The Rise and Decline of the State
Brought forward. I just had cause to share this with a constituent in relation to the Kafkaesque nightmare they face.
David Cameron has said that the era of big government has run its course. The foreword to our manifesto sets out the rotten state of Britain (see also Butler) and the change we offer: from big government to big society.
What then is the history of big government? How did it come about? Has it run its course? Why has big government failed? All this prompted me to read again, but carefully this time, Martin Van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State.
Van Creveld argues that government and state are emphatically not the same. He explains that the government “is a person or group which makes peace, wages war, enacts laws, exercises justice, raises revenue, determines the currency and looks after internal security on behalf of society as a whole, all the while attempting to provide a focus for people’s loyalty and, perhaps, a modicum of welfare as well”. On the other hand, he writes, the state is merely one form of government which may be considered neither eternal nor self evident.
The book’s range is astonishing. Van Creveld begins with prehistoric forms of society before charting the rise of the state, the state as an instrument, the state as an ideal, the spread of the state and, more recently, the decline of the state. Tribes without rulers, chiefdoms, city-states and empires all reached their limits. The monarchs triumphed against church, empire, nobility and towns. Bureaucracies were created which provided infrastructure, monopolised violence and, in short, delivered Leviathan. The state was idealised and used to discipline the people. Money was conquered and total war discovered. The state spread across the world. Major war waned, partly due to the impossibility of total war in the nuclear age. State welfare went into retreat. Technology spread internationally. Finally, the people withdrew their faith in the state.
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