Introduction to Political Theory

usually reject the kind of distinctions that appear in this chapter – the distinction

between state and government, force and constraint.

Chapter 1 The state 29

The state

The state is often identified with civilisation, and it is easy to see why the state has such a

profound impact upon our thought. Conventional religion depicts God as a sovereign overlord,

and classical political thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau assumed that without a conception

of God, no state would be possible. It is also very tempting to translate contemporary concerns

into a frozen notion of human nature as though how people behave in, for example, Britain

today, represents the nature of humankind. Moreover, where people do resort to force to tackle

their conflicts, a world without the state makes a bad situation even worse, and it would hardly

be an advantage to do away with the state, if the alternative was rule by warlords or the Mafia.

Yet it is ultimately an illusion to think that we can do away with force by resorting to the

state, for what could be called a ‘statist’ mentality assumes that violent people are inexplicably

evil. We cannot understand them; we can only crush them. The statist mentality never asks

the question ‘why?’. Why are people so brutalised that they resort to force? Of course, it is

no help to merely invert the idea that people are evil so that we consider them to be naturally

‘good’ instead. Pacifists naively suppose that brutalised people or states will respond to moral

pressures in a purely moral way, and anarchists fail to see that in conditions where force can

be dispensed with, we still need government to regulate social affairs. Firmness and rules are

actually undermined by the use of force, since force encourages us to ignore complexities and

not try and imagine what it is like to be in the shoes of another. The fact that the state remains

hugely influential in our lives does not mean that we should not start thinking about ways and

means of living without it.

Focus

Globalisation and the state

Hyper-globalists are those who argue that the notion of the nation-state disappears

under the cut and thrust of the free market. They are called hyper-globalists (by

their critics) because it is felt that they take a naive and extreme view of the growing

internationalisation of the economy and society.

Take the arguments of Kenneth Ohmae, for example. Ohmae argues that the

nation-state has become ‘a nostalgic fiction’ (1995: 12) in the face of the global

market. Ohmae rests his case on what he calls the ‘Californisation’ of taste and

preference. There is a ladder of economic development, he contends, upon which

more and more societies climb, reaching the US$5,000 threshold of per capita

development. The spread of information-related technology is infectious and Adam

Smith’s invisible hand now works in a global context.

This is a neo-liberal or free-market argument which is starkly inegalitarian and

is hostile to democracy. Ohmae argues that the rules of electoral logic and popular