by Jason Morgan
The state, we often hear from those who study politics, grows organically out of the family. The state as resting upon the family–often referred to as the “building block” of society–is as ubiquitous in political discourse as it is unquestioned. This is unsurprising, as both Aristotelian and Confucian thought abound in such assertions. Today, from highbrow scholarly works to mass media commentariat, the family, it is said again and again, is the foundation upon which both society and the state rest. By this logic, the extended and similarly common argument goes, in order to strengthen the state or society, or to solve some social ill, one must “focus on the family,” that is, ensure that the family be the ever more faithful handmaiden of society and governmental apparatus. So much is the family understood to be the foundation on which the state rests that those who would destroy the state have often first attempted to destroy the family. So prevalent is the assumption that the family is the ground of the state that on this point Friedrich Engels and St. Thomas Aquinas are in agreement.
There is no justification for this concatenated political logic, however. It is purely a myth. The state does not grow organically, or any other way, out of the family. Nor does the state rest on the family, except insofar as the state extracts resources from the family illicitly. Tribes, yes, and clans, of course, and even ruling houses and dynasties–all of these are predicated on family relations, reproducing and often extending familial ties (even where fictional, such as by adoption and marriage) into groupings that can go far beyond the original economics of the household, that is, the close kinfolk who live in common dwellings or in compounds for the purposes of companionship, protection, and carrying out the tasks of daily life. But there is an epistemological leap of grave consequence in arguing that from any family structure there emerges–indeed, must emerge–a government, a country, a nation-state, or any other kind of political grouping. On closer examination of these claims, claims which have virtually uncontested currency virtually everywhere in the world, it must be admitted that there is no connection, beyond force, between families and states. There is no naturally occurring state at all. There is no state in, or of, nature. All attempts to link the family and politics are arbitrary, all arguments for the existence of the state bear no scrutiny, and all reside, without exception, in the realm of myth.
This myth of the familial foundation of the state is not only fantasy. It is also pernicious. For the state needs the family not just to justify its own unnatural existence, but also to feed the statists and their machinery of government. Taxes, tariffs, and all other manner of monies extracted from persons–which almost always means from families, except in cases of extreme and radically self-sufficient hermitage (and recall that the cenobitic communities of the religious life mirror families, with members of such communities often calling one another “brother,” “sister,” “father,” and “mother superior”)–are simply theft. But when theft is called taxes, or tariffs, or some other euphemism, and justified with claims that the thieves are acting on the extended authority and in the interests of the state, which in turn is said (with no justification whatsoever) to protect the family, the theft goes unpunished, in fact is celebrated as a solemn duty.
There is no basis for either the solemnity or the circumlocution. Political scientist James C. Scott makes clear in Against the Grain (2017) that the state begins in plunder and exploitation. Families are caught in states, but do not provide any basis for states beyond what is taken from families against their will. Murray Rothbard is even blunter. “The State and society are by no means coextensive,” Rothbard writes in Man, Economy, and State (2009 edition). For libertarians, Rothbard declares, “the State is an antisocial institution” (p. 1336; emphasis in original). One may certainly posit an opposition between state and family, but not a continuum, because the connection between the family and any larger, political unit remains as unproven and undemonstrated today as at any time in history. Bertrand de Jouvenal makes the tension between “powerful families” and state power explicit, but this is to go only halfway. The state is in tension with all natural society, a fortiori the original and most natural one, namely the family.
If anything, the political history of the West in the past few centuries has been a demonstration of the failure of the family to scale up into anything resembling a political entity, let alone a full-blown centralized state. Wherever one turns, one finds the state struggling mightily to explain itself to those on whom it is parasitic. Edmund S. Morgan’s classic text Inventing the People (1989) is an excellent place to start when dissecting the strange chimera that family-to-statist theorists have constructed. Morgan’s remarkable volume reveals much more than, it would seem, has been understood. If “the people” were invented in the course of several centuries of Anglo-American political history, as Morgan aptly argues, then parliamentary democracy and any other form of representative government must be a sham. Elections on this reading would be, at best, empty performances, perfunctory rituals which license those who prevail in them to exercise power under the apparent sanction of popular will.
On these rocks break the myth of the state. If there is no “people,” then there can be no popular will, either. And if there is no popular will, then there can be no modern state at all. There can be only the older arguments that the state is the extension of the family. And those are as wrong as are all other justifications for statist extraction of resources from families.
“Popular will” will conjure up for many readers visions of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the political philosophies of these two and other Enlightenment thinkers, “the people” are a font of political legitimacy. The trick is how to transfer the “popular will” into actionable government–to bridge, that is, the divide between the many (“the people”) and the one or the few (the central government and its agents). Read Locke and Rousseau and decide for yourself if they succeed. The unnatural contortions required to translate the “popular will” into centralized government and political legitimacy are never put to rest. There is no smooth transition from the individual to the state. The individual’s natural belonging stops with the farthest branching of the family tree. Everything else is imaginary.
