The Citizen, the State, and Loyalty

Russell Hardin

Department of Politics

New York University

19 West 4^th Street

New York, NY 10012

USA

russell.hardin@nyu.edu

Why is anyone loyal to a state? This is the central question in nationalism, but it is a question whose answer is too readily taken for granted even though it is a very modern phenomenon. This is the mystery of nationalism: How can people come to be willing to face a high risk of dying or even to die almost certainly for a nation or an ethnic group, the vast majority of whose members they do not and never will know or even see? (Anderson [1983] 1991, 7 and 141). How can a concept so remote from the ordinary experience of most humans gain such force over so many people? From the side of terrorists, especially suicide bombers, in response to what is now labeled 7/7 for the date of the bombing of public transportation vehicles in London, Johann Hari (2007) asks, Why? Why would young British men want to randomly murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible in nightclubs and airports?

This question is asked countless times and there are few if any compelling answers. On a quick reading of Robert Pape’s ([2005] 2006) attempted explanation of suicide bombing and other terrorist attacks, one might suppose he attributes rationality to the bombers. That is to say, he supposes that such bombings further the goals of those who blow themselves up. What he actually argues or tries to show is that those who send teenagers and others out with bomb vests to blow themselves up are using a rational means to achieve their goals. That still leaves Hari’s question unanswered. Hari’s question is the same as that of Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born doctor in Los Angeles (Broder 2006): “Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, go and blow himself up?”

We could ask a host of more or less related questions on an increasing scale from the least demanding commitment to the most demanding. The simplest and least demanding might be, beyond the quasi utilitarian argument for a state — that it benefits us — why is there any normative commitment to it at all? Many people take strong nationalist commitment for granted as though it were simply a natural phenomenon. But a little over three hundred years ago there was no sense of nationalism anywhere. Even a century ago there was probably no such sense in most people’s lives in most areas of the world, although there is little hope of establishing what were the views of the vast majority of people. They were illiterate and they left no record of their thoughts. We cannot simply extrapolate from elite, written claims to the views of the illiterate (Hobsbawm [1990] 1992, 48). We know that there were ethnic and other vicious conflicts in, for example, the Middle Ages, with its religious persecutions, especially of Jews and of what came to be labeled Protestant tendencies. But in that era there was no nationalism and the wars were dynastic and religious in the cause of universalistic religions, as jihadi wars are today; they were not national or ethnic. Ethnic nationalism was not an issue before the possibility of at least a crude group census accounting of who the people are whose political issues should matter to a government or a state.

Does this element alone — the utilitarian value of commitment to a state — push it into the perverse kind of nationalism that many scholars dislike, even detest? The utilitarian value of the state gives a justification for the state even if that justification is not so compelling as to make us loyal to it. In this discussion I wish to cover these two issues: Why are people loyal to states? Why might we conclude that the state is justified? I think the answer to the first of these questions is essentially psychological and diverse. The second it moral theoretic. I will address the second issue from a Humean perspective. But it is worth noting at the outset that Hume provides us with what can be called psychological utilitarianism and not with a moral theory. I will follow him in this naturalistic account of the moral beliefs that we have and I will not attempt to present a moral theory that one might call right.

Psychologically, the motivating force of nationalism is alien and incomprehensible to those who are not possessed by it.[1] Those who are possessed by it evidently see no need to explain why they are motivated. But the answers to these questions of why there is commitment to nations that we are given by theorists are clearly inadequate without further elaboration. Isaiah Berlin resorts to metaphor. For the answer to why there was such an excrescence of violence after the collapse of the Soviet empire, he evokes the shallow metaphorical image of a “bent twig, forced down so severely that when released, it lashes back with fury” (Berlin 1991). The fury of a twig? Well chosen metaphors can enlighten and lead us to understanding. Badly chosen metaphors can occlude what little understanding we have. This is Berlin’s answer to the question: “What transforms the aspiration of cultural self-determination into nationalist aggression?” Berlin answers for what he seemingly expects to be the response to the collapse of Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe. As it happened, that response was astonishingly peaceful, one of the most peaceful major revolutions in all of history, so maybe it was merely the fury of a twig.

