Leviathan’s Auxiliary: Individualism as an Agent of Tyranny
Introduction
“What will it take to make you capitulate?
We appreciate power
We appreciate power
When will the state agree to cooperate?
We appreciate power
We appreciate power” - Grimes
The formulation of a political orientation is mediated by an inherited, albeit not static, conceptual arsenal - this is applicable for metapolitical theorists and party activists alike. Terminological baggage influences the way in which we think about an idea and its relation to congruous and competing theories.
For political individualists, - a broad spectrum inclusive of tendencies that run the gamut from market liberalism to anarcho-capitalism - individualism connotes certain corollaries and antipathies. As a term, political individualism is suggestive of negative rights, capitalism, a market economy, the supplantation of custom by contract, and so on. The embodied antithesis of the ideal held by political individualists is the state.
Perhaps, to digress momentarily, it may be more apt to invoke the word ‘dis-embodied’, for political individualists frequently note that the state lacks concreteness; one cannot point to a state, - it, like a corporation, lacks corporeality; conversely one can see, touch, speak to, etc., an individual. Political individualists of a conservative bent are seemingly blind to the fact that akin reasoning may be employed to deconstruct intermediate organic forms, such as the family.
The state, considered from their point of view, is merely an abstraction backed by force; an artifice with a monopoly on violence. Thus, it follows that its epiphenomena imbibe said qualities. For instance, in the field of jurisprudence, laws are imperatives backed by the prospect of violence if contravened.
This is the view of John Austin, the pioneer of systematic legal positivism, but his positivistic approach is by no means sui generis, nor is it delimited to the domain of jurisprudence — it is prefigured in Thomas Hobbes’ magnum opus, Leviathan, wherein the state is explicated mechanistically.
“Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”
It follows from its mechanistic nature and human origin that the state, if its edicts are to be abided and it’s authority deferred to, requires a legitimising rationale.
Being a spectral phenomenon, political individualism has responded to this quandary via manifold theoretical means. An outright rejection of the state as illegitimate is a central tenant of anarcho-capitalism. Contrastingly, social contractarianism has been traditionally invoked by liberals to undergird the normative relationship between state and citizen.
Irrespective of whether the state is rejected or conditionally accepted, the belief that the state and the individual possess obverse interests, such that the state’s growth inherently threatens the individual’s security and freedom, is common to nearly every variation of political individualism.
But what if this narrative lacks veracity? What if the there is a symbiotic relationships between these phenomena? It is the contention of this essay that an assiduous reflection reveals that the growth of the state and the liberation of the individual are concurrent and mutually enforcing, to the detriment of intermediate power-structures and traditional societies.
Against Rights
“We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to deathThe sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their polesIt went like this:” — Godspeed You! Black Emperor, ‘Dead Flag Blues’
Following the fall of the Soviet Union and its neighbouring satellite states, mid-brow commentariat across the West boldly asserted a societal and governmental model which we, that being humanity from Papua to Peru, ought to emulate.
Mass democracy mediated by constitutional strictures - the very notion would’ve struck a liberal such as Guizot and a democract of Rousseau’s vintage alike as absurd - in conjunction with consumerism and bilateralism: this was to be the end of history, that is, of the vying of grand ideologies for global or continental hegemony. Fascism and Communism were dead; McDonalds über alles.
For the purposes of this essay, the partial object of which is an evaluation of the relationship between individualism and the state, the facet of the contemporary state which is pertinent is the constitution - specifically, the rights stipulated therein, as well as unenumerated rights “discovered” by the judiciary in common law jurisdictions.
Constitutionally guaranteed rights regulate the conduct between the state and the individual, curbing the potential excesses of the former on account of its inherently asymmetrical relationship with the latter.
A core selling point of liberalism, its adherents contend, is that rather than being ruled by men, one is governed by laws which, in theory, ruler and ruled alike must abide. In conjunction with the separation of powers, a political model is engendered which purportedly lacks the central defect of its 20th century competitors, communism and fascism. That malady being the potential for individual-repression owing to a dearth of intra-system checks and power-disequilibrium in favour of the executive branch.
However, the liberal perspective is mistaken. Rights are posterior, not anterior, to the state. Whilst in theory they are an aegis by which one is shielded from government oppression, in reality rights are merely an epiphenomena of the state’s monopoly on violence. If rights are derivative of state power, how can they effectively encumber its maleficence?
A typical retort to this line of reasoning: the state, based on a separation of powers, possesses a judiciary which acts as a countervailing force vis-à-vis executive’s designs on the freedom of the citizenry. Underlying this argument is the same fallacy upon which rights-apologetics is based: viz. nominal power, the power of words on a piece of paper, exceeds actual power.
