The State Grows Up

I return to Martin van Creveld’s book, “The Rise and Decline of the State.”  In this section, Creveld deals with the transition of government from being centered on the ruler’s person to being centered on the “state.”  The period covered is 1648 to 1789.

For this, perhaps an introduction will be helpful:

…the real story of the absolute state is not so much about despotism per se as about the way in which, between 1648 and 1789, the person of the ruler and his “state” were separated from each other until the first became almost entirely unimportant in comparison with the second.

Building the Bureaucracy

The foundation necessary in effecting this transition was a functioning – almost autonomous – bureaucracy.  The term “bureaucracy” was coined by Vincent de Gourmay as a pejorative – to be added to the forms of government identified by Aristotle: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. 

During the period under consideration, the outstanding change was the one which led from indirect rule by feudal lords to direct government exercised by salaried officials on the king’s behalf.

This included the transition of those who looked after the royal domains into those responsible for government administration.  It should be kept in mind that – certainly for much of medieval Europe – the king’s “domain” (for lack of a better term) extended no farther than land he directly owned.  Other nobles would have pledged allegiance to this king, but in no way did this make their land thereafter the king’s in the sense of a state.  This changed in the new Europe, so much so that whereas historically borders were marked by the boundary of a stream or location of a tall tree, borders were important and marked on the ground; professional surveyors were deployed.

Offices were no longer held by priests or aristocrats; often, offices were sold to the highest bidder – with the return on investment to come via rights attached to the office – in essence, the office was private property.  Nothing prevented one person from holding more than one office.

The establishment of this bureaucracy increased the need for fixed rules; entrance examination were developed and administered.  The modern census was born, and the paperwork – oh, the paperwork!  Statistics were kept – the primary purpose being for taxation.

The Spanish bureaucracy developed into the most advanced in Europe; the Prussian bureaucracy the largest in proportion to the population.  The king became largely superfluous: “Your majesty himself is nothing but a ceremony.”

…the system they built was essentially one of enlightened bureaucratic despotism tempered by the will of the upper classes…an ultramodern, highly centralized, salaried government apparatus….

The more powerful and centralized the bureaucracy – even when encouraged by the ruler in order to control the land – the more it took control out of the ruler’s hand. 

As Hegel recognized, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the point had been reached where the bureaucracy itself became the state, elevating itself high above civil society and turning itself into the latter’s master.

No surprise here….

Monopolizing Violence

It shouldn’t be assumed that the people went along easily:

To make good on its pretensions the state had to increase the instruments of violence at its disposal until there was nobody left capable of talking back…

For this, the monopolization of violence was necessary.  War, in medieval time, was a personal matter – almost a family feud; battles amongst the nobles.  Now, this was changing toward an act only legitimate for the impersonal state.  The rulers no longer marched with the military; the military was staffed by a permanent corps of officers – now able to stand outside of the society from which they came.  The commoners were conscripted.  The first “police” forces were established.

With the establishment of the regular armed forces, the police (both in and out of uniform), and prisons, the proud structure of the modern state was virtually complete.

The monopolization of legalized violence; as with any monopoly, the producer wins, the customers lose.

No Peasant Left Behind

It became important that every person was tied to one state or another – opting out could not be allowed.  One must be a citizen of one or another state.  The worst condition was to be stateless – always subject to deportation, denied work.

The Intellectuals

This transition did not come without an intellectual and philosophical foundation: Machiavelli played a part – since he viewed man as cowardly and treacherous, rules for government cannot be the same as those which apply inside a house; by putting God aside, he also did not have to be bothered with justice and right.

Barzun offers perspective on Machiavelli; he sees not so much fault with the proposed ends – instead, it is the means that has the critics worked up:

It is the means Machiavelli proposes for achieving princehood and staying in power that have caused the furor.

Barzun expands on Machiavelli’s views on man:

“Italians are cowards, poor, and vain.”  This badness must be used to create not good conditions but tolerable ones: both morality and immorality must contribute.

Given this view:

The prince must be honest and decent as far as he can and he must certainly uphold the precepts of Christian ethics.  He must be just and if possible popular.  But he had better be feared than loved.  He dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state.

The Rise of the State

This is the title of the second chapter of Martin Van Creveld’s book entitled “The Rise and Decline of the State.”  It should be obvious from the title that I will have difficulty with this period. 

The period covered is 1300 – 1648, and Van Creveld begins with the struggle against the church – a struggle against faith in the church and toward faith in the state, it seems.  He contrasts attitudes toward the church in the earlier periods of the Middle Ages with those that followed – culminating with the major inflection point of the Reformation:

When, in AD 1170, men sent by King Henry II of England murdered the primate of England – Archbishop Thomas Becket – in his own cathedral, the upshot was a sharp reversal for the royal cause…Not only was the king forced to repent in public, but the extent of his surrender is indicated by the fact that England was subjected to a flood of papal decrees dealing with every aspect of government including, in particular, the clergy’s right to be judged solely by men of their own kind.

