The State - (3) - [Draft]

Image credit. Continued from here.

§ 17 - State Power Implies Capabilities of Socially Reasonable Improvement and Performance

Logically, it is a single feature that underlies the raw powers of the state: the possession of supreme, unassailable capabilities of enforcement. Practically, however, such supremacy is not unconditional. Abusing and squandering its coercive advantage puts the state in danger, exposing it to the possibility of demise by alien conquest or internal subversion, or both. 

Attached to the state's superior power is the ability to do good. The state can put into effect arrangements that are advantageous to the entire community, whereas none of its citizens alone would be able to bring about such good - like the pooling of resources (enforcement of taxes) and the coordination of common projects. Thus, the state will tend to be measured by its immediate agents and by its subjects against these possibilities, which create incentives and build up pressure to deliver improvements and reasonable performance. 

Thus, structures of maximal power contain the potential for maximal improvement - a strong state can achieve more than a weak one. Once again, a strong state is capable of attaining freedom - a weak one is not.

So, let us examine the manner in which its raw functions drive the development of the state throughout history toward building up a growing array of socially useful services. The state prevails by becoming a social technology of increasing capabilities. From its unique powers of coercion arise unique powers of serviceability.

§ 18 - Before the State

Having become discernible from other animals, human beings live as hunter-gatherers for more than a million years. Organised in small groups (with rarely more than 25 members), they dwell in caves or even in the open. Like other animals, they are exclusively dependent on food resources found in nature. Once the local supply of animals and plants has been exhausted, the tribe moves on.

Only 10.000 years ago, sedentary agriculture is beginning to spread. Human agriculture covers a period of time representing less than 1% of the 1.6 million years during which humans have been roaming the planet. It takes thousands of years for agriculture to spread worldwide. For Europe, the speed of proliferation has been estimated at 1 kilometre per year.

A growing and denser population makes for diminishing returns from hunting and gathering entailing a higher incidence of violent intergroup conflicts. Pressure mounts to adopt new social technologies. Scarcer resources owing to population growth, overhunting and related environmental overuse lend advantage to groups that learn to apply methods of excluding aliens from their territories. 

§ 19 - The Germinal State

We witness the rise of a tighter ownership regime build around the idea of excluding everyone but members of the own group. Thanks to the new mode of ownership, it is possible to more accurately identify benefits and costs of resource use, avoid rampant depletion characteristic of unrestricted common ownership, and substantially improve conservation and nurture of vital resources, with the result of achieving higher levels of productivity especially by domesticating animals and cultivating plants in a sedentary sphere of control.

There is a close twinning between institutional developments (new modes of ownership) and the new mode of production (agriculture), the former offering better conditions of material improvement, the other delivering material advance, thereby promoting further sophistication in institutional structure, which, in turn, fosters technical, economic and military progress.  

Embarking on husbandry, the breeding of animals and crop plants, clearing forests and cultivating land, mankind increases its resource base beyond natural availability and starts a revolution that is the base for unprecedented economic and cultural advancement. In this way, man is about to put in train far more change and progress in the last ten minutes, as it were, of the 24 hours of the species' existence.

§ 20 - Neolithic Revolution - A New Social Technology Emerges: the State

The spread of sedentary agriculture, known as the Neolithic revolution, spawns an enormous hike in productivity which provides the material base for larger communities and a new way of living that relies on a broadening division of labour. 

Higher agricultural yields sustain specialists that are freed from the need to participate in the provision of food. New areas of expertise emerge which change the rules and prospects of social interaction. We see the rise of specialists of coercion, governance, or spiritual guidances, as well as technical and commercial specialists, the latter organising exchange not only among members of the own community but also with aliens, establishing contacts that tend to widen the cultural horizon of mankind.

Specialists are instrumental in developing institutional structures capable of defining, ordering and enforcing novel forms of ownership, while being able to fend off alien transgressions or expand the community's sphere of influence and domination. 

Social relations develop that transcend the tribal nexus or the reach of a village community, creating more populous and territorially wider communities exhibiting differentiated social stratification (different social classes).  

In the ensuing struggle for structures of maximal power, competition by selection brings forth the ground layer of the most efficient mode of domination - the state as monopolist of coercion and supreme specialist of violence.

Institutional change and material advancement support larger and more highly specialised populations related to one another by a more effective division of labour. Equally, imperial expansion plays an important role in the development of more stratified communities with a greater appetite and capability for surplus production. It has been frequently observed that under favourable environmental conditions small units such as isolated tribes would target levels of output lower than what they were capable of. Under conditions of subjugation these productivity reserves are tapped to levy taxes payable in kind. These tributes are used to prop up the apparatus of domination, to build streets, fortresses, palaces and temples, and to guarantee the sustenance of rulers, warriors, priests, and other members of a ruling elite.

We are now ready to appreciate the problems of social coordination specific to larger communities and the possibilities of the state to overcome these challenges and open up new vistas of collective performance.

Continued here.