restrained through counter-force. Or a person who is different from others, let us
say because he is gay, cannot be expected to suffer attacks on his person or his
livelihood, and force may have to be employed against those who perpetrate the
outrage. The point about force, whether it can be justified or not, is that it suppresses
difference and its use by the state exhibits the same problem. Whether it is an attack
on defenceless people by an authoritarian state, or a forceful seizure of criminals by
a liberal state, the state necessarily crushes difference, since it is impossible to
consider a person’s attributes comprehensively when using force against them. What
we mean by this is the following. Supposing force is used against a man who rapes
a woman. The man might be a good gardener, able to repair cars and very good
with computers. None of these attributes are relevant because the man is deemed a
rapist, and he must be locked up against his will. The other aspects of his personality
are ignored. Such an abstract focus is inevitable when force is used.
Targeting an individual or group through the state, makes it impossible to regard
their differences positively, as attributes to be celebrated – and this is why states
have to draw what postmodernists call ‘binary distinctions’ – distinctions in which
someone wins and someone loses, ‘differences’ that are perceived in repressively
hierarchical terms. The state is an institution that either obliterates or demonises
differences. It treats its supporters as the ‘same’ and its enemies as different, and
thus it disrupts the respect for difference that is crucial if people are to govern their
own lives. This is why we need to distinguish between state and government (see
Chapter 1 on the State). Government seeks to help people help themselves and,
therefore, to use their distinct characteristics in a way that contributes towards
development.478 Part 4 Contemporary ideas
It is obvious that there are three naturally distinct, one might almost say hostile races. Education,
law, origin, and external features too have raised almost insurmountable barriers between them;
chance has brought them together on the same soil, but they have mixed without combining,
and each follows a separate destiny.
Among these widely different people, the first that attracts attention, and the first in
enlightenment, power and happiness is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below
him come the Negro and the Indian.
These two unlucky races have neither birth, physique, language in common; only their
misfortunes are alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the land where they dwell;
both suffer the effects of tyranny, and, though their afflictions are different, they have the same
people to blame for them.
Seeing what happens in the world, might one not say that the European is to men of other
races, what man is to the animals? He makes them serve his convenience, and when he cannot
bend them to his will he destroys them... It is impossible to destroy men with more respect
to the laws of humanity.
(Democracy in America, 1835/1966: 391, 421)De Tocqueville on colonialism as an
extinguisher of difference