For all of its complexity, philosophical discourse seems to always wind its way back to a few core issues—for example, the meaning of being, the nature of the good, and the scope of human freedom. So foundational are these questions that they are often left unexplored in more topical works. Like NBA players being told to practice jab stepping and jump stopping, philosophers often assume that they have moved beyond the fundamentals. It’s an understandable impulse. After all, the application of one’s ideas to current events or problems is likely to garner interest, while circling back to, say, Plato’s allegory of the cave may be viewed as trite or even irrelevant. The marketplace of ideas is, at the end of the day, still a marketplace. If a product doesn’t sell, it’s taken off the shelves.
At any rate, as I peer into the rabbit hole of a new academic project, I’m reminded of how many perennial problems are bound up therein. Consider politics. It appears that any discussion of politics must, at some point, confront the nature and purpose of the state. And yet, as Walter Opello, Jr. writes in War, Armed Force, and the People (2016), there has been a trend in recent political science to foreground "civic associations” and “economic forces” at the expense of statecraft. He believes that this is a mistake because “the rise of the modern state was, without a doubt, the most important development in human history,” so much so that today “every square kilometer of the planet, except Antarctica, falls within the exclusive domain of one state or another.” Such power is nothing less than revolutionary, since “the modern state is [also] an abstraction, an idea that exists in the minds of its people and its officials above and beyond the formal institutions of governance.”
But it is precisely here that larger philosophical questions begin to brew. Indeed, according to Opello, thinkers have struggled to account for why human beings give their allegiance to the state at all. It is not a necessary feature of existence. There have been other forms of governance. “Whence came the state,” as Opello succinctly puts it. Here he distinguishes between “consensus theorists” such as Thomas Hobbes, who argue that, given the otherwise inhospitable conditions of human life, people tacitly assent to state rule, and “conflict theorists” such as Franz Oppenheimer, who insist that far more mundane reasons explain state formation—namely, warfare and political control.
Obviously, these are weighty topics that far outstrip a brief reflection such as this one. Suffice it to say that, for Opello, conflict theory is the better option, inasmuch as it is rooted to concrete historical events. Drawing on the work of international relations experts Cynthia Weber and Andreas Osiander, Opello maintains that war not only applies internal pressure to state formation—as when a major conflict leads to policy changes such as new voting laws—but it can also encourage states to “discipline” and to “regulate” other states that deviate from “the prevalent conception of legitimate state organizational practices.” Hence, when a war breaks out, it is never separable from questions about the nature, purpose, and scope of state power.
Still, just as these issues lurk behind everyday headlines, so do additional problems continue to loom in the background—yes, the very fundamentals that were mentioned at the outset. For it is doubtless the case that the phenomena of politics and statecraft bear metaphysical and ethical assumptions that legitimize the exercise of state power. But what are those? And how might they be at play in contemporary politics and war?
Sigh. It’s a good thing it’s Friday.
The question of "the nature and purpose of the state" is not entirely disparate from the topic of yesterday's post (about whether institutions can be for the good of human formation, rather than simply manipulative forces, rejected by constant mistrust and suspicion.)
Forgive me for a bit of a tangent , but I wanted to share that in recent commentary, this piece has been the most inspiring for me to think further about the question of the meaning and purpose of the state. The author Rana Dasgupta is usually a novelist, but this piece is a chapter from an upcoming book titled "After Nations." The topics relate to the sense of what Dasgupta describes almost theologically as kind of "spiritual trauma" in that the impacts of technology, globalized disaster, and the inability of states to control money flows, have resulted in a loss of faith in the power of modern states. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta