What is Government?
N.R. Anecone
What is the state? An axiom is that there are no laws without a state. And a state is an organization situated around a government. History shows the complexity of legal relations is a consequence of the relative development of production. If there was no agriculture there would be no populations, if there were no populations there would be no government. Governments may be interpreted as reactions to the growth of populations. In a sense governments are instruments which a society (or some stratum of a society) uses to distribute or decide what to do with its resources.
From this very general definition several advances can be made. If we want to identify what government is, the inquiry should be as general as possible so the model explanation we construct is applicable to all cases. We must identify what is fundamental to both the concept and practice of government—the properties which do not meaningfully vary with history.
To start, what kinds of government have existed? The first step in the quest to understand the nature of government is to sketch a very rough outline of governmental history.
The most primitive form is despotism, in which a strongman usually of military disposition seizes a society and manipulates it out of egoism. Usually this comes at the pain and expense of the underlings. This form has had full play in history, in all centuries. Despotisms were curses to the ancient Chinese, the renaissance Italians, and still are curses to modern Africans and North Koreans. In effect, despotism is man in the state of nature as conceived by Hobbes, only superimposed over larger populations with at least some development.
If one is very concise, most historical governments can be subsumed by the category of despotism. It is roundly the most primitive form of statism or proto-statism. An improvement on this basic category is monarchy, in which a leader claimed rulership for him and his family through the maintenance of symbols of authority (crown, throne, etc) plus heavenly mandate, and most important of all, through the vital sequence of hereditary lineage. The most logical extension one can make is that monarchies are simply more ornamental forms of despotism. The difference is only a slightly more recognizable state and the rudimentary organism of a bureaucratic apparatus, installed by nepotism and dynastic relations.
Monarchies had quite a long play through history. From 768, the time of Charlemagne, and through the revolutions of the 19th century, it was the preferred type of governance in Europe. The history of government proves there has been a steady trend, if only statistically and unsurely, in the limiting of absolutist autocracy (Excepting for the limiting cases of Hitlerism, Maoism, and Stalinism of the 20th century). As early as the 740s republicanism had become a reality amid several cities in Italy, and throughout Europe over the next centuries what would gradually emerge were checks and balances. (Under this interpretation, the whole collective strife of history has an evolutionary arc towards greater integration and greater complexity.)
These first checks and balances were not the official, institutionally enforced “artificial ones” written into nation’s founding legal documents. Rather, they were “feral,” caused by necessary square-offs between the different segments of a steadily diversifying social system. The irreversibility of certain changes—the emergence of merchant classes, the sedimentation of a bureaucracy orbiting the royalty—fixed the evolution of forms of government that were more constitutional in demeanor and which serviced, ever so slightly more, the needs of others and not just the strong and noble. Violence, which had been the most efficient means of coercion by despotic governments, could no longer accomplish everything the rulers wanted. Violence became not the order of the state itself, but a department of the state. It became a limb of a greater being which had by the 19th century limbs of finance, public works, and armed forces.
Constitutional monarchy and enlightened despotism were the result of governments developing a capacity for self-reflection. They started, ever so meanderingly, to actually think about what they were doing. It is appealing that these forms of government developed only when the state had already differentiated itself enough so that its leaders did not have to manage everything alone and at least some citizens (i.e. the middle class) could be spared war, disease and toil long enough to begin analyzing and producing information. One can propose a principle: the more stable a state, the more developed it becomes, the more differentiated its activities. It would be unhistorical to assume human societies move towards a state of “ever greater perfection”, but the rule seems evident that states become more advanced with greater stability. (The logic here is of course that no libraries, schools, hospitals, etc, can be constructed if there is no knowledge of how to build them, or the population is underfed and in perpetual revolt, etc.)
The French Revolution is often interpreted as the birth of European nationalism. The underrepresented and spurned segments of the populace no longer tolerated the medieval structures enjoyed by the old regime. With the great revolutions of the late modern period, those who did the production used the oldest tactic of history—brutality—to topple the debauched and oversatisfied elite. Politically this led not to the permanent elimination of elitism but only to a raised awareness among governments that their people actually existed and have functional nervous systems capable of planning revolts and feeling the pain of poverty. Governments had to become aware of the populations parallel to them if they were to carry on.
