The Corrosive Effects of Sovereign States on Associational Life
adapted from my book in progress, The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies
There is a widespread presumption in the West that the State has the last word on a host of coordination problems facing society, be it the management of infectious disease, the security of citizens, or the regulation of science, medicine, industry, and education. The magic word we use to capture this finality is “sovereignty.” “The State is sovereign,” means on the one hand that it is immune to interference from foreign actors; and on the other hand, that State actors, as long as they are acting constitutionally, have a form of authority that normally overrides the authority of rival actors, be they citizens or associations.
Of course, this “sovereign” authority, even if it enjoys a significant degree of social recognition, may not be completely effective in practice. For example, there may be many messy aspects of social life that stubbornly resist the State’s authority claims, and there may be a substantial number of citizens who no longer believe in the right of the State to regulate their lives. However, to the extent that State officials and a significant number of citizens act as if the narrative were true, and to the extent that States do, in many situations, exert a wide-ranging and supreme form of authority over the life of citizens, we can say that the practice of Statehood is imbued by a theory of sovereignty.
The notion that any single actor or institution in society uniquely enjoys a claim to authority that is supreme and overriding with respect to a wide range of social problems is sometimes considered a truism. But this way of seeing society is not “natural” or universal. Political governments in many parts of the world are by no means viewed in their societies as “sovereign” and have to compete with a broad range of competing social authoritities. This was certainly the case in the feudal Europe of princes, priests and nobles. I am not suggesting we should return to feudalism, just that the attribution of supreme and general-purpose authority to a single government ruling over an extended territory is the product of a contingent political settlement, and as such, may legitimately be questioned.
There are two basic reasons for rejecting the claim of any state to be a sovereign regulator of social, political and/or economic life: one has to do with the fact that rulers have limited knowledge and a limited capacity to sympathise with the individuals and groups of a large society; while the other has to do with rulers’ propensity to use power in selfish and self-serving ways.