The "social engineer" is the reformer who is
prepared to "liquidate" all those who do not fit into his plan for the
arrangement of human affairs. Yet historians and sometimes even victims whom he
puts to death are not averse to finding some extenuating circumstances for his
massacres or planned massacres by pointing out that he was ultimately motivated
by a noble ambition: he wanted to establish the perfect state of mankind. They
assign to him a place in the long line of the designers of utopian schemes.
Now it is certainly folly to excuse in this way the mass murders of such sadistic gangsters as Stalin and Hitler. But there is no doubt that many of the most bloody "liquidators" were guided by the ideas that inspired from time immemorial the attempts of philosophers to meditate on a perfect constitution. Having once hatched out the design of such an ideal order, the author is in search of the man who would establish it by suppressing the opposition of all those who disagree. In this vein, Plato was anxious to find a tyrant who would use his power for the realization of the Platonic ideal state. The question whether other people would like or dislike what he himself had in store for them never occurred to Plato. It was an understood thing for him that the king who turned philosopher or the philosopher who became king was alone entitled to act and that all other people had, without a will of their own, to submit to his orders. Seen from the point of view of the philosopher who is firmly convinced of his own infallibility, all dissenters appear merely as stubborn rebels resisting what will benefit them.
The experience provided by history, especially by that
of the last 200 years, has not shaken this belief in salvation by tyranny and
the liquidation of dissenters. Many of our contemporaries are firmly convinced
that what is needed to render all human affairs perfectly satisfactory is
brutal suppression of all "bad" people, i.e., of those with whom they
disagree. They dream of a perfect system of government that — as they think —
would have already long since been realized if these "bad" men,
guided by stupidity and selfishness, had not hindered its establishment.
A modern, allegedly scientific school of reformers
rejects these violent measures and puts the blame for all that is found wanting
in human conditions upon the alleged failure of what is called "political
science." The natural sciences, they say, have advanced considerably in
the last centuries, and technology provides us almost monthly with new
instruments that render life more agreeable. But "political progress has
been nil." The reason is that "political science stood still." (1)Political
science ought to adopt the methods of the natural sciences; it should no longer
waste its time in mere speculations, but should study the "facts."
For, as in the natural sciences, the "facts are needed before the
theory."(2)
One can hardly misconstrue more lamentably every
aspect of human conditions. Restricting our criticism to the epistemological
problems involved, we have to say: What is today called "political
science" is that branch of history that deals with the history of
political institutions and with the history of political thought as manifested
in the writings of authors who disserted about political institutions and
sketched plans for their alteration. It is history, and can as such, as has
been pointed out above, never provide any "facts" in the sense in
which this term is used in the experimental natural sciences. There is no need
to urge the political scientists to assemble all facts from the remote past and
from recent history, falsely labeled "present experience."(3)Actually they do
all that can be done in this regard. And it is nonsensical to tell them that
conclusions derived from this material ought "to be tested by
experiments."(4)It is
supererogatory to repeat that the sciences of human action cannot make any
experiments.
It would be preposterous to assert apodictically that
science will never succeed in developing a praxeological aprioristic doctrine
of political organization that would place a theoretical science by the side of
the purely historical discipline of political science. All we can say today is
that no living man knows how such a science could be constructed. But even if
such a new branch of praxeology were to emerge one day, it would be of no use
for the treatment of the problem philosophers and statesmen were and are
anxious to solve.
That every human action has to be judged and is judged
by its fruits or results is an old truism. It is a principle with regard to
which the Gospels agree with the often badly misunderstood teachings of the
utilitarian philosophy. But the crux is that people widely differ from one
another in their appraisal of the results. What some consider as good or best
is often passionately rejected by others as entirely bad. The utopians did not
bother to tell us what arrangement of affairs of state would best satisfy their
fellow citizens. They merely expounded what conditions of the rest of mankind
would be most satisfactory to themselves. Neither to them nor to their adepts
who tried to realize their schemes did it ever occur that there is a
fundamental difference between these two things. The Soviet dictators and their
retinue think that all is good in Russia as long as they themselves are
satisfied.
But even if for the sake of argument we put aside this
issue, we have to emphasize that the concept of the perfect system of
government is fallacious and self-contradictory.
What elevates man above all other animals is the
cognition that peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of
labor is a better method to preserve life and to remove felt uneasiness than
indulging in pitiless biological competition for a share in the scarce means of
subsistence provided by nature. Guided by this insight, man alone among all
living beings consciously aims at substituting social cooperation for what
philosophers have called the state of nature or helium
omnium contra omnes or the law of the jungle. However, in order
to preserve peace, it is, as human beings are, indispensable to be ready to
repel by violence any aggression, be it on the part of domestic gangsters or on
the part of external foes. Thus, peaceful human cooperation, the prerequisite
of prosperity and civilization, cannot exist without a social apparatus of
coercion and compulsion, i.e., without a government. The evils of violence,
robbery, and murder can be prevented only by an institution that itself,
whenever needed, resorts to the very methods of acting for the prevention of
which it is established. There emerges a distinction between illegal employment
of violence and the legitimate recourse to it. In cognizance of this fact some
people have called government an evil, although admitting that it is a
necessary evil. However, what is required to attain an end sought and
considered as beneficial is not an evil in the moral connotation of this term,
but a means, the price to be paid for it. Yet the fact remains that actions
that are deemed highly objectionable and criminal when perpetrated by
"unauthorized" individuals are approved when committed by the
"authorities."