Modern states are only one power structure among many. They, as group-systems, are not sharply discontinuous from the rest of society, a universe away from the remainder of social reality, as was the case in earlier political forms where the royalty and its attendants were held totally apart from the majority of farmers, soldiers, and petty craftsmen. Modern states, with corporations, are arguably less concentrated, less “pyramidal” in the distribution of power—because there are now many systems of rules and organization within nation-states, not simply the orders of some single leader or some single cabal of grand masters. The American government serves an example. While still claiming the authority of various legislative, executive and judicial formalisms, it is viewable as just one structure amid a whole network of corporations. (Corporatism can be interpreted as the evolution of a plurality of non-state, partially self-regulating, limited governments.)
That covers our cursory review of the history of statehood. Now we must ask: are there any regular patterns, any properties of cohesion or repetitiveness that serve to unify all this sweeping variation? One is reminded of Hobbes’ metaphor of the Leviathan. –If a state had a predictable anatomy, as predictable as a healthy person’s anatomy, we could easily systematize our conceptions of government, provide a “blueprint”. There is no obvious blueprint, because the blueprint itself presupposes a fictional, unrealizable ideal. To think there such a thing as an ideal government is to make a value-judgment, since there is as of yet no mathematical theorems which tell us what is the best kind of government, beyond doubt. In other words, there is always a possibility beyond the political systems in their present state, there is no way to place a ceiling on possibility which coincides exactly with the way a political system is, and declare, “this is as best as it gets.”So instead of pestering our thoughts over a Utopia, American government will have to serve as a specimen for analysis.
What has changed from the time of the Roman Senate to the United States Senate? Aside from obvious differences in geography, the U.S. government differs from a classical government due to productivity enhanced by communications and informations technology, by residing in a phenomenally more diversified and comprehensive civilization, and by advancements in political theory achieved by the European Enlightenment. It is unlikely that the neurophysiology of political agents has evolved over such a brief interlude, so it is the variables of enculturation, population, technology, and individual disposition which have changed the form of government.
More important to identify is what hasn’t changed. The thing that fully defines the function of a government is what philosophers call rule-following. Governments are facilities which produce, under that mysterious attribute called authority, –rules, which citizens are expected to obey.
What distinguishes government rules from other kinds of rules?
Is there something fundamentally dissimilar between the two following cases?
a.) A father asks his child not to touch the hot stove.
b.) The U.S. legislative branch passes an amendment prohibiting the consumption of alcohol.
Both these cases show the imposition of a rule: both demonstrate the act of an authority projecting a rule on a recipient.
A demand for a behavior is issued or imposed in both cases. In case a if we substitute the verb “asks” for “orders” we would think it more similar to b. The reason why: governments do not ask citizens to accept a rule. Legislative acts are imposed on citizens in a downward-hierarchical manner.
How is legality established? What makes one rule a universal proscription (one issued federally) and another rule a tiny condition applicable only to one person (a parent to a child)? Surely they are both rules; they are the various manifestations of the same general operation. It is convincing that the same root phenomenon unites these two kinds of expressions: i.e. rule-following. Only does their radius of applicability vary,–only does the father’s rule apply to just one soul for one tiny vanishing moment, while the government’s rule is supposed to apply to a population on a major scale and duration.
We might make the distinction that there are wild and domestic rules. Humans generate social rules ultimately as stints to aid survival. If tribesman 1 tells tribesman 2 not to go into the shrubbery because a venomous snake is known to be there, this is something of a wild, or contingent, rule. It does not get written into law; it is contingent on its singular and short-lived use. Its utility applies only to one instant use. It does not get written into law since the tribe, we assume, has no literacy and also because it is useless waste to pass a trivial law, a mandate with a broad radius of applicability. This rule exists ephemerally, as a transient heads-up. Now if the tribe grew into a fixed agrarian commune, then into a literate city-state, they would formulate laws. The Ten Commandments were a vital evolution in the history of law because they were a key episode of domestication; they formalized what must have been wild (contingent) rules. They solidified the transient voice of a spoken rule by etching them onto tablets, a substrate that persists over time. In terms of content, the Ten Commandments were interdictions which applied universally, not just at the moment of utterance. Thou Shalt Not Kill: here is a rule which applies to all subjects in all cases, whereas the spoken statement “Don’t go into the shrub, there’s a snake there.” has a singular and quickly discarded use.