Let it not be inferred that this essay constitutes a denial that constitutional rights and the separation of powers are operative in a day-to-day sense. They certainly are extant. However, their subsistence relies upon a factor, the monopoly on violence, which they’re incapable of restraining when an actor employs the modern state’s reservoir of power, which heretofore has remained dormant, in a manner that contravenes constitutional strictures and norms.
We should not conflate power’s diffusion with its elimination. Bertrand de Jouvenel incisively noted this in his post-war magnum opus, ‘On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth’:
“Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.”
For modern democracies, therefore, constitutionalism is a false panacea; a mirage whose vaunt to have tamed the state must not be received with credulity.
A spectre haunts — the spectre of power.
One may conjecture that guilt underlays the attempt to shroud power’s persistence. Sub-conscious acknowledgement on the part of liberalism’s legatees that their project, the aim of which was the restraint forever after of tyrants, has engendered a most potent minotaur, to appropriate de Jouvenel’s term for the modern state.
The concluding section of this essay explores individualism’s role in the creation of this power.
Individualism and Tyranny
“I try to sing along, but the music's all wrong
'Cause I'm not, 'cause I'm not
I swat 'em like flies, but like flies the buggers keep coming back
And not, but I'm not
All hail to the thief, all hail to the thief
But I'm not, but I'm not
But I'm not, but I'm not” - Radiohead, ‘2+2=5’
At the outset, it must be cognised that power has for much of human history been diffused. The modern state, theorised and manifested in the early modern period, is a recent development.
By the modern state, I refer to that structure marked by the following demarcations and markers: the public-private distinction; the state-citizen relation; formal egalitarianism amongst the citizenry; the state as sole wielder of legitimate violence.
A detailed account of the modern state’s ascent is beyond the ambit of our essay, but certainly any contribution must take stock of François Furet’s thesis that the supplantation of patria potestas by the administrative state is a cardinal punctuating event separating medieval and modern conceptions of the political sphere.
Prior to the rise of the administrative state, with its legion of bureaucratic acolytes whose status and power hinges upon the central power, the subordinates of monarchs were aristocrats who possessed their own clients. The latter’s service could be relied on in times of war - whether enmity was directed toward an outside force, a domestic peer, or even the monarch. As late as the Fronde the latter variant of warfare occurred.
The Holy Roman Empire is emblematic of the limited power of medieval monarchy. To wage war in the name of the Empire in the 16th century required consultation with the Estates.
In ‘Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-speaking peoples since 1500’, Peter H. Wilson states:
“Military authority was therefore fragmented rather than monopolised. The emperor and imperial estates were all warlords, while the Empire and its Kreise could also act collectively in this capacity. From 1519, the emperor was obliged to consult the imperial Estates before making war in the Empire’s name, but he could still do this in his own capacity using the resources of his own very extensive lands.”
Wilson characterises the Holy Roman Empire as a “mixed monarchy in which the Emperor held initiative, but shared the exercise of power with the imperial Estates”. It must be kept in mind that the “Habsburgs [possessed] the first permanent army in the Empire”; Wilson is by no means describing a retrograde political order relative to its contemporaries.
The ambit of monarchical rule had certainly expanded since the 12th century. John Julius Norwich captures the limited influence of the French Monarchy in that century:
“His predecessors had done their best; but at the time of his accession the leading dukes and counts of the realm – to say nothing of William of Normandy – were still so powerful that the king had little real authority beyond the confines of the Ile de France, the region immediately surrounding Paris.”
The preceding quotes evince the weakness of mediaeval monarchy relative to its absolutist successor. Modernism signified the liberation of power from its feudal bounds. Power’s deliverance was concomitant with the ascent of the individual onto the world stage. It is integral to grasp the nature of this subject, its relationship with power, its historical adversaries, and the poisonous fruit engendered by its self-defeating symbiosis with power.
At the outset it must be made clear that the individual does not exist. The individual, as we contemporaneously cognise it, is the product of history — specifically, centuries, if not millennia, of conflict between power-centres.
At the origin of this gestation, we witness a being far removed from our contemporary conception of individuality. In physicality, this differentiation is scarcely conceivable - nutritional fruits, irrespective. Nor is the demarcation related to the sartorial sphere. Specifically, the primary distinguishing factor is the proximity of power.
In times of yore (admittedly vague), one was subject to the power of the familial patriarch, whose power of life and death, as well as many lesser spheres regulated by jurisdictions the world over, derived from a religious foundation; he tended to the hearth fire, this patriarch, and in so doing kept alive the flame which was at the heart the Indo-European ancestor cults - the ur-religion of this people, per Fustel de Coulanges in his Ancient City.
