David Thunder (University of Navarra) argues that many modern political theorists, from Hobbes to Rawls, overstate the importance of state sovereignty. He envisions an alternative, polycentric form of social organisation that can support one’s freedom to flourish. Tune in for his argument in this episode of the Governance Podcast led by Billy Christmas (King’s College London).
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The Guest
David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer in political and social philosophy at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting positions at Bucknell and Villanova Universities, and a stint as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. David earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, tentatively entitled May I Love My Country? In Search of a Defensible Patriotism; and Sovereign Rule and the Still-Birth of Freedom: A Preface to Confederal Republicanism.
David’s academic writings include Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (edited volume, Springer, 2017), and numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Business Ethics. His writings cover a wide range of questions including the pros and cons of individualism, the ethics of financial trading, the complicity of citizens in collective injustice, the concept of moral impartiality, and the scope of duties of beneficence. He writes occasionally for The Irish Times and RTE’s Brainstorm page. For more information, see www.davidthunder.com.
Skip Ahead
00:59: What is sovereigntism? Why are you so critical of it?
2:18: Is your criticism of it primarily in terms of as a theory of political organisation, as an approach to justice in normative political theory? Or is it a critique of empirical reality? Is it that you think this is the system we do in fact have, and it’s bad for a number of reasons?
4:06: Could you say a bit more about how this aspiration to sovereignty is so harmful to these kinds of associations?
5:58: What do you think is worth protecting about associational life? What would you say to someone who takes the opposite approach and says that these small associations are undermining the authority of the national government and that undermines our sense of national identity, a more cosmopolitan and open ended form of human cooperation and really these associations are just old fashioned things which we can now do away with now that we have nation states.
8:47: So you start off with this tentative defense of associational life that, while any kind of associational life is not always good, it is a necessary condition that we are able to form and live in associations. And the aspiration of the sovereign state is parasitical or cannibalistic upon that. If the goal of associational life is this common flourishing, friendship and knowledge, generational solidarity, is there a need for external regulation of associational life in order to, not guarantee, but certainly regulate and offer some predictability that associational life will not go to the worst case scenario?
12:35: It sounds like you do want there to be political institutions to provide that kind of regulatory framework for associational life, but it’s important that it be fragmented perhaps in a federal way. Do you see federal systems such as Switzerland, the US, Germany, I suppose also India and Nigeria, are those viable models for what you would call a polycentric polity?
15:24: You mentioned that fiscal authority is particularly important. Could you say why it has particular importance?
17:15: So the emphasis on localised fiscal authority is not necessarily a claim about entitlement to wealth– it’s not a libertarian claim. It’s more based on an empirical worry that more centralised and distant authorities, when they have fiscal power, they are able to squander that money to engage in clientelism or bad forms of redistribution. Whereas at the local level, when people observe corruption or clientelism, they are able to quickly exercise some voice in the matter.
20:24: So the extent to which the polity is decentralised, it’s always going to be a matter of degree- it’s not the case that a state is either fully sovereign or fully polycentric.
23:19: You want to see these units in competition with each other or engaging in some kind of bargaining or negotiation and that would be a healthy symptom of the system.
26:03: So your image of how constitutions ought to be is that they should be open-ended in a way, open to re-negotiation and revision from sources of authority which the constitution may not recognise. I suppose the question that a constitutional theorist in the mindset of a sovereigntist imagination would say, that sounds perfectly nice but who maintains the open-endedness of the constitution?
28:51: A good example of polycentric authority is private arbitration, which is a very common practice. Some may argue that it already takes place against the backdrop of an already monopolised legal order that says if you sign contracts where you nominate third parties and you renege after that, we will then come after you.
32:04: The reputational cost of reneging on contracts definitely induces compliance in a lot of scenarios, but typically, I think we should expect that disciplinary power of repeated dealings and reputational effects to occur with business people — economic actors that have an interest in securing long-term cooperation to yield predictable income flows. What about in cases where you’re not interested in making money, you’re interested in committing genocide, say?
36:55: When we talk about polycentric governance and you mention that it’s very important to localise fiscal control, an argument for that is when you shrink down the size of jurisdictions… you make exit less costly… an important part of your work previously has focused on citizenship and democratic participation which emphasizes that rather than just your ability to vote with your feet, it emphasizes the ethical importance of participation. How do you see that work speaking to your current work on the critique of the sovereign state?
40:57: You referred to your views as a form of republicanism, or consociational republicanism. In my background, contemporary political philosophy, republicanism refers usually to neo-Roman republicanism, which sees the most important goal of the polity as liberty as non-domination. I take this view to be suspicious of group life, associational life; it sees the republican state as something which liberates you from these kind of parochial forms of domination. How does your view of consociational republicanism relate to the neo-Roman republicanism of someone like Pettit?
47:40: A separate strand of your critique of the sovereign state — I’m not sure how much of the book is dedicated to it, but you’ve mentioned in your talk that the notion of a sovereign state to protect freedom was a kind of deduction of the ontological or moral individualism of the Enlightenment. Could you say a little bit more about why you think ontological or moral individualism is problematic and why you think it entails the ideal of sovereignty?