This all comes down to the idea that there is a background noise of rules which pop into existence everywhere and all the time in human life. The largest conceivable fraction of these rules are contingent, –they do not become fixtures in a society but have only an immediate use in a speech community. As societies developed over history, became agrarian, nucleated into city-states, fused into industrial collusions, some fraction of contingent rules were domesticated. They became systematic outgrowths of the entire social network. They applied to many if not all for as long as they were legally sustained.
In many cases the rejection of one of these fixated rules comes with punishment, which ranges from a penalty as innocuous as a warning or monetary fine to imprisonment, torture, and extermination. These rules caught within the inflation of knowledge growth and technical mastery which characterizes the curve of history. One suspects these knowledge advances fed into both the recalibration of the rules (though the work of lawyers and academicians) and also the ease at propagation (through education and information technologies).
The constant underlying the nucleation of governments (in all cases) is the background noise of contingent rules. Since rules are aspects of human existence which support survival, their universal prevalence in all social systems is caused ultimately by adaptational necessity[1]. Out of all the contingent rules which spring into existence, there will be a fraction of weighted agreements, laws, which institute in the society. Legislative government is a specialized vehicle for the production of laws. Laws are domesticated rules with a wide radius of applicability.
The tentative answer to the question “what is government” is “governments are advanced producers of domesticated rules.” But this says very little about how this is done.
How does a rule become an established reality? Contingent rules are the normal baseline from which domesticated rules emerge. Once contingent rules are installed in memory and fixed through written law or some form of continuous proclamation they become laws. This idea, one suspects, marks a phase shift: a noise of primitive rule-following raises its tempo in to become a formal legal stricture. All authorities are able to project rules to their speech community. But it is a uniquely realized property to be a lawmaker—someone who issues rules with the influence of political mandate.
Is there no algebraic formula for legislation in general, a standard “type” which acquires values in special cases? Surely not. Legislature does not come about through calculation—right? What does a government do when it generates laws? Certainly it does not whip our books of equations (?). No doubt statistical data influences the structure of laws in advanced states. But one thinks there is no sure science or algebra to the creation of judicial laws.
How then does a piece of legislation originate? It is not randomly generated in computers. Keeping with the logic of rules, it is clear laws arise in response to some need or want. Just as a local government prohibits swimming in certain spots of the beachfront because of the danger of whirlpools or jellyfish, so too do national governments draft laws as antidotes, or as restrictions,–fundamentally as instruments to control behavior.
(We might distinguish laws that are in the form “Thou shalt not…” as negative or restrictive laws. The companions of these types of laws are in the form “Thou shalt…” and are positive or exhibitive laws. Negative laws are enforced by punishment and are supposed to keep people from doing certain things. Positive laws distribute or grant rights or privileges.)
The first step in law-formation is the recognition of the need of a rule. Lawmakers must think to themselves. “I have realized this missing piece in the structure of the presently ratified legislature. If I work at designing some new proposal, this need will be satisfied. I predict that by doing this it will benefit the constituency I represent [whoever that is].” It were as if passing a law is to cause the political system to ingest a new component, which in a healthy nation-state manages to take affect and change the operation of the parts involved.
Necessary to this is that powerful reality: cooperation. A rule exists only if it is conceded to, only if a social contract has been approved. Man might be able to dictate to himself “I will not go to the library on Monday.” And maintain this rule to himself through psychological discipline. But this rule is private and has little impact on the behavior of the social system at large. Legality only has sense if its terms are accepted through consort
That does it for rules and rule following. Now we turn to some speculative ideas on the nature of political systems.
Part II
Treating governments as superorganisms is highly alluring. It promises a rich and bright bounty of new analogies. But is it only a metaphor? If it is only a metaphor, a great revolution in our scientific understanding of social systems would be blocked. If however, governments are superorganismic in nature, we can import a whole suite of ideas (possibly factual,) into their study.
