested, from Objectivism's stress on rationality and proper cultural values as the foundation for a free society -- all the way to the Rothbard Caucus's proposal to dismantle all improper government programs immediately and without regard for consequence.
Each in its own way, the various strains of libertarianism are grappling with the problems of public choice theory, and, in his own way, Machiavelli acknowledged . As Wikipedia explains (I think fairly),
One of the basic claims that obtain from public choice theory is that good government policies in a democracy are an underprovided public good, because of the rational ignorance of the voters. Each voter is faced with an infinitesimally small probability that his vote will change the result of the elections, while gathering the relevant information necessary for a well-informed voting decision requires substantial time and effort. Therefore, the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout.
While the good government tends to be a pure public good for the mass of voters, there exists a plethora of various interest groups that have strong incentives for lobbying the government to implement specific inefficient policies that would benefit them at the expense of the general public. For example, lobbying by the sugar manufacturers might result in an inefficient subsidy for the production of sugar, either direct or by protectionist measures. The costs of such inefficient policy are dispersed over all citizens, and therefore unnoticeable to each individual. On the other hand, the benefits are shared by a very small special interest group, who has very strong incentives to perpetuate the policy by further lobbying. The vast majority of voters will be completely unaware of the whole affair due to the phenomenon of rational ignorance. Therefore, theorists expect that numerous special interests will be able to successfully lobby for various inefficient policies.
Inspired by the inaugural essay at Cato Unbound, James Buchanan's"Three Amendments: Responsibility, Generality, and Natural Liberty," Sandefur has argued that there is no possible way to write a constitution whose text escapes the fundamental problem of public choice in politics. He writes,
At Cato Unbound, Prof. James Buchanan.. recommends amending the United States Constitution to say something like (in Hayek's words)"Congress shall make no law authorizing government to take any discriminatory measures of coercion." He's open to other phrases, but the idea is to enshrine the principle of"generality, which has long been accepted as the central element in the rule of law."
Buchanan believes that we can limit the public choice problem by establishing a constitutional limit on differential benefits, but, as Anthony de Jasay explains in his essay, On Treating Like Cases Alike, reprinted in Justice And Its Surroundings 170 (2002), there is a major problem with this: constitutional rules are subject to the same public choice pressures that influence statutes. As Jasay puts it, interest groups not only" choose legislation that maximizes their gains from politics," they also"learn to choose a constitution that maximizes the scope for such legislation."
...Requiring"generality" doesn't answer the question, therefore, of what sort of laws are general and what are special, because it doesn't explain what variables are to be considered relevant when determining whether one case is like another case. Those variables are potentially infinite, and many have a great deal of plausibility. But once we decide on some, then we have loaded the game and our"general" laws are no longer truly"general" in a meaningful sense.
...You see now why I once referred to this essay as"spooky." It suggests that there is no possible solution to the fundamental problem of politics — no matter how philosophically savvy the people are!
Call it the Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem of limited government: No matter how we set the limits, there will always be people with the proper personal incentives to wish to circumvent them; no matter how we write the rules, there will always be ways of rendering these same rules moot. And if there aren't any such ways, then people, in their infinite turpitude, will invent them. In a flash, we are back at Machiavelli, who demaned a certain public-spiritedness, a certain virtù, as a precondition for liberty. And I daresay that even in an anarcho-capitalist system, the same might well be required: Even granting for the sake of argument that all the rest of anarcho-capitalist theory is right, what, if not some quality or virtue of the people, would prevent an anarcho-capitalism from degenerating into a mere government?
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]