A more common, indeed almost standard, attempt to explain patriotism and nationalist commitments is to claim that we have a socio-biological urge to be in a group and that this evolved survival urge leads to such commitments as nationalism. An early advocate of this view is Thorstein Veblen ([1917] 1964, 41; cited in Moynihan 1993, 87). How is this supposed to work? What group? Under what circumstances? This urge fits many social psychological experiments in which people are assigned to competitive groups, thus leading the individuals in one group to be hostile to individuals in the other group. This happens even though the only stated distinction between the groups is, for example, that one is labeled green and the other is labeled blue. These experiments would divide Germans from Germans as readily as they divide Germans from French so long as there is the other but utterly meaningless division into blue and green (Tajfel 1970, 1982). This is “intergroup behavior,” which is interaction with another group or its members according to their group membership or identification. For example, you deal with another person or group in one way if the other is Italian and another way if the other is French. In a blue-green experiment or an analog of it, the discrimination might sound silly. In the case of racial and other prejudice, it can be brutal and even deadly. In the notorious Stanford Prison Experiments, randomly chosen subjects played guards and prisoners and the guards brutalized the prisoners (Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 1973). This result was surprising and led to shutting down the experiment. If we can behave this way in such a context, it is no wonder that conflict between nations could lead to utterly vicious actions. In the US Civil War, members of families who were on opposing sides found themselves murderously hostile to each other.

With Us

From a large study of soldiers in World War II, Samuel A. Stouffer (1949) and his colleagues attribute the courage of soldiers in the trenches to loyalty within groups of soldiers. Spending extensive time together under such duress and risk builds interpersonal commitments that lead many individual soldiers to be deeply loyal to each other. More than four centuries ago, Shakespeare (1599) grasped the Stouffer thesis as have, no doubt, countless others. In the St. Crispin’s Day speech given to him by Shakespeare, Henry V states Stouffer’s thesis clearly and eloquently as his exhausted and dwindling band of men is about to face a far larger, healthier French force. He says:

We would not die in that man’s company  

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This is almost exactly Stouffer’s thesis. King Henry continues:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;  

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me  

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,  

This day shall gentle his condition;  

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed  

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,  

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks  

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.[2]

The crucial term in this oration is “with us.” It is the brotherhood of the trenches and the long marches that motivate bravery, not Mother England. And Henry’s men demolished the French forces at Agincourt on Saint Crispin’s day. They did so in part because they were bound to each other and partly because they had superior technology, the English long bow, with which they cut down waves of attackers while firing about six arrows each minute with deadly accuracy from outside the reach of the French. The French archers and crossbowmen were outclassed by the faster, longer and more accurate rate of fire of the longbow. The constricted battlefield meant that they could not bring their superior numbers, perhaps three to five times the English numbers, to bear.[3]

Isaiah Berlin (1991 and 1976) attributes this idea of the human need for belonging and loyalty to a group in a much broader sense to Herder, who, he says, virtually invented the idea. Herder “believed that just as people need to eat and drink, to have security and freedom of movement, so too they need to belong to a group. Deprived of this, they felt cut off, lonely, diminished, unhappy.[4] Nostalgia, Herder said, was the noblest of all pains. To be human meant to be able to feel at home somewhere, with your own kind.” Herder wanted a “deeply nonaggresive … cultural self-determination.” This is not Woodrow Wilson’s a state for every ethnic group, but a culture for every ethnic group. This would not politicize ethnicity because it would not be about the political organization of ethnicity or its borders.

What eventually has come to be called civil society is what Herder wanted and apparently expected. He supposed that each of the many and various civil societies would be unique. But for him, Berlin says, “there is nothing about race and nothing about blood. He only spoke about soil, language, common memories, and customs,” the social coupling of place and vision. There is nothing genetic in these differences, there is only socially created culture with its stumbling, varied developments, largely through historical accident, but nevertheless formative and compelling for those who have been formed within them (Herder [1774] 2004; see also Vico [1725] 2002, Berlin 1976 and 2000, and Tagliacozza and Verene 1976). Henry elevates his appeal to the group’s solidarity with each other almost to a moral principle, as though it were not merely a matter of psychological solidarity, which might be directed at awful, not at all moral purposes.

The Nazis took over and polluted Herder’s ideas, introducing a supposedly genetic element and making them the central ideology of a chauvinist, vicious movement (Hitler 1925; Rosenberg [1930] 1941), part of whose program was the systematic murder of all members of certain inferior ethnic groups. For Herder, all cultures are equal. Hitler speaks nonsensically of “the will of Nature” for a higher breeding of all life. To bring this about, “The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness.” Mass murder is therefore the will of nature. This is a grievous distortion of Herder’s vision. Hitler (1925, chap. 11) asserts that:

All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word “man.” He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude him-and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert.