But let us frame the question more capaciously, as one of Enlightenment politics more generally, instead of trying to follow Rousseau’s, or Locke’s, or anyone else’s contorted reasoning in attempting to justify government and give it grounds for rightfully existing. What was the Enlightenment, politically speaking? In the Enlightenment, and prompted above all by the emergence of a large group of literate people in Europe, the natural dignity of man was grafted onto the notion that participation in politics (long the monopoly of a violent peerage) was a natural birthright of humans and a byproduct of their dignity. If people were not slaves by dint of their “natural reason,” then they could not be serfs or peasants either, and by the same measure. “The people,” many during the Enlightenment argued, must be given a voice in politics. Many went further. “The people” were to be the fons et origo of political legitimacy, as Locke and Rousseau avowed. Sovereigns–that is, thieves at the apex of a network of aggrandizement and armed robbery, the entire arrangement baubled with “divine rights” language and draped in ermine, kings standing in glory at the center of “scepter’d isles”–once ruled realms, not people. But with the Enlightenment, “the people” emerged from realms’ shadows. “The people” had to be taken into account. “The people” could no longer be distracted with mere bread and circuses. They had to be treated as adults and consulted in the running of the business of state.
This was the beginning of what we now call “democracy” in the Enlightenment sense of the word. There is no such thing as democracy, of course, at least in its narrow Greek meaning. Democracy failed miserably in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and has failed and will fail every other time it has been or will be tried. Democracy does not work because there is no state, only mythmaking by the parasitic political class. In Enlightenment “democracy,” there are to be votes and public debates and open hearings and representative government, because “the people” are to be given their due where politics is concerned. But observe any government, yours or any other. Taxes flow in one direction, the same as with wallets in muggings. Under an Enlightenment democratic regime, you are asked your opinion about what the muggers do with your money. But as to whether you have any real say in how the state operates, much less in whether it continues to exist, the answer is obvious. Your political “dignity” does not extend to areas that would jeopardize the monopoly enjoyed by the same few who once ruled from horseback and with the will of God on their shoulders. Democracy was a farce in Athens; it returned in the Enlightenment as seriocomic vaudeville, except with a bodycount in the hundreds of millions.
One could read the entire political history of the West, and then, as “Enlightenment ideals” were spread at the point of the bayonet and gun (recall Rousseau’s insistence that some would have to be “forced to be free”), throughout the world as the history of the hypocrisy entailed in preaching democracy while craving political power. There is no democracy anywhere. The family is hierarchical, and the trick of the state has been to extend this aspect of human nature and then, in time, flatten it out into “civil rights” and “democratic suffrage.” But democracy is, ironically, the self-perpetuating framework by which “the people” frustrate their own attempts to take part in politics. Voting, as has been demonstrated in every society that has ever tried it, is subject to the whims of those who count the votes. And even if we assume, pro arguendo, that an election could be completely open, free, and fair (an assumption undermined in its entirety by two words: “Twitter Files”–but let us continue with the thought experiment), it would still affect nothing substantially within a given government. For elections and parliaments and the like are explosive armor on the outsides of tanks. The fireworks visible to observers insulate the drivers and other key people within.
To give just one very minor example, I and a colleague recently interviewed Baba Nobuyuki, leader of the Nihon Ishin no Kai, an opposition political party in Japan. Baba mentioned that the attempts by the ruling party, the comically and inaccurately named Liberal Democratic Party, to stymie oversight by other parties and, ultimately, by the voters culminated in just three LDP heavyweights’–Aso Taro, Motegi Toshimitsu, and Kishida Fumio–quashing reform initiatives in a backroom deal. There are some one hundred and twenty-three million people in Japan. Of those, all over eighteen can vote. Of those, perhaps half do vote in any given election. Of those, some of course vote against the LDP by voting for another party, while the remaining ballots are cast for the LDP, the party in power. But of all the voters in Japan, the only ones whose votes count on questions hitting at the heart of politics–namely, the ability of politicians to steal money from the rest of us–are the votes of three people who sit atop that pyramid scheme which we have taken to calling “democracy.”
In the United States, when someone emerged to call the democrats’ bluff and point out that elections are rigged and the political center profits at the expense of average Americans, that person was singled out as a threat to America’s “sacred democracy.” An election (!) is to be held yet again, however, to determine the “will” of “the people.” The hypocrisy is a whiff of ammonia in the nostrils, but even then “the people” do not awaken.
There is also no democracy because democracy is utterly antithetical to human nature. The state, to recapitulate, is parasitic on the family. The family is not a democracy. Those who would rest the state on the family are sometimes discomfited by the paterfamilias, or by the general common sense that children are not consulted about their own breastfeeding or the changing of their diapers. But people–”the people,” in the Enlightenment’s political embarrassment–are not infants at the breast. They are adults, and they make their own way in the world. The state is nakedly parasitic on them, and when “the people” emerged as a political force, a consequence of literacy and Christianity in large part (remember that it was the Christians who argued that Indians in “the new world” were human, because of dignity–the depravations of empires and sovereigns producing a backlash of “democracy” and “natural rights” that would tear those empires apart in time), “the people” had to be given their due. “Democracy” in the Enlightenment sense of “diversity and inclusion in the political process” was born. Recall that the Enlightenment was the age of Machiavelli as much as of Montesquieu.