What then, can be gleaned by treating sociological networks as superorganisms?
The central proposition is that aggregate social systems containing populations on the order of show swarmlike behaviors. On this scale of events, with populations this gross, a webwork of communications, medical , transportation, agricultural, scientific, manufacturing and governmental infrastructures are not only absolutely needed to support the existence of the whole but are reflective of the sum of efforts contained in the whole. We often consider, for instance, the governmental apparatus as severed from the agricultural apparatus. But are they really closed systems? No, their operations interpenetrate and cannot exist separate from each other, at least in their modern condition. To put it another way, their division into categories under-represents the feedback and feedforward connections exhibited by the entire complex.
Governments, in the superorganism model, are viewed as the nervous systems of the whole. Coordination in the government reflects coordination in the rest of the system at large, and vice versa. Through the output of laws, signals reach other systems in the network, which are expected, if the state is powerful, to comply. Laws, if obeyed, differentiate the net behavior of the subjects. If the subjects under law behave according to the law, their net configuration of behaviors will shift. In a healthy state the laws are constant among the subjects to which they apply. Therefore the subject’s law modified behavior will also remain constant. (Of course, this is an idealization. People cheat where they can sometimes.) Thus, so long as the state outputs laws and the laws are understood and followed, a cumulative trend towards integration will occur.
In modern civilizations, technology rapidly increases the speed of these signals—though human nature probably limits their integration. (Often a good thing!) These difficulties, which spring fundamentally from mammalian irrationality, are beyond the scope of this discussion to spell out. And here we have only the need of examining the “nervous system,” and not the appendage sets of agencies that accompany it in the nation-state.
When one thinks about the structure of the United States government as the Enlightenment theorists conceived it, one realizes they too visualized its scheme as organismlike. Their division of the government into a set of departments each containing a hierarchy of offices, all of which—in every hierarchy of all the offices of all the departments—interrelated according to regulatory mechanisms is sharply reminiscent of the self-maintenance of biological systems. The philosophers knew well that man was fallible so they tried to establish a self-correcting architecture into representative republicanism.
Here also, we note adaptational similarities between political and biological systems. If there were no pressures, no risks, there would be no necessity for nestedness in the structure of the government. The molecular components of life—on the scale of functional protein, are as little engines against decay and disorder. In a healthy body, they stay disorder so long as their corresponding DNA is not damaged or so long as they are not misconstructed due to a glitch in the assembly process. A living thing is a community of cells synthesized into an array, fighting to stave off disorder. Living things sometimes succeed marvelously at this because of nested feedback loops.
Similarly, governments have an organization which works to maintain order, the harmony of the parts. A weak or nonexistent state, such as Somalia, experiences strife mainly because it cannot regulate its internal affairs. Human activity under such anarchy has no polar flow, no education, no medical support, no genuine law enforcement,–in short, no capacity for order-regulation.
A good state is one that distributes the means to immunize the population from such abysmal conditions.
Obviously, governments may vary. But all of them exhibit a kind of collective rippling effect in response to stimuli. One could benefit by imagining the affairs of state from the perspective of the upper atmosphere, as from the lens of a satellite. From such a perspective wouldn’t it appear that mankind exhibits swarm behaviors, in a style directly analogous to schools of fish, swarms of bees, herds of ants? For example, the day to day affairs of car traffic. Here we have it that every week tens of millions of people recapitulate practically the exact same behavior—commuting. All of this behavior is organized by an extraordinarily cunning but simple invention—money. This collective behavior is not possible without the infrastructure to accommodate it (roads, gas stations, etc,) and the infrastructure is not possible without the collective behavior, seeing as it would have no reason to exist and would not receive repair inputs from tax-funded labor. Civilization supports itself circularly.
[1] If one wants to take a Darwinian interpretation, one could suspect rule-based social behavior is adaptational. In its most primitive forms it regulates the survival of the community, it establishes rules for the provision of mates, warrants or inhibits acts of vengeful violence, demands group solidarity, all of which can be interpreted Darwinianly.
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