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.One might reflect further on the conditions under which a rational state would choose selectively to publish truthful statistics, lies and no statistics, allowing for the effort needed to keep secrets (especially selectively), the inconvenience of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and the risks involved in coming to believe one's own lies.The right mix of truth, falsehood and silence looks very difficult to achieve-even the Soviet Union, which chooses its preferred "mix" more freely than most other states, seems to have mixed itself a poisonous brew.The fostering of systematic error by mendacious statistics, however, is kid's stuff compared to some of its other forms.In the development and propagation of a dominant ideology, defined as one favourable to the state's purposes, systematic error is generally being fostered without conscious design, i.e.far more effectively and durably than by mere lying.For instance, the powerful notion that the state is an instrument in the hands of its citizens (whether of all citizens, of the majority or of the propertied class) has certainly not originated in any Ministry of Propaganda.Educators inculcating doctrines of the state producing public good, and the requisite norms of good citizenship, are doing so in all sincerity.As I write (1984), the jury is still out on the Reaganadministration and Mrs Thatcher's government.Both seem at thesame time to be rolling and not rolling back the state.Comparing their strong commitment on the one hand and the slightness of the result on the other, one is reminded of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.Historiography tends to deal more satisfactorily with statesappearing in the shape of kings and emperors than with states which are faceless institutions.All too often, the latter are confused with the country, the nation; the historical driving force springing from the conflict between state and civil society is left at the edge of the field of vision.When the game is Emperor vs Senate, the king and his burghers vs the nobility, or the king vs established privileges and "ancient freedoms," historians are less apt to make us lose sight of which interests make the state do what it does.In modern parlance, the labourer has "maximized" whenaccepting to work for subsistence wages.No better alternative was offered to him.A different, more "strategic" sense of maximization, however, would have him attempt to influence the available alternatives.He could try to organize a union and bargain collectively, or strike.He could seek redress in "distributive justice" through the democratic political process.He could also fall in behind the "vanguard of the working class" and join the struggle to modify the "relations of production."If it takes the application of a fixed "amount" of power to stayin power, with the surplus (if any) available for exercise at discretion, anything which maximizes power must also maximize the discretionary surplus.The fastidious may therefore wince at "discretionary power" as the maximand; why not just plain power?However, the convenience of a built-in separation between "being in power" and "using power to freely chosen ends" seems to me to outweigh the inelegance of the solution.If the maximand is discretionary power, we can describe competitive equilibrium in politics as the position where discretionary power is nil.This has the didactic merit of rhyming with the position of the perfectly competitive firm whose profit is nil after it has paid for all its factors of production.Political theory, as we have seen, asks questions of ateleological nature and treats the state as an instrument: What can states do for their citizens? What ought they to do? What are the obligations and limits of civil obedience?, etc.I know of only two serious precedents of attributing a maximand to the state itself.Both do so in the context of theorizing about the production of public goods.One is Albert Breton, The Economic Theory of Representative Government, 1974.He postulates that the majority party will behave so as to maximize a function increasing in some way with the chance of re-election, power, personal gain, image in history and its view of the common good.The other is Richard Auster and Morris Silver, The State as a Firm, 1979.Here the maximand is the difference between tax revenue and the cost of the public goods produced by the state.Auster and Silver hold that unlike monarchy or oligarchy, democracy amounts to "diffuse ownership" among politicians and bureaucrats, and hence there is no residual income-recipient to profit from a surplus of taxes over the cost of public goods (leading to their over-production).I would interpret this to mean that in democracy there is no "maximizer."Note also, as examples of an approach which proceeds, so to speak, from the "producer's" motives rather than those of the "consumer," W.A.Niskanen Jr, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, 1971, where "bureaux" seek to maximize their budgets, and B.S.Frey and F.Schneider, "A Politico-Economic Model of the United Kingdom," Economic Journal, 88, June 1978, who find that when the government is unpopular, it pursues popular policies and when it is popular, it indulges its own ideology.Formally, discretionary power would have become negative insuch postures, hence (total) power would be inadequate to ensure its own maintenance; the tenancy of the state would change hands.Such proposals reach beyond the bounds of the simple sort ofelectoral competition set out earlier in this chapter.In addition to promising the majority the minority's money (equalizing incomes), they might, for instance, include the equalizing of schools (Gleichschaltung of education) or the equalizing of "economic power" (nationalization of the "means of production"), or some other property, privilege, immunity of the minority, including its creed (Huguenots, Mormons) or race (Jews).Chapter 5.State CapitalismV.I.Lenin, "The State and Revolution," in Selected Works,1968, p.296.Ibid., p.279.Ibid., pp.306, 325.The quotation is from Engels's 1875"Letter to August Bebel."V.I.Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the SovietGovernment," in Selected Works, p.419.Ibid.Ibid., p.421, italics in text.Ibid.Even Lenin's own creature has come a long way towardsaffecting this sort of consciousness: in the 1977 Soviet Constitution, it calls itself "the state of the entire people," serenely unworried by the absurdity, at least for Marxists, of a state being everybody's state!Weak medieval kings and strong territorial lords bothexercised near-sovereign political power only over the land they "owned" (though this was but a quasi-ownership), the patterns of dispersed political and dispersed economic power coinciding as they have never done since.On the other hand, centralized political and economic power have often coincided.They still tend to go hand in hand in "second" and "third world" countries.Jean Elleinstein, Lettre ouverte aux Français de la Républiquedu Programme Commun, 1977, pp.140-51.Like the gentleman in the Park who mistook the strolling Duke of Wellington for a certain Mr Smith ("Mr Smith, I believe?"-"If you believe that, Sir, you will believe anything"), Elleinstein manifestly believed that nationalization would do these things rather than their opposites.It is this trusting simplicity that best suits the state (and of course its leaders) in the difficult transition from democracy to socialism.To readers of J.Rawls's Theory of Justice, 1972, and ofchapter 3 of this book, these phrases will have a familiar ring [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]