Competing and overlapping political power offered a good check on abuse throughout much of the medieval period.  This is contrasted with an event about a century-and-a-half later:

In the summer of 1307 Clement, expecting to preside over an ecclesiastical council that was to be held in Tours, traveled to France.  There he had to stand by as the king mounted a spectacular series of show trials in which the Knights Templar were accused of everything from heresy to homosexuality.  What military force the church possessed within the realm of France was destroyed; its commanders were executed, its fortresses and revenues taken away and joined to the royal domain.

Van Creveld identifies the next step as the new humanist scholarship emerging in Italy – and the admiration of everything classical, “which itself implied that an orderly – even flourishing and intellectually superior – civilization was possible without benefit of the Christian faith.”

Next the Reformation:

An even more important turning point in the triumph of the monarchs over the church came in the form of the Reformation.  From the beginning one reason why Luther in particular gained so much more support than previous reformers was precisely because of his instance that the movement he led had no revolutionary overtones….

Clearly why the Ron Paul R3VO7ution failed….

This was not to suggest that Luther played a strictly hands-off role in this transfer of power (and property) from church to state:

The City-State

I continue with my review of The Rise and Decline of the State, by Martin Van Creveld.  The introduction can be found here.

Van Creveld’s opening chapter covers what he describes as the time before the state – pre-history to AD 1300.  In this chapter, he reviews tribes – with and without rulers, city-states, and early empires – e.g. China and Egypt.  In this post I will focus on his section regarding the city-state.  As in all such sweeping views of even a specific aspect of history, much of what is written is a generalization – not all aspects will be found in every city-state.

…the outstanding feature of classical city-states was that their citizens appointed certain persons among themselves to govern all of them. …we are talking here not of rulers but of magistrates.

Unlike many of the tribal societies before, governance of the city-state was not based on descent.  This position also did not come with the concept of “ownership”; the appointed magistrates did not “own” all of the property or the people – they were not necessarily the wealthiest or most powerful citizens of the city, they did not lord over the other citizens:

On the contrary, in both Greece and Rome “government” (arche, imperium) was defined as a form of authority exercised by some persons over others who, unlike family members and slaves, were their equals (homoioi) in front of the law and did not “belong” to them…

There was no distinction corresponding to our customary (and superficial) separation of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.  Instead, “[p]erhaps the most important single institution was the popular assembly.”

Rome was perhaps unique in that it had four different assemblies, each comprising a different section of the population; elsewhere, one assembly was found – an assembly of all adult makes, excluding those who were part of another household, slaves, and foreigners.  In Athens, some forty meetings per year were held:

The assembly’s main function was to pass laws, known as nomoi in Greece and leges in Rome; but it also elected the magistrates and pronounced the final word on questions of war and peace.

The assembly also possessed the right to use ostracism in order to exile those citizens felt to be a public danger – an approach sometimes suggested as viable by those advocating a more libertarian / anarchic solution to certain offenses.

Next in importance to the assembly were the various magistrates.  Whereas many might be selected by lot, the most important ones were invariably elected… In Greece…the objective was usually to enable as many citizens as possible to rule and be ruled in turn.

The process of selection by lot is known as sortition:

…election by lot, a method of choosing public officials in some ancient Greek city-states. It was used especially in the Athenian democracy, from which most information about the practice is derived. With few exceptions, all magistrates were chosen by lot, beginning with the archons in 487–486 bc; likewise the Boule (council) of 500 and the juries of the law courts were chosen by lot. The practice of sortition obviated electoral races and provided for the regular turnover of officeholders. The operations of government were thus not in the hands of experts, but, through the system of sortition, the Athenian democracy provided at least some practical political education for its citizens.

The rationale of sortition was the equality of all citizens.

We could do worse than elect our politicians by lot…wait a minute…we already do worse!

The situation of law, crime, and punishment deserves mention.  There were several courts in which a trial could be judged.  The system was a jury system:

Thus, in Athens, the assembly elected a pool of 6,000 potential jurors each year; to forestall bribery, the decision as to who would serve on each court each day was made by lot with the aid of a specially constructed machine…In this way the classical city-state became the first, and for a very long time only, political community to take juridical powers out of the hands of the ruler(s).  No magistrate, not even the Roman consuls whose power was greater than that of all the rest, in an ancient city-state possessed the right to inflict capital punishment on a citizen in peacetime unless he had first been permitted to present his case before a citizens’ court….