Contrastingly, Lewis H. Morgan, via his study of the Iroquois culture, concludes that hegemony originally belonged to the fairer sex. Dubbing the locus of their power ‘long-houses’, in his Ancient Society (from which Friedrich Engels drew his opinions regarding primitive families and social conditions more broadly) he had the following to say about how women exercised their power:
“As to their family system, when occupying the old long-houses, it is probable that some one clan predominated, the women taking in husbands, however, from the other clans; and sometimes, for a novelty, some of their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually, the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pack up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and, unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his own clan; or, as was often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power among the clans, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, to "knock off the horns", as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with them.”
Whether the social order was matriarchal or patriarchal, what may (anachronistically) be termed the ‘individual’ was subject to proximate power. This power, or powers depending on context, regulated, conditioned, and mediated the multifarious facets of one’s being.
Birth, not property, is the origin of inequality. Absent grace courtesy of one’s most immediate benefactor (one’s parents), the fate of the hapless infant in his helpless state is death; thereafter, in the period of youthful and adolescent gestation, acculturation of the nascent member of the tribe, gens, family, etc., occurs - the division between it and indoctrination has never satisfactorily been explicated…
It is not true to say, as the social contractarians did, that ancient man lacked government. Instead, it can be said that primitive man was a subject, a follower, amongst few, rather than many. Quantity, not quality, separates now and then.
Circumscribed by a web of intermediate authorities, or petty tyrannies, the individual’s natural ally was the central authority. Both had a mutual interest in curbing the power of intermediate authority. For the central power, its dukes and satrapies, not the lower classes, mitigated its ability to exercise its power; for the individual or the people, the power of aristocrat or cleric was onerous, not the distant and aloof monarch.
Ever incisive, Bertrand de Jouvenel says of the central power:
The growth of its authority strikes private individuals as being not so much a continual encroachment on their liberty, as an attempt to put down various petty tyrannies to which they have been subject. It looks as though the advance of the state is a means to the advance of the individual.
An equally apt assessment may be found on the now lamentably dormant blog, ‘The Journal of Neo-Absolutism:
“The monarchy then engaged in this alliance with the common people due to the imperatives its relatively weak position foisted on it due to the barons intransigence and opposition, and also as a means to ostensibly better govern. Monarchy was then anything but a despotism which modern/liberal propaganda post-enlightenment has presented it as, but rather a political structure under restraints which were genuine. A reality that we are again blind to due to the shared assumptions provided by modernity/liberalism that we have passed from a period of darkness into the enlightenment of liberal governance, assumptions that we shall see were perpetuated by Power’s expansion.”
Not content with the above-cited quotations? Let your incredulity be quashed by a statement made to the Venetian Doge by Bertuccio Ixarello, a sea captain who had suffered dishonour at the literal hands of a haughty aristocrat:
“Let us join forces to destroy this aristocratic authority which thus perpetuates the abasement of my people and limits so narrowly your power.”
If we have learned anything from Foucault and Marx it is this: the reification of products of contingency is fallacious and ahistorical. Libertarianism, liberalism, and so forth, as well as their antecedents, conferred natural liberty to man: to engage in commerce, to be a moral agent, to be a political participant, and, above all, to consent.
But absent a context of sovereign domination, legal equality, the rationalisation of the political sphere, the abolition of the guilds (an act of the French Revolution), and the extrication of patriarchal (or matriarchal) privilege, can we speak of an individual? Or merely a being which, in different circumstances, has the capacity to be one?
And what but the central power, whether it be a republican body or absolute monarchy, could have, via competition with other power centres, produced the conditions in which the modern individual emerged?
This humble contention is the central thesis of this essay.
Conclusion
In its destruction and attenuation of aristocracy, the guilds, the church, and so forth, we have arrived at the time of states and individuals. And what does the latter have to show for it? In lieu of many powers, there is one, or in Western Democracies: the maya of multiplicity. The individual finds himself at the mercy of a benefactor - one may feed the minotaur, but one will never satisfy it.
The fallaciousness of rights-discourse has been touched upon. In light of the above, it’s clear that the individual, in averring his rights, is merely mapping the government’s ambit. A clarion call for the claws of leviathan to pierce further into the body-politic. And the interpolation of ‘claws’ is by no means figurative hyperbole, for the government’s possession of a monopoly on violence ineluctably makes every act of sovereignty, whether carried out in the service of benevolence or not, inherently violent.
Lenin once said “the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. Similarly, the individual, in its alliance with the central power, has crafted the hangman’s knot, and following the extirpation of privilege, partiality, and irrationality, finds itself on the gallows awaiting a similar fate…