Anthony De Jasay

Quotes From

The State (1985)

• There is some reason to hold that the more civilization advances, the more viable becomes the state of nature.#
• The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities.#
• Max Weber . . . defined the state as the organization which “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” . . . a definition which might resist counter-examples rather better would lay down that the state is the organization in society which can inflict sanctions without risk of disavowal and can disavow sanctions by others. #
• As kings from medieval times sought to lessen their dependence on the nobility by soliciting the support of town burghers, so did the state in more modern times emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie by enfranchising and buying the votes of successively broader masses of people.#
• It would seem that the more governments came to rely on popular support (in England in the last third of the nineteenth century), the more willing they became to arouse demands for change instead of letting sleeping dogs lie.#
• The rule “to each in proportion to his wants” as a sufficient condition of utility maximization, does not simply translate into the equalization of incomes. People’s wants run to many things money can buy over and above bread and dripping, beer and pizza. It is preposterous to interpret their capacity for satisfaction in the physical sense of one man, one stomach. They are much too different for the levelling of their incomes to represent a plausible approximation to solving any maximum problem.#
• A human figure with two arms on the right shoulder and hip and two legs on the left shoulder and hip would strike us as rather off-putting, not because it was asymmetrical (it would not be), but because its symmetry violated another to which our eye has become accustomed. Similarly, the preference for one order over another, one rule over another, one equality over another does not in any obvious manner spring from the depths of human nature, even if the preference for order over disorder may be plausibly held to do so. The choice of a particular order, symmetry, rule or equality over its alternatives needs either habit, custom, or the force of substantive argument to explain it; if it is the former, political theory gets swallowed up in history (which might be a well-deserved fate) and if it is the latter, we will be back to square one, making derivative cases for a liberty-securing, a utility-maximizing or a justice-dispensing equality rather than proving the claim that equality for its own sake is intrinsically desirable. #
• One equality crowds out another and, as a corollary, the resulting inequality can always be said to have some equality as its reason and indeed its justification. . . . Further “dimensions” can always be invented so that symmetry in one implies asymmetry in some or all the others, #
• When one equality, symmetry, proportionality, can only prevail at the cost of upsetting another, equality itself is patently useless as a criterion for giving precedence to one or the other. Love of equality is no better as a guide for choosing between alternative equalities than love of children is for adopting a particular child. The appeal of rationality merely calls for some order and not for one particular order to the exclusion of another.#
• Commutative justice has an agreed procedure, issuing in judgements of courts of law, for deciding which “demands of justice” should be granted. The demands of social justice, however, are not adjudicated in this way. Nobody’s judgement in social justice entails a moral obligation for somebody else to have it executed#
• There is no other test of the equality, of people’s respective opportunities to make money, than the money they do make. For once inheritance of capital is abolished, everybody is made to go to the same school and every girl is given cosmetic surgery at eighteen, there are still ninety-nine well-known reasons why one person may be materially more successful than another.#
• It may, in fact, be a misnomer to call either [the contractarian or the Marxist theory] a theory of the state, though they are both theories of the individual (or class) subject’s interest in the state#