Government as such is not only not an evil, but the
most necessary and beneficial institution, as without it no lasting social
cooperation and no civilization could be developed and preserved. It is a means
to cope with an inherent imperfection of many, perhaps of the majority of all
people. If all men were able to realize that the alternative to peaceful social
cooperation is the renunciation of all that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the
beasts of prey, and if all had the moral strength always to act accordingly,
there would not be any need for the establishment of a social apparatus of
coercion and oppression. Not the state is an evil, but the shortcomings of the
human mind and character that imperatively require the operation of a police
power. Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'être to the imperfection of man and can
attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by
recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an
individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence.
The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to
protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most
dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power
for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against
oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from
becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The
essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the
arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for
freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek πολις down to the present-day resistance to socialism,
is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments
of the officeholders.
A shallow-minded school of social philosophers, the
anarchists, chose to ignore the matter by suggesting a stateless organization
of mankind. They simply passed over the fact that men are not angels. They were
too dull to realize that in the short run an individual or a group of
individuals can certainly further their own interests at the expense of their
own and all other peoples' long-run interests. A society that is not prepared
to thwart the attacks of such asocial and short-sighted aggressors is helpless
and at the mercy of its least intelligent and most brutal members. While Plato
founded his Utopia on the hope that a small group of perfectly wise and morally
impeccable philosophers will be available for the supreme conduct of affairs,
anarchists implied that all men without any exception will be endowed with
perfect wisdom and moral impeccability. They failed to conceive that no system
of social cooperation can remove the dilemma between a man's or a group's
interests in the short run and those in the long run.
Man's atavistic propensity to beat into submission all
other people manifests itself clearly in the popularity enjoyed by the
socialist scheme. Socialism is totalitarian. The autocrat or the board of
autocrats alone is called upon to act. All other men will be deprived of any
discretion to choose and to aim at the ends chosen; opponents will be
liquidated. In approving of this plan, every socialist tacitly implies that the
dictators, those entrusted with production management and all government
functions, will precisely comply with his own ideas about what is desirable and
what undesirable. In deifying the state — if he is an orthodox Marxian, he
calls it society — and in assigning to it unlimited power, he deifies himself
and aims at the violent suppression of all those with whom he disagrees. The
socialist does not see any problem in the conduct of political affairs because
he cares only for his own satisfaction and does not take into account the
possibility that a socialist government would proceed in a way he does not
like.
The "political scientists" are free from the
illusions and self-deception that mar the judgment of anarchists and
socialists. But busy with the study of the immense historical material, they
become preoccupied with detail, with the numberless instances of petty
jealousy, envy, personal ambition, and covetousness displayed by the actors on
the political scene. They ascribe the failure of all political systems
heretofore tried to the moral and intellectual weakness of man. As they see it,
these systems failed because their satisfactory functioning would have required
men of moral and intellectual qualities only exceptionally present in reality.
Starting from this doctrine, they tried to draft plans for a political order
that could function automatically, as it were, and would not be embroiled by
the ineptitude and vices of men. The ideal constitution ought to safeguard a
blemishless conduct of public affairs in spite of the rulers' and the people's
corruption and inefficiency. Those searching for such a legal system did not
indulge in the illusions of the utopian authors who assumed that all men or at
least a minority of superior men are blameless and efficient. They gloried in
their realistic approach to the problem. But they never raised the question how
men tainted by all the shortcomings inherent in the human character could be
induced to submit voluntarily to an order that would prevent them from giving
vent to their whims and fancies.
However, the main deficiency of this allegedly
realistic approach to the problem is not this alone. It is to be seen in the
illusion that government, an institution whose essential function is the
employment of violence, could be operated according to the principles of
morality that condemn peremptorily the recourse to violence. Government is
beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing. People may be prone to
forget it because the law-abiding citizen meekly submits to the orders of the
authorities so as to avoid punishment. But the jurists are more realistic and
call a law to which no sanction is attached an imperfect law. The authority of
man-made law is entirely due to the weapons of the constables who enforce
obedience to its provisions. Nothing of what is to be said about the necessity
of governmental action and the benefits derived from it can remove or mitigate
the suffering of those who are languishing in prisons. No reform can render
perfectly satisfactory the operation of an institution the essential activity
of which consists in inflicting pain.
Responsibility for the failure to discover a perfect
system of government does not rest with the alleged backwardness of what is
called political science. If men were perfect, there would not be any need for
government. With imperfect men no system of government could function
satisfactorily.
The eminence of man consists in his power to choose
ends and to resort to means for the attainment of the ends chosen; the
activities of government aim at restricting this discretion of the individuals.
Every man aims at avoiding what causes him pain; the activities of government
ultimately consist in the infliction of pain. All great achievements of mankind
were the product of a spontaneous effort on the part of individuals; government
substitutes coercion for voluntary action. It is true, government is
indispensable because men are not faultless. But designed to cope with some
aspects of human imperfection, it can never be perfect.
Notes
No comments:
Post a Comment