If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group.

Ridiculously many nationalist movements are founded in such claims of the superiority of the relevant people.

Still we may ask, why has there been nationalism only in the past 200 plus years? (Henry V’s account is from more than four hundred years ago.) As Hobsbawm ([1990] 1992, 18) notes, the concept of the nation is very young. Perhaps the answer lies in the explanation of several other transformations at about the same time as the rise of nationalist ideas. A modern economy leads to cities, education, national presses, availability of citizens, and often a need to mobilize them, especially for national defense or war for any reason. Nationalism, mass democracy, mass movements, popular revolution (as opposed to coups), large armies (such as Napoleon’s), and large scale bureaucracy, appear to be all part of a single set of transitions, demographic, economic, and political, that allow the state to reach its population, to count and label everyone (Scott 1999). These transformations appear to be all intermingled and mutually caused. For example, demographic changes affect economic developments, which affect demographic changes. Nationalism became possible just as all of these apparently analogous changes became possible.

Indeed, in its early manifestations democracy may be a response to the demand or need to mobilize militarily, as for Napoleon’s armies, and more generally as making a population capable of being mobilized for national purposes (Hardin 2008, chap. 4). Mass education in multilingual societies, such as European nations two to three centuries ago, also served national purposes of mobilization. Therefore Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt were against public education, because they did not want the state to politicize children for its purposes. In their view, mass education undercuts individual autonomy. They agree that education is a path to autonomy, but the education should be organized by parents or someone other than the state, which under Frederick of Prussia banned Humboldt’s books.

As noted in chapter 1, over the past three centuries in the developing literature of nationalism, the focus has shifted from the nation, as in the nation state, to a nation, as in an ethnically defined people. The earlier focus was inherently on unification, hence on unity. The newer focus is on exclusionary groups, hence on internal conflict and divisiveness, on subjugation and expulsion. In its beginnings nationalism of the earlier variant merely happened, largely without design until design was an afterthought. The later development is an unusual instance of social action that is substantially driven by theory, as contrasted with social action that might be explained by theory that the actors themselves do not espouse or even understand. Among the early theorists of nationalism in the latter sense of the nation as a people is Herder ([1774] 2004).

Nationalism in the earlier sense simply happens and theory lags far behind, to explain what has already happened. The outstanding case of such a history is England. The idea of the nation then unfolds in the United States, an immigrant nation where none had been. It is possible that the theoretical model of England was clearly understood by some of those involved in the creation of the US. From the era of Napoleon to the Franco-Prussian war, the European nation especially becomes focused on war and national defense and on economic development for its contribution to national defense. The spontaneous development of a national language, as happened in England and then in the US, is displaced by a deliberate policy to create French, German, and eventually Italian and Polish citizens, each speaking a national language, especially in factories and in the military.

After the disaster of xenophobic nationalism in World War I, theory again takes over to define nations as peoples and to help bring on the eventual collapse of colonial outposts into uncounted aspiring new nations. Perhaps the leading theorist of the focus on nations as peoples is Woodrow Wilson, a political actor with almost enough power to create nation states comprised of peoples. His failure meant that the creation of new, ethnic nations would wait until after World War II. Many of the new nations created since then are, however, ethnically diverse and therefore contrary to Wilson’s vision of coherent ethnic societies. Internal contests for political control in these diverse nations often break down in conflicts along ethnic lines, as recently has happened in Rwanda and Kenya. In the earliest stages of its development, nationalism was functional in the sense that it enabled economic development, national unity, and national defense, largely to the benefit of citizens. In its later stages, nationalism has been too divisive and even murderous for this functional justification to stand.

Throughout all of these developments, individuals have committed themselves to the defense of their own nations with extraordinary intensity. This is, again, the core mystery of nationalism: Why does the nation with its accompanying nationalism matter so much to people whose lives are often ruined by their commitments to it? Why do they feel fulfilled by such commitments? For some people, of course, nationalist appeals offer the possibility of political careers, but for the vast majority of those activated by nationalism there is little to no hope of any such career. Nevertheless, they are moved. And they seem to be happy to follow those who do have careers.

