One of the perennial questions brought up by a philosophical approach to politics is the question of “Why do people obey and show, frequently self-destructive, loyalty to their nation’s customs and officials?” More succinctly: “Why do people obey the law?” The answer, like all human affairs, must involve both an animal instinct to obey and a higher capability to reason. Homo sapiens is neither purely an animal of instinct nor a disembodied calculator.
This is an aspect of politics that I think has been lost in recent discussions, especially those pertinent to Donald Trump. Politics cannot be distilled into questions about facts. There is the entire Quine-Duhem thesis aspect at play that political ideologies cannot be tested against the facts directly, but instead rely on background assumptions that are frequently incommensurable across political divides.
However, more important, I think, is that one needs to consider why people follow some focal points and the motivations for doing so. Ideas and politicians alike can only command people when they can coordinate them. Coordination, in turn, requires the existence of focal points that people both follow and find mutual sympathy in other people who follow them. Der Führer and the Declaration of Independence were both significant focal points for the Third Reich and the United States of America respectively.
In his 1766 set of lectures on jurisprudence, Adam Smith argues for a taxonomy of two principles upholding a society pertinent to these thoughts: Authority and utility. He lectures:
There are two principles which induce men to enter into civil society, which we shall call the principles of authority and utility. At the head of every small society or association of men we find a person of superiour abilities; in a warlike society he is a man of superiour strength, and in a polished one of superior mental capacity. Age and a long possession of power have laso the tendencey to strength authority. Age is naturaly in our imagination connected with wisdom and experience; and a continuance in power bestows a kind of right to the exercise of it. But superior wealth still more than any of these qualities contributes to conferr authority… This principle is fully explained in the Theory of moral Sentiments, where it is shewn that it arises from our sympathy with our superiours being greater than that with our equals or inferiors: we admire their happy situation, enter into it with pleasure, and endeavour to promote it.
…
The second principle which induces men to obey the civil magistrate is utility. Every one is sensible of the necessity of this principle to preserve justice and peace in the society. By civil institutions, the poorest may get redress of injuries from the wealthiest and most powerfull, and tho’ there may be some irregularities in particular cases, as undoubtedly there are, yet we submit to them to avoid greater evils. It is the sense of public utility, more than of private, which influences men to obedience. (Smith 1978: 401-2).
One of the noteworthy aspects of Smith’s discussion here is that nowhere does he imply that contract is one of the reason that people obey the laws and their magistrates. Indeed, he goes on to mock the idea of an original contract in the very same lecture.
Reducing society to a contract only obfuscates the problem at hand, it does not shed much light onto it. The fact is that there are certain aspects of our lives where we are governed by contracts, but that itself is an artifact (in the wider sense of the word à la David Hume’s “Letter from a gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh” and Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial) of society. Contracts, as used in our peculiarly modern society, are part of the explicandum.
Almost a century later, Walter Bagehot would have a very similar taxonomy in The English Constitution when he distinguished the ‘dignified’ parts of that constitution from its ‘efficient’ parts:
No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or of others which being the growth of many centuries exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divid them into two classes. In such constitutions, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division): first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population,—the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts,—those by which it, in fact, works and rules. There are two great objects which every constitution must attain to be successful, which every old and celebrated one must have wonderfully achieved:—every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government.
There are indeed practical men who reject the dignified parts of government. They say, we want only to attain results, to do business; a constitution is a collection of political means to political ends; and if you admit any part of a constitution does no business, or that a simpler machine would do equally well what it does, you admit that this part of the constitution, however dignified or awful it may be, is nevertheless in truth useless. And other reasoners, who distrust this bare philosophy, have propounded subtle arguments to prove that these dignified parts of old governments are cardinal components of the essential apparatus, great pivots of substantial utility; and so manufactured fallacies which the plainer school have well exposed. But both schools are in error. The dignified parts of government are those which bring it force,—which attract its motive power. The efficient parts only employ that power. The comely parts of a government have need, for they are those upon which its vital strength depends. They may not do anything definite that a simpler polity would not do better; but they are the preliminaries, the needful pre-requisites of all work. They raise the army, though they do not win the battle. (Bagehot 2001 : 7)
In Bagehot’s description, there is a very keen emphasis on the dignified part of the constitution, on the authority that people wield based on people’s awe of them, as motivating people’s decisions to follow certain focal points. I think that’s a wise place of emphasis, and one that deserves to be meditated on.
Bibliography:
Bagehot, Walter. 2001. The English Constitutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Adam. 1978. The Lectures of Jurisprudence. Ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.