52:55: You said in your talk that you take that your case for a polycentric form of governance to be a perfectionist one; it’s grounded in the ethical good of persons. You don’t describe it as a liberal case and you don’t make too much mention of protecting freedom. It’s more about protecting valuable forms of life. Perfectionism is not a fashionable position in contemporary political philosophy- everyone goes out of their way to show that their view is a form of liberalism. Do you take your perfectionism to be illiberal or at odds with a liberal anti-perfectionism?
Full Transcript
Billy Christmas
Welcome to the governance podcast at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Billy Christmas and I’m a lecturer in political theory here at King’s. Joining me today is my colleague Dr. David Thunder, a researcher and lecturer in political and social philosophy at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra in Spain. He’s currently preparing two book manuscripts, tentatively entitled May I Love My Country? In Search of a Defensible Patriotism; and Sovereign Rule and the Still-Birth of Freedom: A Preface to Confederal Republicanism. Welcome, David.
David Thunder
Thank you very much, Billy.
Billy Christmas
So yesterday you gave a talk here at the Centre. And an important element of that talk was a certain critique of something you call sovereigntism or the sovereign imagination. And the title of the talk was Political Order after the Sovereign State. So what does it take to be a sovereign citizen? And why is it that you’re so critical of it?
David Thunder
Sovereigntism, for me, is something that is so natural now to political flood, contemporary political philosophy that it’s almost like the air we breathe, we hardly notice it, because it’s implicit in a lot of discussions of the state and a political order. But in fact, it’s a development of the modern era. And it’s the idea of sovereignty as a general all purpose authority that is monopolised by a political actor within a territory. That idea of the supreme authority as an unrivalled authority is in fact a modern invention, and arose from the efforts of absolutist monarchs to assert their authority in a very complex social landscape in which you had a feudal system with many overlapping and multiple authorities. So it was in their interests to develop a doctrine of sovereignty. Which basically gave them supreme authority in a territory.
Billy Christmas
So it’s something that’s a theoretical and kind of ideological development of the early days starting in the early modern period. So is your criticism of it primarily in terms of as a theory of political organisation, as a kind of approach to, to justice to normative political theory? Or is it a critique of empirical reality? Is it that you think that this is the system we do, in fact, have and it’s bad for a number of reasons?
David Thunder
Yeah. Well, my ultimate concern is a practical concern. Middle to end concern is with how political ideal ideology translates into political institutions or political practices. So my concern is a pragmatic, practical concern about the quality of life of ordinary citizens. And there is a paradox at the heart of my argument, namely, that the doctrine of sovereignty can never be fully realised in a political institution, because of social complexity. They can never really master social complexity and social dynamics to the extent that they actually exercise that monopoly over social order or social regulation. However, the efforts to realise that ideal attempt, much like many ideologies, the effort to realise an ideal that is only realisable can have negative consequences for the lives of people and communities. And so it’s it’s the fact that sovereignty acts as a regulative ideal for state action. That is my issue, because I think it’s an inappropriate and counterproductive regulative ideal that ends up damaging the social order of small scale communities in particular on medium scale communities, because they find that they’re internal, what I call their normative orders, end up being colonised by the sovereign state.
Billy Christmas
Could you say a bit more about how, how is that you think this kind of aspiration to sovereignty is so harmful to these kinds of associations?
David Thunder
Sure. Yeah. Basically, the aspiration to exercise general purpose and supreme regulatory authority within a region, what it ends up doing is giving presumptive supremacy to the customs, the culture, the idea of justice, and the idea of social order that is embraced by state institutions. And so because they have a presumptive supremacy over rival social orders, when they come into conflict with those social orders, and when that sovereigntist stock trade is armed to the teeth, both with bureaucratic administrative institutions, and also with fiscal powers and financial powers, it has a competitive advantage when it comes into contact with rival normative orders. And so it tends to, it may not destroy those normative orders. It may tolerate certain aspects of them. But the general trend would be towards gradual colonisation, that is to say, remaking them and its own image and likeness. And one of the points I made in the talk yesterday, was that because the state is, is a single institution, or let’s just say a cluster of institutions of relatively centralised institutions, the rules that it makes aren’t necessarily general or universal. And so they cannot adapt themselves to the special conditions of small associations, each of which has its own necessary requirements for order.
Billy Christmas
So what do you think is worth protecting about associational life? Or what would you say to someone who wants to take the kind of opposite approach and says, Well, these kind of small associations, you know, they’re undermining the authority of the national government and that undermines our sense of national identity, undermines kind of a more kind of cosmopolitan and open ended form of human cooperation. And really, these are just kind of old fashioned things, which we can now do away with now we have nation states, and we can all interact on kind of equal terms under the protection of the national government. What do you think is worth protecting about associational, kind of maybe perhaps small scale and diverse life like that?
David Thunder
Yeah. The first thing to say is that association life is not in and of itself necessarily always a good thing. Because you can have good and bad associations, you could have harmful or noxious associations, you can have more or less just and more or less oppressive associations. So it’s not an uncritical celebration of local associations. Rather, it’s to say that the kinds of creatures we are as human beings, we require socialisation within face to face communities in order to develop our capacities as human beings in order to enjoy worthwhile goods such as friendship, the pursuit of the truth, the pursuit of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge to future generations and handing down old traditions that can contain within them valuable way of life. This is a MacIntyrean sort of point that scale matters. And that’s if you don’t have face to face communities, it will be very difficult to hand on, let’s say a rich way of life within the context of more personal institutions were treated simply as individual individual members of a state, for example, we may be able to gain certain kinds of, well, material welfare. Even although I would say in the long term that’s questionable, whether that’s sustainable, but let’s just say assuming that the state was permitted to provide that material welfare or other types of well being, that have to do with common good, meaningful common goods, deliberation and the pursuit of these common goods, whether they be friendship or excellence in some profession, or in some craft, these sorts of goods cannot be promoted by large scale bureaucratic institutions.
Billy Christmas
Okay, so. So you start out with this kind of tentative, tentative defence for associational life that just any old kind of form of association life is not always everywhere good. It is a necessary condition that we are able to form and live in association and that the sovereign state or the kind of aspiration of the sovereign state is parasitical or kind of cannibalistic upon them. So, if the goal of association life is this, this kind of common flourishing, he says, goods such as friendship and knowledge, generational solidarity and things like that, is there a need for for external regulation of association in life in order to not guarantee but certainly regulate and give us give some kind of predictability that associational life will not go, you know, to the worst possible case scenario that it could and become incredibly, you know, oppressive or something like that.
David Thunder
Absolutely, I believe that the ideal that I that I’m developing in my book is actually what I call a consultation, republicanism, and that ideal assumes, well, it argues for what I argue for is a polycentric social order and that means essentially that different social groups have responsibility for regulating different aspects of social order. But those regulatory regimes are very often overlapping, they may not be always overlapping because some regulations may actually play in a very very localised domain and there may be very little overlap with other regimes, but, characteristic of an interdependent and I would say to some extent globalised society, we move in different social circles, we move, we participate in a wide range of different associations. And so, associational orders, regulatory orders end up overlapping in interesting ways. And this provides a certain kind of check upon associational tyranny and there are two types of checks that occurred to me right now, one type of check upon associational tyranny would be where the same social domain is simultaneously regulated by more than one regime. So for example, in a federal policy, you can have municipal governance, regional governance and federal governance happening within the same territory, right? So then they have to jostle it out in their respective courts, and no one of them can simply have a total monopoly over that territory.
And the other check on associational tyranny is a right of exit or right mobility. And basically that means that if you live within a geographic territory in which you don’t like the way your life has been regulated, you can move to a neighbouring territory, or let’s say a neighbouring canton, or a neighbouring municipality, where, for example, you prefer the tax regime there than where you have. Now in the context of the sovereign state or the operational sovereign state, to the extent that it can exercise fiscal monopoly over an extended territory, just as one example of the forms of, let’s say, on freedom that you can find in a sovereign territory. It’s very difficult to escape its fiscal edicts or its fiscal imperatives. So if it decides to set the tax rate through its parliament at 40% or 50%, there’s very little that the citizen can do about that because there isn’t a competitive environment.
Billy Christmas
So it sounds like you do want there to be political institutions to provide that kind of regulatory framework for associational life?
David Thunder
Absolutely.
Billy Christmas
But it’s important that it be fragmented, perhaps in a federal way. I suppose, do you see federal systems such as Switzerland, the United States, Germany, I suppose also, India and Nigeria. Is that a viable model for what you’d call a kind of a polycentric polity?
David Thunder
Well, they definitely embody elements of the polycentric polity. And each of those examples you give, perhaps, embodies to different degrees the kinds of features that I would want in a polycentric polity. The United States is an interesting case, because there are quite strong, let’s say sovereignist imperatives of work in the federal government of the United States in terms of public finance, commercial regulation, and so forth, and even in terms of constitutional jurisprudence, and when regulation. So nonetheless, the states do have quite strong prerogatives, the individual states. The difficulty here is to what extent and that’s something you need to look at on a case by case by case basis to what extent centricity actually trickles down to the level of the municipality, the township, and I think there is a tradition of self government in many of the townships of the United States, as I’ve been told.
But to what extent they have genuine fiscal autonomy is another question. I think the States have individual states that have quite a bit of fiscal authority. That may be some cases overbearing with respect to the fiscal authority of municipalities, for example, but this is an empirical question. If I were to look at which country comes closest to the ideal that I am aspiring to that I would like us to aspire to? I would say Switzerland probably comes closest. And one of the reasons for that is because fiscal authority is in the hands of the local cantons. And let’s just say it is distributed because the federal law and regional levels also exercise fiscal authority. But fiscal power is, the majority of fiscal power remains in the hands of the cantons. And also, they have a lot of control over local regulation. And local, let’s say lawmaking. Municipal regulated regulations are very important in the cantons and it is a highly democratic society in that sense.
Billy Christmas
Um, so, you mentioned that fiscal authority is particularly important. Could you say why you think fiscal authority in particular it has this importance
David Thunder
Yeah. And for me, fiscal authority has special importance, because as embodied beings, who realise their aspirations, through material resources which could be as basic as a house, a home. We cannot develop our ideals of human flourishing without channelling material resources, utilising material resources in order to put them in order to implement their ideals. And the problem is that when governments let’s say exercise a monopoly over a large portion of our material resources, then they are not, do not have an incentive to control their spending habits. And they can, they can basically waste a lot of public resources, and simultaneously drain associations of potential resources they could use to implement their projects. And so I believe that the tax rate in the Western world is far above what it needs to be in order to sustain our well being. Public assets, certain public aspects of well being, certain aspects that only political governments can handle, public goods, that sort of thing, certain kinds of public goods, non excludable goods such as, I guess, road infrastructure, water system, and security, while they’re partially non excludable, especially in urban areas in urban areas.
Billy Christmas
Yeah. So the emphasis on kind of localised fiscal authority is not necessarily a kind of a claim about entitlement to wealth or anything like that. It’s not a kind of a libertarian claim. It’s, it’s more, it’s more kind of based on an empirical worry that more or less localised, more centralised and distant authorities when they have fiscal power are able to squander that money or to engage in kind of clientelism or the kind of kind of forms of redistribution which no one is really in favour of, whereas at the local level, when the people say the citizenry observe corruption or clientelism, or both or just spending on things that they don’t really value, they were able to quite quickly exercise some kind of voice in the matter, whereas it’s much harder at the national level.
David Thunder
Basically, I think accountability at the local level for tax spending is one of the major issues that the governments should be accountable to, answer to their city, the citizenry for the way they spend public money, which in fact, is the money of taxpayers and money of citizens. And I think in a highly centralised tax regime, it’s actually very difficult to exercise that kind of accountability. Because all of the spending is very complex, and it’s pooled together. And it’s, and so it’s very difficult to sort of piece it apart and to understand exactly what the tax priorities are. And also at a practical level, it’s very difficult for local citizens to exercise any meaningful influence over national politics.
Billy Christmas
Yeah, but they may have less knowledge about what’s going on at the central level and also less of an incentive. Yeah, their power is diluted because their vote is against that of everyone else in the country.
David Thunder
They have a lot less leverage. I mean, in fact, potentially an entire region or an entire, let’s say a political unit of the country or territory, such as a municipality could be overwhelmed by sheer demographics, and could be outvoted by the rest of the country. So you could potentially have a taxation policy that destroys a local industry, but is approved by the majority of a country. And this is one of the facts that if I could mention Brexit in this context, it’s just interesting to me to see how the priorities of different parts of the United Kingdom are so different, and how their interests can diverge. And perhaps in the case of Brexit, it’s not practical to, it may not have been practical to break down authorities locally. But it does make one wonder whether there are other issues of domestic policy upon which there could be divergence. And there could be advantages to local adaptation. In other words, different localities having different policy priorities and techniques, and so on.
Billy Christmas
So the extent to which the polity is decentralised sounds – as opposed to being sovereign, and being polycentric – it sounds like this is definitely a matter of degree, right? It’s not like there are states that are sovereign or states that are polycentric, it’s always gonna be a matter of degree.
David Thunder
It’s always a matter of degree. And the reality is that, in practice, a certain amount of fragmentation is probably inevitable in a large scale polity. I mean, in the sense that it’s going to have different administrative units. But you could even say even in France, like a highly centralised country like France, the administrative units will have certain prerogatives and certain amounts of autonomy. But ultimately they serve at the pleasure of the sovereign state. And the state can regulate and alter their jurisdictions and will pretty much, it may be bound by certain constitutional, let’s say, constitutional rules, but they are the rules of the state. As such, I think the test of whether a system is truly polycentric or let’s just say, a kind of pride ignited case of a highly polycentric system would be a system in which units of the system have a right of succession. Because if there is a right of succession that demonstrates that they have a high level of autonomy.
Billy Christmas
So it says you can’t really tell how polycentric a system is based on the extent to which it’s decentralised because every system depends upon there being tiers of power. The question really is, which direction does the kind of authorization go in? Do the localised units get their legal authority, I say from above? Or do they get it from below and then pass that authority upwards towards the top?
David Thunder
Yes. And I think another way of thinking about it is, how are disagreements between the units settled? How are they habitually settled? If the top level tends to win out and those disagreements tend to impose its own imperatives, its own preferences, then that is a sure sign that it’s not a genuinely polycentric system and the system is, formally, maybe have multiple centres. Well, the centres are in fact being controlled from the top. So it’s about control. Polycentrism is not just the idea that there are multiple administrative units. It’s about where control of a public administration actually lies. And if it’s at the centre, if it’s at one centre or a few centres, that’s a model centric system, or tends towards model centrism. If it’s, if the controls are at the periphery, then that would be a genuinely polycentric system.