It is an interesting fact that the brief account here is both historical and analytical. The history has played out according to a clear analytical development that fits the descriptive world of nationalism.

Social Order[5]

Perhaps the first thing to be said about the state in any effort to justify it is that it is virtually necessary for social order in any society of substantial size, indeed any society beyond face to face organization. People have argued for the possible stability of anarchic government, but no one has made a convincing case and no one has pointed to a real world example of stable anarchy. The story of Saga Iceland during a bit more than three murderous centuries of no powerful central government and especially no executive power is the best that any theorist seems able to invoke. In Saga Iceland, ultimately “the sanction behind legal judgment and arbitrated settlement was self-help, most often appearing in the guise of the bloodfeud” (Miller 1990, 20-21). But there was also an elaborate hierarchical system of courts. In the end, however, Iceland fell apart in one of history’s bloodiest civil wars. Norway was called in to restore order.

The near impossibility of peaceful anarchy is essentially the view of Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1994), whose Leviathan rules with a powerful fist. We often think of Hobbes as a tyrannical anti-liberal. In a fundamentally important sense, however, he is a nascent liberal. He focuses entirely on the individual and the individual’s motivations and values. He rejects any notion of a collective or group value. There are goods or arrangements that are collectively beneficial, but they are collectively beneficial only because they benefit all individuals individually. They are mutually advantageous. Hobbes supposes, for socio-political reasons that the best or most effective way to organize society to benefit individual citizens is to create an all-powerful sovereign who can use draconian force, if necessary, to maintain social order. Maintenance of social order benefits everyone by protecting their lives, their property, and their incentives to be productive in their own interest. Making it the incentive of everyone to be productive in their own right is the route to the general prosperity of all.

It is in their functional role as guarantors of social order that states are valuable, because they do this. This is the positive view of nationalism. Its negative side is that, once a large part of some populace is mobilized by such a commitment, that populace can do many things other than merely to support order in a decent state. It can become vicious and destructive at an appalling level.

Moreover, Hobbes is concerned with patterned individual actions that contribute unintentionally to collective prosperity. Those actions are themselves intended only to benefit the individuals directly involved in them. It is the overall aggregate of such actions that produces law and the state. The state and its actions are therefore the aggregation of individuals and their actions.

Mirroring Others’ Feelings

Hume ([1751] 1998, 5.17n19) quotes and approves Horace’s observation that, “As men’s faces smile with those who smile, so they weep with those who weep” (Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 101-102).What might stand behind the phenomenon that Hume recognizes and uses to ground his claims for sympathy, but that he does not explain?[6] The black box brain reveals itself to us in this phenomenon but it leaves us to explain it. There are now fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies of the brain’s reaction to others’ sensations that corroborate Horace’s and Hume’s observed facts and that, in a sense, seem to show the phenomenon of seeing another’s emotions at work or even coming to share those emotions. The fMRI studies do not do much more than Hume already did — they establish that mirroring happens, although they are more definitive than Hume’s singular testimony. The part of the brain that perceives a smile is evidently the part that engineers a smile of our own, so that Horace’s observation may be a biologically hard-wired fact of our brains. Smiles evoke smiles. The evolution of this feature of our brains might be explained by the benefits of smiling in gaining the good graces of others, especially when we are too young to survive on our own.[7] Smiling may enable humans to enjoy very long periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence so that we can develop extraordinary abilities that set us apart from other animals.

Hume further notes “we may remark, that the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other’s emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees” (T2.2.5.21; see also T3.3.1,7 and EPM5.18 ).[8] What in twentieth century philosophy was the problem of other minds (how can we know another’s mind?) is assumed away in limited part by Hume. For this too there may now be neurophysiological evidence from fMRI studies. Sympathy, these studies suggest, is a form of direct, non-verbal communication and the evocation of relevant feelings. It is such psychological mirroring )that leads me to like or dislike something that is done to you, by letting me sense what you enjoy or suffer to the point of sensing and suffering it with you. Contemporary neurophysiological findings seem to strengthen Hume’s claims for the moral psychology of mirroring, although the mechanism is not yet clear. Hume appears to be right on the psychology here. The only question that might remain for some is that of his general claims for morality psychologized. Do we have moral reactions (approbation or disapprobation) to the feelings we get from mirroring? Those would be moral reactions on behalf of another. That is to say, the important and very difficult trick Hume needs to complete his explanatory theory is to evoke my sentiments — that is, a moral judgment — in response to actions that affect your interests.