There was no concept of committing a crime against the state:

In the absence of the state as a legal persona against which offenses could be committed, our modern distinction between civil and criminal jurisdiction did not apply.  It made no difference whether the matter before the court involved a dispute over an inheritance or murder; instead a line was drawn between cases which involved only individuals and those which, like peculation, treason, impiety, and – in Rome – insulting the greatness or majestas of the Roman people, concerned the community as a whole.  In the former cases, the only ones who could bring suit were the injured person or, if he was no longer alive, his relatives; the second type could be prosecuted by any citizen who wished to do so.

There is, perhaps, some applicability in this to the concepts of law and justice in a more libertarian / anarchic society.

There was little concept of specialized personnel, large administrative bureaucracies, or regular armies.  There was no institutional training of personnel for positions in police work, accounting, or diplomacy.  The laws themselves, at least initially, came from oral tradition – similar to the discovery of law during the Middle Ages.

The expenditures of government were met with market duties and proceeds from the justice system.  The most important source, however, was the so-called liturgies – contributions made by the wealthier citizens for specific purposes: staging a play, supplying an exercise hall, or erecting a public building.  Beyond any altruistic motives, such payments often helped to increase popularity and therefore gain sympathy from a jury pool – as such wealthy people were certain to be dragged into court on occasion.

Voluntary payments for so-called public goods; an interesting idea.  Instead of buying off the politicians via “campaign contributions,” they bought off the population directly, thus circumventing the tremendously expensive middle-man.

Thus ends Van Creveld’s overview of the governance in an ancient city-state; in addition to my being exposed to this history, it also provides real-world examples of institutional possibilities absent a (or at least via a greatly reduced) central, monopoly state government.

The Rise and Decline of the State

With this post, I begin a review of the book by Martin Van Creveld: “The Rise and Decline of the State.”  Best to start with his opening statement in the Preface:

The state, which since the middle of the seventeenth century has been the most important and most characteristics of all modern institutions, is in decline.

Plenty of bloggers like me make such outlandish statements; so, who is Martin Van Creveld?

Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam to a Jewish family.  His parents, Leon and Margaret, were staunch Zionists who had managed to evade the Nazis during World War II.  One of Creveld's uncles and several cousins were killed in the Holocaust.  In 1950, the family immigrated to Israel, and Creveld grew up in Ramat Gan.  He was drafted to the Israel Defense Forces and served in logistics, but was soon granted an early discharge for medical reasons due to his cleft palate.  From 1964 to 1969, he studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned an MA.  From 1969 to 1971, he studied history at the London School of Economics and received a PhD.  His doctoral dissertation on Hitler's strategy in the Balkans during the early years of World War II was later published into a book. After completing his PhD in 1971, van Creveld returned to Israel and began teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He became a professor in 1988. In 2007, he retired from teaching at Hebrew University, and began teaching at Tel Aviv University's Security Studies Program.

Two of his books are required reading for United States Army officers (The Transformation of War and Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton); there are only two other books written by non-American authors on the required reading list – the well-known books by Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, respectively.  Not bad company.

Van Creveld has interesting views on current affairs:

In a TV interview in 2002, he expressed doubts as to the ability of the Israeli army to defeat the Palestinians:

They [Israeli soldiers] are very brave people... they are idealists... they want to serve their country and they want to prove themselves. The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose-lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot….Now the Israeli army has not by any means been the worst of the lot. It has not done what for instance the Americans did in Vietnam... it did not use napalm, it did not kill millions of people. So everything is relative, but by definition, to return to what I said earlier, if you are strong and you are fighting the weak, then anything you do is criminal.

On a less comforting note:

In a September 2003 interview in Elsevier, a Dutch weekly, on Israel and the dangers it faces from Iran, the Palestinians and world opinion van Creveld stated:

We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.

A frank assessment in a world gone MAD:

In the 21 August 2004 edition of the International Herald Tribune van Creveld wrote, "Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy."

Van Creveld has stated that the Israeli government has "vastly exaggerated the threat that a nuclear Iran poses to its security, as well as Israel's capacity to halt it."

And a comment that moves him high on my list:

In 2005, van Creveld made headlines when he said in an interview that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC [sic] sent his legions into Germany and lost them", a reference to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.  His analysis included harsh criticism of the Bush Administration, comparing the war to the Vietnam war.  Moreover, he said that "Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial."

So much for the author; returning to this book:

From Western Europe to Africa, either voluntarily or involuntarily, many existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart…Regardless of whether they fall apart or combine, already now many of their functions are being taken over by a variety of organizations which, whatever their precise nature, are not states.