Billy Christmas
You want to see these units kind of bought in competition with each other or certainly engaging in some kind of bargaining and negotiation with one another, that would be kind of a healthy, healthy symptom of the system rather than simply appealing to output authority to sell.
David Thunder
Yes, and I would even say that, ironically, a sovereigntist political system can actually, can’t be so inflexible, that it can accelerate social conflict, because it’s a bit like a stick that doesn’t bend. I mean, either it breaks or it stays straight, and there’s only two options. And it’s something like that you could say is the sovereignist system because of the habit of sovereignist thinking and the doctrine of sovereigntism, which is often constitutionalized, central governments have a strong incentive to insist upon the supremacy of their normative order and their decisions. And when they come into collision with local dissenters, they don’t have resources to bargain adequately with those local dissenters because they feel compelled to assert their sovereignty as prerogatives.
And an example of this is Catalonia and Spain, because the outcome of that, it is fundamentally a political and cultural conflict. But because the Spanish constitution attributes sovereignty to the Spanish state and considers the autonomous regions of Spain as emanations of the sovereign states, the conflict with Catalonia actually resulted in the Spanish government sending in troops sending in military backup, so to speak, national police in order to in order to prevent certain kinds of illegality, illegal votes in Catalonia. But it came to a kind of a standoff between the Catalonian government and the Spanish government, partly because there is no way to renegotiate the constitutional, kind of the constitutional framework of Spain without renouncing the principle of sovereignty. And that is a fundamental commitment to the constitutional arrangement. What I’m advocating is constitutional schemes in which renegotiation of jurisdiction is something that doesn’t destroy the constitution.
Billy Christmas
So it’s always kind of, it’s always on the table.
David Thunder
It’s always on the table. There’s always a possibility of free negotiation.
Billy Christmas
So your your kind of image of how constitutions ought to be is that they should be sort of open ended in a way and always potentially open to renegotiation and revision from sources of authority, which the which the constitution may not recognise at any given time, it should be open to recognise a new source of authority.
David Thunder
Yes.
Billy Christmas
I suppose the question that a, perhaps a constitutional theorist within the mindset of the sovereigntist imagination might say is, Well, that sounds perfectly nice, but who maintains the open endedness of the constitution, who ensures that it is always open to new sources of legal authority?
David Thunder
Yes. Well, I believe that the basic constitution of a polity of a federal policy would be political in character in the sense that it’s, both its reach and its legitimation would have a territorial character, it should still be clarified and fundamental renegotiations of a constitutional charter or a constitution, I believe would require, would give privilege, a privileged position to political governments to the political governments that constitute the polity and ideally those negotiations would have to be multilateral or bilateral, as the case may be. In other words, the interested parties would have to agree to come to the table and renegotiate the terms. I simply don’t believe that it’s necessary to have a single supreme actor who oversees negotiations, two or three or more negotiating parties are perfectly capable of nominating a third party to adjudicate or to let’s just say, facilitate and mediate negotiations. They don’t need an all powerful sort of overarching party that can intervene at any moment with power in order to carry out constructive negotiations, and the world of markets and business, we get these kinds of negotiations all the time of contracts and renegotiations of contracts. But for some reason, we have a hard time thinking that this could be a viable model for political negotiation. Sometimes some people have difficulty with that.
Billy Christmas
So that’s a good example of a form of, kind of, I guess, polycentric authority or kind of open ended authority is private arbitration which is a very, very common practice. But do you not think it’d be fair to say that the reason that that is effective, that nominating where two parties bilaterally nominate a third party to enforce their negotiation. The reason that that is effective is because it takes place with against the of the backdrop of an already kind of innocence monopolised legal order that says, By the way, if you signed contracts where you nominate third parties, and then you renew after that, we will then come after you or we will enforce your agreement with that third party.
David Thunder
I don’t think that the integrity of contracts necessarily relies upon a single enforcer, a single sovereign enforcer who can adjudicate contractual disputes in the international arena for example, contracts are negotiated all the time between businesses. And, and those contracts, the businesses, basically, that’s against the backdrop of multiple national governments that could be implicated by those contracts. And no one of those national governments necessarily has exclusive jurisdiction over those disputes. As far as I’m aware, companies can choose the jurisdiction under which their dispute will be, you know, adjudicated or arbitrated, if necessary. What I think just to get away from the premise that we need this overarching enforcer, for contracts to be to be valid, we definitely do need there to be penalties for non compliance with contracts. I think that’s very important. But one of those penalties can be a loss of reputation or loss of credibility. So if you renege on your attracts, you will get a very bad reputation over time. So there are reputational costs to being a bad player and acting unfairly. That shouldn’t be overlooked. And also, you may be able to mutually nominate third party enforcers and choose certain penalties. But in that situation, you don’t have a single sort of automatic enforcer within the territory, necessarily. I mean, in practice, of course, in a federal polity, you’ll probably have disputes from time to time over whether the local, the regional or the federal government has jurisdiction to enforce a contract. But that’s what laws are for and that’s what lawyers are for, trying to work out the details.
David Thunder
And I’m going to push back against this one more time and then we’ll move on to a different subject because I particularly find this part very interesting because it’s an issue I tried to grapple with. So the reputational cost of reneging on contracts is certainly real and definitely has, definitely induces compliance in a lot of scenarios. But typically, I think we should expect the disciplinary power of repeated dealings and reputational effects, to cope with things like business, business people or kind of economic actors, entrepreneurs, that have an interest in securing long term corporation with predictable kind of input to yield predictable income flows and that certainly explains how international trade, international business kind of operates without it being very obvious that there’s a single jurisdiction overarching.
But what about when you’re not getting into, you’re not getting into it for a long term income stream, you’ll get your, you’re not interested in making money, you’re interested in committing genocide and you take power in a region and you want to you and you want to exterminate a tribe of people of an ethnic group or something? And, you know, maybe you signed up to some UN Charter to say that you won’t do that, but I’m just gonna, who cares? I’m just going to break, I’m just going to renege on that agreement and no one’s going to enforce it. And I don’t really care about my reputation. What I care about is exterminating this tribe. What about those kinds of situations when people are not being, you’re probably not gonna like this phrase, but not being rational economic actors, but are being you know, power hungry and aspire to be in a position of kind of unchecked political power.
David Thunder
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I guess. Well, the first point to make is that having a centralised political apparatus in which power is concentrated at the centre is actually an invitation for power hungry people to try to get leverage over the entire society. So a federal structure is actually a check on power hungry individuals who wants to monopolise public power and public authority. The second point to make is that the regulation of civil life and civil such as contracts, and let’s say, local disputes that are within the bounds of civility, you might say to do with property rights and so on, is quite a different matter than the regulation of outright violence and crime and criminality. And basically, I’m not, I totally accept that we need military, we need a military. We need an army. Generally speaking, we need a police force. We need a security system. And that security system can be to some extent decentralised because I think local areas can have their own security systems. But when you’re dealing with, it really depends on the level of the tress as to what degree of centralised security you need.
So, for example, a standing army, which interestingly was one of the big debates about defending the United States was whether we should have a standing army or not, and whether this was some threat to liberty to have a standing army, as opposed to local sort of malicious. Well, having a standing army in the modern context probably makes sense and also having robust police forces. And quite sophisticated intelligence services. And, but I think that one of the false, one of the fallacies of the argument for the sovereign state is to assume that because certain aspects of security need to be centralised therefore every aspect of public regulation needs to be centralised. So I want to make a break between those two moves and say, Yes, I could see that certain aspects of both external and internal security would logically need to be centralised, not all but some. But it wouldn’t follow from that, in my view, that every aspect of regulation inevitably must be centralised. The important thing is that the use of security forces remains, that there are local checks on that and that the central government, in fact, is being controlled from the periphery and the periphery has the power to remove its allegiance to that central government.
Billy Christmas
Okay, thank you. So I want to move on to just kind of two other strands of this work before we finish. So when we talk about polycentric governance and you mentioned that it’s very important to localise, particularly fiscal control, an argument for that is often that when you, when you kind of shrink down the size of, of jurisdictions or kind of geographical, geographical, legal monopolies or not quite monopolies, what you do is you make exit less costly. So, if I don’t like some new policy the parliament puts in place, I can move to a country in the EU or I can move somewhere else. And that’s just incredibly costly, and I’m not going to do it. And whereas if I really just don’t like some of the tax code or something or the speech codes or something of Hackney, I could just move to Islington. And that’s actually something that you could do, that’s actually a reasonable thing to do. But an important part of your work and previous to these books has been on citizenship and something like democratic participation which emphasises rather than the ability to kind of vote with your feet and just leave situations that you don’t like, it emphasises the importance, the ethical importance, perhaps of participation. So could you perhaps say something about your work on citizenship and how you see it as, as speaking to, to your current work on, on the critique of the sovereign state?
David Thunder
Yes, my book on citizenship which is called Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life, which was in 2014. That book is quite a conservative book. What it does is it assumes the structure of the constitution, of constitutional democracy in the Western world. It assumes a relatively centralised, democratic constitution, and it asks the question, can citizens live a worthy life within that kind of context, political context? What would it take for a citizen to govern their life responsibly and to develop the full panoply of human virtues within that political context. And my conclusion is that it would be difficult but not impossible. Given that those kinds of political structures, citizens can, with a lot of effort and struggle, can overcome certain obstacles to flourishing and self government. But I did come to the conclusion that it was too conservative as a project from my perspective, and that what it led me to was to question whether that institutional context is an appropriate one or a fitting one for self government, and, and for indeed living a flourishing life and acquiring the goods that can only be provided by local communities.