From the fMRI data it appears possible that these two phenomena — sympathy and moral sentiments — are at least partially run together in our brains.[9] Hence, Hume’s theory is complete but in a way that he apparently did not see. The knowledge and the feeling, the sympathy and the sentiments, may come in a single package. There is no mediating interpretation that our brains have to make. A nearly brand new baby smiles back at our smile. It is implausible to suppose that the baby is interpreting our kindness or good will in its first days of life; it is reacting from an apparently hard-wired capacity. Empathy seems to “mirror” another person’s emotional responses in one’s own brain.[10] Happily, “mirror” is Hume’s word and also the terminology of contemporary neurophysiological science ( T2.2.5.21). One might see mirroring as a two-step process. Our perceptions of, say, a smile stimulate thoughts, which guide our behavioral response: smiling back. Studies of brain activity, as measured by fMRI brain scans, suggest that the whole reaction is immediate in a single step, not mediated by thought. The part of my brain that recognizes a smile also forces or stimulates my own smile and my own feeling of pleasure.[11] Seeing your smile triggers mine. We are to a degree hard-wired to each other.

At a very young age, Hume seems to have grasped the nature of this phenomenon to a sufficient degree as to make it the foundation of his naturalistic moral psychology. He does not attempt an explanation of the phenomenon but merely starts from it to explain morality as a matter of fellow feeling. In fact, of course, he had no way to prove his assertion of the nature of this psychological trick other than to elicit our agreement that we too have the experience he describes. The technology of fMRI now seems to give us some far from definitive entrée to the phenomenon.

Hume says our sympathy for those on a ship sinking off shore will be greatly heightened if they are close enough for us to see their faces and their frightened responses. He does not explain this fully but only says that contiguity makes their suffering clearer to us (T3.3.2.5; also see T2.1.11.6 and 8). The fMRI studies suggest that the issue is not that we have to see their expressions in order to understand their emotions; our reason is adequate for such understanding. The issue is that we have to see their expressions in order to trigger the mirroring of our own similar emotions. This is a phenomenon that is not mediated by thought or reason, and perhaps it cannot be replaced by thought or reason when the actual visions are not available.

Suppose we accept this entire account of our moral sentiments and of their apparent mirroring. If they are merely a fact of our psychology, should they determine our morality? Yes, in Hume’s functional way. That is to say, our sentiments about others evoke responses from us that are responses to the utility, pleasure, or pain of those others. What typically brings pleasure to others is their own benefit, which is good for them. We cannot go further to say it is good per se unless we go so far as to say that something like utilitarianism is the right moral theory. Hume does not make this claim, but in his analysis of the motivating force of mirrored reactions he does imply that he and we are psychologically utilitarian. One of the things we can tell about another through mirroring is how something affects their welfare, pleasure, or pain. This fact is important if we are psychologically utilitarian — and mirroring virtually makes us be, as though evolution has produced utilitarianism as our moral response. This fact does not make utilitarianism the true moral theory. Psychological utilitarianism connects observation to judgment. These facts do not make utilitarianism the true moral theory; they merely characterize our psychology as moralized through mirroring. This psychology gives us a science of moral beliefs and approbations; it cannot additionally justify those approbations or make them right.

Mirroring is a major discovery for Hume despite the fact that seemingly all people experience it, so that it might well have been a matter of widespread common knowledge. It apparently remains unconscious and inarticulate to most people even while it often regulates their emotions and behavior. Hume is sufficiently perceptive that, once he has noticed the phenomenon, he finds mirroring to be a fundamental part of the psychology of sympathy and therefore a fundamental part of distinctively moral psychology. Mirroring makes Hume’s theory psychologically richer than any of the then contemporary moral sense and sentiments theories, which are inherently psychological in their foundations. Their proponents are generally content to stop their inquiries at the point of asserting that we just do know right from wrong, that reason can determine these, or that god has given us such knowledge. Hume has empirically observed — and supposes we can all observe — the phenomenon of mirroring and sympathy.