The state is parasitic on families conceptually, by claiming to rest atop a hierarchy beginning in the average home and ending in the power–often absolute–of the ruling family. The state is also parasitic on wealth. In Japan, for example, inheritance taxes (that is, taxes levied on death) suck even the marrow out of bones picked clean in life by the predatory government. Other countries have similar arrangements. “Death and taxes” or some variation thereof is a black joke worldwide, because governments everywhere threaten death, or at the very least lengthy incarceration, for those whose tax bills are not paid. The state also tries to make itself seem as inevitable as the life cycle, but in this, too, the state is parasitic on human nature. The state is not natural. The state is simply dogged in its refusal to be shaken off by the families on which it is predatory.
(Evading taxes, incidentally, is a privilege of the political elite. The reason is simple. It is redundant to continue with the hypocrisy of the state as an extension of the family when one’s own family is in control of the state. One does not play blackjack when one owns the casino.)
Consider also that wars are increasingly slaughterhouses in which members of average families are led to die. The state needs money, but it also needs men. The state widows women by the millions in its wars. One is often told that this is necessary to protect the “homeland” (there is no such thing beyond one’s own home), or, more instructively, the “motherland” or the “fatherland.” Examples of this kind of language, in which the state figuratively marries or blends with the family, abound. Widows to “fatherlands” and “motherlands” and “homelands” become single mothers to fatherless children, and often are left homeless as a result. Many such women and their broken families are left with no choice but to rely on the state’s largesse, as though the “welfare” the state provided (often as a benefit for deaths the state has caused) were truly salubrious, and as though the central government could take over the role of the father and repair the family that it had broken in its rapacious greed. (Black Americans have seen the state destroy the family in more ways than just through warfare. Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, and Candace Owens are eloquent researchers of what the American state has done to the Black American family.)
One is born into a family as one’s birthright as a human being. One has a mother and father, perhaps siblings and cousins, uncles and aunts. This is one’s natural home, and these are one’s natural companions, along with the new families that children, grown to adulthood and married, go on to make and care for. But there is no connection whatsoever, besides a ten thousand year legacy of marauding, pillaging, rapine, murder, and impoverishment, between the family and any government, especially a government installed in some faraway capital in what one is told is one’s country. There are accidents of language and geography. There are customs with which one is familiar, folkways which one holds dear. There are human societies, and these are rich and variegated. But there is no way to justify using the family to uphold the entity which is parasitic upon it.
Even on the principle of subsidiarity, much vaunted by Catholic theorists, the logic of the state’s growing up from the family is untouched. “As [Pope] Leo XIII pronounced in such a masterly way,” writes Catholic political philosopher and natural law thinker Heinrich A. Rommen, “the limits of state intervention lie in the emergency that leads to the intervention. Therefore, no more matters should be regulated by the state and no intervention should go further than is demanded for the cure of the grievances or the defense against the danger of the common good.” On the same page, however, Rommen writes: “Nothing has endangered the whole social fabric of our modern nations so much as the progressive decomposition of the family, the ease with which divorces are granted, the cancer-like growth of birth control.” I agree wholeheartedly with Rommen on “the progressive decomposition of the family,” but insist that the link he makes between state and family is arbitrary, and that, further, the “decomposition of the family” which I join him in lamenting is in many ways the handiwork of the state which Rommen would justify.
Another element of Rommen’s which must be analyzed here is “emergency.” In this concept of “emergency” lies one of the main elements of the rationalization of the state’s existence. Carl Schmitt, who wrote insightfully about the rise of the National Socialist state in Germany from the exhaustion of the Weimar Republic, was a topic of study of an Italian philosopher named Giorgio Agamben. Agamben extended Schmitt’s political thinking through investigations into homo sacer, or the victim, set apart for the gods, whom the state is allowed to kill. This sanctioned killing is the origin of political order. The state is born in the murder of the innocent. The state is this distinction between life and death, and the extension of the degradation of man into legitimately hunted. The state of emergency is the condition of politics which seems to demand strong and immediate action by one man or one body acting with dictatorial power. But this is precisely what the state is from its inception, namely strong and immediate action by one or a few, except that the state itself is the state of emergency which necessitates its own continuation and aggrandizement. One marvels at the ease with which the Catholic teaching of subsidiarity can be flipped on its head so that the state comes to reign over all. The effortless switch in polarity for a thesis which putatively sought to keep the state in its place is a function of the unnaturalness of the state from the beginning and in total.
American political thinker Lysander Spooner understood the nature of the state perfectly. Some men in Philadelphia signed a piece of paper in the eighteenth century. This action bound, at best, themselves to whatever the paper had written on it. The paper has no bearing on anyone else. To add my own commentary, it most certainly does not come any closer than anyone ever has to explaining why the state should exist as an extension of the family. The state congratulates itself, lauds itself, sanctions itself, and extends itself. But it has no justification and no logical basis in any naturally occurring human society at all. It is simply parasitic on families.
Jason Morgan is an Associate Professor at Reitaku University. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 