So that led me to rethinking of the institutional scheme. And that’s what that means in my current book, in which I’ve, in which I’m developing an alternative model of constitutionalism and of democracy, which is, as we have just said, is polycentric. And, and I would say that right now, where my thinking stands on this is that self government and participation in public institutions takes two forms, if you will. One is strictly political form, in which I’m trying to influence public policy of political governments, territorial political governments, and the other is associational participation, in which I’m trying to influence the shape and policies of a non political association. And for me, that form of participation is an exercise in self governance as well. And often one that is by some democratic theorists is not sufficiently emphasised.
Billy Christmas
So that segues quite nicely onto the next question. You mentioned, you referred to your view, you see it as a form of republicanism, consociational republicanism. So in my background in political, contemporary political philosophy, republicanism is a, refers usually to neo Roman republicanism, which sees the most important goal of the polity as a form of liberty as non domination, which typically tend to be very critical and suspicious of group life, of associational life and sees the republic, republican state as something which liberates you from these kind of parochial forms of domination. So how do you see your own republicanism, consociational republicanism, in contrast to neo Roman republicanism of someone like Pettit?
David Thunder
Yes, I’ve read several of Pettit’s work on republicanism. And I think there’s a lot of value to the idea of non domination. The absence of arbitrary interference by a third party including the state is a useful way to think about freedom. But it’s also an incomplete way to think about freedom. Because freedom is only meaningful and is only valuable to the extent that it is used to achieve human goods to flourish, to develop our capacities to enjoy life. So freedom is not an empty ideal for me, it is oriented towards some form of flourishing. And so the mere absence of domination, for me, is not sufficient in and of itself to redeem the value of freedom. And the form of republicanism that I would endorse isn’t exactly neo Roman republicanism, it’s probably more of what you might call civic republicanism or classical republicanism or Neo sectarian republicanism, if you will, Greek and Roman, so more Greek and Roman, although it’s probably artificial, to separate them completely, because there’s a lot of overlap.
I mean, when I read Cicero, I really do see a lot of marks of classical republicanism, civic republicanism, seeking the good, the common goal of the polity and so on. And that form of republicanism emphasises the need to develop certain kinds of virtues, and attitudes and public spirit in this, but also has an intrinsic value, has intrinsically valuable qualities and as elements rather well with well lived human life. That kind of republicanism extols the value of self government, as something that is, in fact enhances the value of human life and is not merely instrumental. Where I differ from classical republican and civic republican tradition in, I think it’s a significant difference, is that I consider political institutions to be only one element, one vehicle of self government and not necessarily the most important vehicle of self government.
For me, associations, non political associations, in many instances are actually a more important vehicle to self governments than political associations. They invite more participation. They provide more channels of participation, and, and of rational dominion in the social sphere than political institutions. Political institutions provide a framework for the self government that occurs in associations. But realistically, I’m fully aware that political institutions are only consistent with a limited level of participation, even at a local level. So if we were only relying on political institutions for self government, we’d be in very bad shape.
Billy Christmas
So Iris Marion Young had a criticism of republicanism and republican philosophy more broadly, which was something along the lines of the public spiritedness of a participant in the republic was a very homogenising concept. And what she saw is it was very kind of masculine and white, and a Eurocentric concept which kind of de facto excluded all these forms of difference that she puts it. It excludes women, it excludes different ethnic groups. Do you think that that homogenising tendency of republican theory is part of what you see as the danger and the kind of cannibalism of the sovereign state upon associational life, or as Iris Marion Young would call it kind: different groups?
David Thunder
Yes, I do. I think that if we concentrate the ideal of self government upon political agency or agency within the context of political structures, that there is a danger that we will over, that we will, yes, that we will homogenise the ideal of self government by attaching it to the activities that occur in the context of those particular kinds of institutions, and that we will deprecate or underestimate the value of, let’s say, non political associational action. And I would say that it’s not uniquely a problem for the sovereign state necessarily that particular problem because even a federalized republicanism if it focused exclusively on the political channels of self government could, let’s say obscure the value or underestimate the value of an agency within non political associations and the different forms that self government can take. So Vincent Ostrom, when he talks about American federalism, he is quite clear that self government must be exercised not only in political governments, it is also an ideal way of life that is instantiated in many different non political associations.
Billy Christmas
A separate strand of your critique of the sovereign state, I’m not sure how much of the book is dedicated to it or if it’s a more of a passing thought, but you mentioned it in your talk yesterday. He said that the notion of a sovereign state to protect freedom was a kind of deduction from the ontological or moral individualism of the enlightenment. But could you say more about why you think that moral on ontological individualism is problematic and why you think it entails the idea of, of sovereignty with the need for sovereignty?
David Thunder
Yes. Basically, I noticed a pattern in defenders of the sovereign state, starting in the 17th century, and moving forwards. And, and this pattern, I think, was particularly marked in Hobbes, you see it in Locke, and you see it in Kant, and you see it in Rousseau. And basically, and you see it in John Rawls, and in many contemporary political philosophers. The pattern I noticed was that when they discuss problems of civic order or political order, they treat those problems fundamentally as a kind of coordination game played by a set of individuals by a set of individuals. So it’s not that they’ve eliminated groups completely because they assume a single group, the group of individuals will form a state who the people, but the jungle of associations that actually constitutes that group, that single group that forms that state, that jungle of associations, is given passing reference, passing recognition.
In Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, and Rawls and other theorists, it’s not that they deny that individuals have groups and belong to groups. Rawls is quite clear that we have background cultures and that we belong to churches and we have different types of conceptions of the goal. But when it comes to setting up the problem of political order, they simply barely discuss the dynamics of intergroup coordination. And I find that astonishing. I find that astonishing. I was very surprised by this pattern. And I had to scratch my head and wonder why intergroup coordination was left out of the picture. And the conclusion I came to was that they were in the throes of a kind of individualist image of society. And that for them the imagination that drove their projects, that social imaginary that drove their projects was an individualist imaginary in which it’s individuals who need to assert their rights in the context of a very large group.
Billy Christmas
So on your view, do you think it’s fair to say if, you know, if we must do, kind of state of nature social contract theorising, the state of nature is not a homogenised, and yet disorganised people, it’s a set of very different forms of pre existing social organisations, families, tribes, groups religions, and this sort of thing must emerge as a result of these groups coordinating with each other.
David Thunder
Yes, that’s the proper way to construe a state of nature, if you really want to set up a state of nature, problematic as that construct is going to be. And you might as well build in some other relevant empirical features that are, besides the fact that they’re individuals working, trying to cooperate. So Hobbes, for example, recognises heads of households. And I think as far as I’m aware, he considers those individuals to act as heads of households.
Billy Christmas
And same in Rawls.
David Thunder
Yeah. And, but, but the question is, why? Why, why should we stop at the level of heads of households? Why should that be the unit, the only unit that enters into the equation when it comes to discussing coordination. Why can’t we talk about cities? Why can’t we talk about towns and villages? And why can’t we talk about regions? Why can’t we talk about churches or even just universities? Why are all of these players just completely sidelined in the way we set up the game? I mean, to me that’s arbitrary. It’s an arbitrary way of sidelining them. I accept that all political philosophy must involve a certain simplification, right? You need to consider, treat certain phenomena as background noise, that we come from background noise. Well, there’s a hell of a lot of background noise going on if the only relevant actors are heads of households. Yeah.
Billy Christmas
We have just a couple of more minutes left at most, because I know you have to go and catch a plane. You said in your talk that you take that in your case for a kind of a polycentric form of governance to be a perfectionist case which is to say that it’s grounded in the kind of the ethical good of persons. You don’t describe it as a liberal case. And you don’t make too much mention of the importance of kind of protecting freedom. It’s more about protecting valuable forms of life. Perfectionism is not a very popular, fashionable position in contemporary political theory, everyone kind of goes out of their way to show that their view is some form of liberalism. Do you take your perfectionism to be a liberal or certainly at odds with a kind of liberal anti perfectionism?
David Thunder
Well, I think logically my position is inconsistent with anti protectionist liberalism for sure, though interestingly, it actually shares some of the underlying concerns of anti protectionist liberalism, such as Isaiah Berlin’s fear of a big brother state that would be telling us how to live. I think it’s a misunderstanding of perfectionism to assume that it endorses paternalistic kind of big brother states necessarily. Because it’s one thing to affirm that the end of social development, or around social development should be human flourishing. And it’s quite another thing to say that the state should be endorsing a particular model of flourishing.
So I think that’s an important clarification, because my view is that, first of all, which I didn’t really clarify very well, in the talk yesterday, I didn’t, that point didn’t come across fully. That my idea of flourishing is actually a libertarian ideal of flourishing in the sense that freedom and deliberation, the agent’s own decisions and choices have to be part of their own search. In other words, their flourishing has to be shaped by their own agency. And they’re all if you want a certain form of rotten rational mastery on the part of the agent, and that rational mastery or autonomy is actually part of their flourishing. That’s Joseph Raz’ view of the morality of freedom. And I share that view, which is the reason why there are strong liberty based arguments against certain forms of paternalistic intervention because they can damage the code of autonomy, because for me, autonomy is part of the human good.
And so I guess, yes, it’s a perfectionist position, but it’s a polycentric perfectionist position, meaning that there are many different actors that can assist an individual in attaining his or her flourishing, and no one of those actors has a kind of omni competent supervisory role over the process. And there are very good prudential reasons to limit the powers of the state that have to do with the fact that it can go badly wrong, its judgments about flourishing. So the idea of arming the state with a perfectionist sort of imperative to impose a particular model of flourishing upon everybody, I think is a sovereigntist way of thinking and I think Berlin’s critique is implicitly critique of the sovereign state. It’s not a critique of political perfectionism in general.
Billy Christmas
Okay. I think we better leave it there so that you can get back to Spain. So thank you very much for that, David. I know I don’t speak for myself when I say that was really interesting. And I’m really enjoying reading both of your books when they’re finished and out.
David Thunder
Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed the discussion.
Billy Christmas
And thanks everyone for listening.