There is a further trick that might still be difficult: evoking an emotional response of a similar kind in response to the interests of society as though by generalization from one-on-one mirroring. Identification with the interests of society must be very weak psychologically and it is grounded in reason more than in sympathy. Neurophysiological studies probably cannot address such an abstract phenomenon as responding psychologically to the interests of society. Seeing the interests of society forwarded or abused is not comparable to the visual cue of a smile or frown.

So what provokes our sympathy, commitment, or loyalty toward our society and our state? Perhaps we generalize from individual level mirroring. But this requires reason and cannot be accomplished merely through instant, virtually direct communication with all of the society, or even with representative members of it.

Political Obligation

A standard account of our commitment to our state is that we have a moral obligation, somehow argued. I will not present such an account, which I think is entirely wrong (see Hardin 1999, chapter 3). Instead, I will follow Hume ([1739-40] 2000, bk. 3) and many contemporary social scientists who presume and even require a naturalistic account of commitment to the state or, more plausibly, of acquiescence to the state. The normative account was once commonly grounded in a supposed contractarian agreement, but the dismissal of the objective likelihood that many citizens could believe that they have contracted or could know what the content of such agreement is has led to the alternative supposition that we would have agreed if the issue had come up for us, or even that the only reasonable supposition is that we would agree, as in Thomas Scanlon’s (1982, 115n) “contractualist” argument, in a footnote, that “what is fundamental to morality is the desire for reasonable agreement, not the pursuit of mutual advantage” (see further, Barry 1988; but also Hardin 1988).

Scanlon’s concern with this vision is personal morality, as in his book, What We Owe to Each Other (1999). Transforming this into a theory of politics or the state is not his enterprise, and it is not easy to see how such a transformation might work. One might attempt a kind of federated structure of relationships. At the bottom level there would be ordinary mirroring relationships, as in Hume and Horace. Above that there might be representatives of lots of groups of people engaged in such relationships. As a group or tribal leader you might mirror the aggregated sensibilities and desires of a significant number of others. You and others aggregating from below might be aggregated at your level. But at each higher level of aggregation, the intensity and definition of the desires of those below must increasingly fade away, so that at any moderately high level of such federated aggregation the representation of desires from below must substantially weaken. At some point, this federation of views must undercut J. S. Mill’s ([1861] 1977, chap. 3, final sentence) claim that the best form of government is participatory, which means it must be representative. Mill’s claims are not grounded in mirroring but in the process of making inputs to government decisions.

The State As an Unintended Consequence

The state is not historically a well planned or designed entity. It is an unintended consequence of countless actions and choices. It comes into being without real design by any identifiable actor. There are partial and piecemeal exceptions to this claim, but even they can be seen as tinkering to improve something that already exists and that is not in any meaningful sense itself under control of its citizens. Does this fact about actual states matter? For political theorists it matters in a devastating way: I undercuts any normative claims on behalf of the state. There is nothing pervasively good about a state or even the state. And if it is unintended, then the state is a useful object to control, insofar as anyone can do this to any degree. In a democratic state, the seriousness of this problem is especially evident. When President G. W. Bush narrowly won reelection in 2004, as he pranced about the stage, he asserted that he now had political capital that he could put to use and that he would do so. Of course, what he meant was that he was relatively free now to exercise power as he saw fit to accomplish whatever he chose to do. He did not evidently mean that he now had the power to do what those who elected him wanted him to do. He meant he was now freed from anyone’s control and could use the government as he saw fit.

When he was faced with the opportunity to buy what is now called the Louisiana Purchase from France, President Thomas Jefferson agonized over the issue. Congress was out of session and, in his day, communication and travel were very slow. He therefore had to act on his own judgment. He had access to and power of the purse of the new nation. Ordinarily, however, he could not use the nation’s funds with impunity. He had to act with Congress. But he could not get what he thought was the constitutionally required support for closing the deal soon enough. Unfortunately, if he did not act more or less immediately, he knew that he risked losing the opportunity forever. Buying Louisiana would more or less double the size of the US and would guarantee that it would be a major world power essentially forever. Part of Jefferson’s hesitation came from his doubt that it would be good to double the scale of the US, and yet he seemed already afflicted with the desire to fulfill the so-called manifest destiny of the new nation. He may have expected to run into difficulty when Congress reconvened, but he did not. Indeed, the purchase was one of his few acts that appealed across party lines to the fading Federalists, who by then included many of the Anti-Federalists of the era of adoption of the constitution, and those anti-Federalists were hostile to creating a large state; they preferred a collection of many nations representing the disparate colonies to an amalgamation of all the colonies into a single nation with a strong central government.

