account_balance Society Is Us. The State Is Not.
report_off The claim
""The State, that's us.""
Society and the State are not the same thing, and the difference is not a technicality.
In civil society, we trade, create, associate, or choose to do none of it. These relations rest on mutual consent. The State is a different kind of institution. As the sociologist Max Weber defined it, it holds the “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force” within a given territory: it can impose its decisions under the threat of legal coercion. Rothbard says the same thing more bluntly: the State is the only organization in society that gets its revenue not through voluntary payment for services rendered, but through coercion.
“But we elect our leaders!” Voting grants procedural legitimacy to whoever ends up governing; it does not manufacture each individual’s consent. If 60% of citizens vote to tax or regulate the other 40%, the decision is democratic, but it is still binding on the minority who voted against it. An election changes who wields power. It does not change the coercive nature of the power itself. Repeating that “we are the government,” as Rothbard put it, amounts to pretending that any collective decision is voluntarily accepted by every single individual it falls on, including the ones who lost the vote.
Nor is the State some mystical extension of the population, a moral person standing above and for everyone. Public Choice theory, developed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan and his collaborators, made a simple but disruptive point: the State is made of ordinary individuals, elected officials, senior civil servants, administrators, who respond to their own interests, budget constraints, and career incentives like anyone else. It is an administrative apparatus with its own internal dynamic, not the simple sum of the citizens it governs.
This is also a semantic trick. “The State, that’s us” quietly turns “the State takes my money” into “I am taking my own money from myself.” But when a tax is collected, there is a taxpayer who pays and an administration that collects. If the taxpayer refuses, the police show up. That is exactly what separates a tax from a purchase or a gift: nobody sends the police after a customer who decides not to buy. Confusing society with the State is like confusing a ship’s passengers with the shipping company that operates it. We are all aboard the same boat, but the passengers are not the crew, and the crew is not the ship’s owner.
None of this means rejecting every rule or denying that public services can be useful. Separating society from the State simply clears the way for the one question that actually matters in politics: what should the limits of State power be? If the State is “us,” then every constraint becomes a self-constraint, and the very idea of an abuse of power disappears; there is no one left to abuse it against. Society is collective life. The State is the organization to which we delegate the use of coercion. Protecting the first requires measuring and limiting the second.
Quotes
View full quote"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.'"
View full quote"The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by..."
View full quote"A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."
View full quote"Public choice theory has been the avenue through which a romantic and illusory set of notions about the workings of governments and the behavior of persons who govern has been replaced by a set of notions that embody more skepticism..."
Books
Anatomy of the State
Concise treatise analyzing the nature and origins of the state, arguing that the state is fundamentally an organization based on aggression rather ...
Read MorePolitics as a Vocation
Lecture delivered at Munich University in 1918, published in 1919, in which Weber defines the modern state by its monopoly on the legitimate use of...
Read MoreThe Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
Volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, gathering his key essays, including "Politics without Romance," his 1979 lecture explaining P...
Read More