Jefferson’s hesitation over whether the purchase would be good for the nation would not for a moment have detained a Bush or possibly almost anyone who could have gained election to national office in Jefferson’s time or anytime since. Jefferson, having won democratic election in 1800, would not have thought he was now free to use the government or the state to act as he wished. Or rather, since Congress was not involved, Jefferson used only the state, and a Bush would clearly have thought the state was his to use. There is possibly no greater change in the normative stances of contemporary politicians and politicians of Jefferson’s time than this altered stance toward the state and its usefulness to various political groups. John Adams might have wondered whether he should use the state to keep his party in power after losing the election of 1800 to Jefferson’s party. And evidently Abraham Lincoln thought he should use the power of the northern parts of the US to force the southern parts of that nation to remain within the nation. But these issues were grand almost beyond imagining and they had world historical implications that might lead many of us throughout the history of the US to weigh whether we should suspend the constitution and act in favor of what was “best” for the nation.

The remarkable issue here is that the state, however it has come into being, is available to be used by various office holders to carry out their purposes, whether partisan or nonpartisan. In the cases of Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s extra-constitutional urges, the object of concern was nonpartisan in the sense that it did not clearly benefit some narrowly conceived interest but was at least thought to be about the grand interests of the nation itself, even about the definition and scope of the nation itself. It does not follow that various government officials will see the state this way, but some will and perhaps many will with respect to certain interests. At the extreme, we may get the occasional G. W. Bush prancing about the stage and asserting his election as empowerment to use the state for his purposes. Or maybe that extreme will become more nearly the normal practice.

References

Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, revised edition.

Berlin, Isaiah. 1991. “Two Concepts of Nationalism: An Interview with Isaiah Berlin.” Interview by Nathan Gardels. New York Review of Books 38 (21 November, no. 19): 19-23.

–––––. 2000, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hammann, Herder. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.

Haney, C., W. C. Banks, and Philip G. Zimbardo. 1973. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.

Hardin, Russell. 1998. “Reasonable Agreement: Political Not Normative.” In Paul J. Kelly, ed., Impartiality, Neutrality and Justice: Re-Reading Brian Barry’s Justice as Impartiality. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press: 137-153.

–––––. 1999. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––––. 2006. “Politics without Compromise: Immigrant Terrorism,” in Philosophical Yearbook, Glasnik Instituta za filozofiju Filozofskog Fakulteta u Beogradu, vol. 19.

–––––. 2007. David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––––. 2008. The Mystery of Nationalism, book manuscript.

Hari, Johann. 2007. “We Have Not even Begun the Long Work of Defusing the London Bombs.” The Independent 30 June.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. [1774] 2004. Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. In Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, ed. by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett: 1-97.

Hitler, Adolf. 1925. Mein Kampf. Munich: Secker and Warburg, vol. 1. As of 18 August 16, 2007 on the internet at: http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/forward.html (the critical vol. 1, chap. 11 is entitled “Nation and Race”).

Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan, edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett.
Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan, edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett.

Hume, David. [1751] 1998. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp.

–––––. [1739-40] 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton.

Mill, John Stuart. [1861] 1977. Considerations on Representative Government, in Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 19 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ed. J. M. Robson: 371-613.

Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1993. Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Pape, Robert A. [2005] 2006. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House.

Rosenberg, Alfred. [1930] 1941. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit. Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag. In English translation, 1983. The Myth Of The 20th Century. Newport Beach, Calif.: Noontide Press.

Scanlon, Thomas M. 1982. “Contractualism and Utilitarianism.” In Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 103-128.

–––––. 1999. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Stouffer, Samuel A., Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams, Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. 1949. The American Soldier: Adjusting during Army Life. Volume 2 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tagliacozza, Giorgio, and Verene. 1976. Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tajfel, Henri. 1970. “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination.” Scientific American 223 (#5): 96-102.

–––––. 1982. “Social Psychology of Ingtergroup Relations.” Annual Review of Psychology 33: 1-39.

Veblen, Thorstein. [1917] 1964. An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, reprint.

Verene, Donald Phillip. 1976. 

Vico, Giambattista. [1725] 2002. The First New Science, edited and translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.