The Dictatorship of Dysfunction

Review: The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Part 1

Again, for those in the DC area, consider attending AI Bloomers 6pm tomorrow (November 16th), co-hosted by Dean W. Ball and myself. Please sign up here.

Is bureaucracy inevitable? Do all states become incompetent? Can state capacity come back like a phoenix rising from the ashes? All of these are important questions. We are not the first to ask these questions. 

Carl Schmitt is a famous scholar of sovereignty. He asks who ultimately holds power. However, the legacy of Schmitt I most take to heart has a different form. In my view, his understanding of the machinery of the state gets to a question that should be completely uncontroversial — whether the state can function at all. 

“Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This is arguably Schmitt’s most famous quote from his most famous work, Political Theology. Political Theology delves into the legitimating process of the State. Analysts have sinced focused on the legitimacy in times of crisis and regime change. However, this quote explains much of why the quotidian function of government agencies is so dysfunctional. 

To get things done, you must be decisive. That’s what every startup founder learns. And what CEOs of even very large bureaucracies in Fortune 500 companies constantly try to reinforce. Sovereign is he who decides the exception. But it’s not just the CEO who has to decide. Executives, managers, and even individual engineers must make consequential decisions in their product and in their domain of expertise. An effective founder understands this. He understands how to delegate. He understands how to hire people to make the right decisions, which are not simply a machinic rule-following from his superiors but an open-ended exploration of local knowledge that his superiors could not personally evaluate. 

the machinic leviathan, ChatGPT

In her book Recording America, Jennifer Pahlka, Obama’s deputy CTO of America, describes a process of top-down delegation for government software projects. She calls it a’“waterfall’ hierarchy. If you go to any software company, this is not how software is developed. They use what’s called an “agile” process, which is much more sensitive to user feedback and iterative improvement. 

Reshaping this hierarchy is necessarily a political problem, as I write for the American Mind:

There is a misconception that fundamental reforms such as Schedule F are synonymous with grand ideological change. In reality, fundamental reforms are necessary for a goal as simple as increasing government competence with software. Prematurely taking them off the table will make even a moderate good governance agenda impossible.

A waterfall hierarchy is a natural occurrence in a social or political order that is neurotic about defending legitimacy.

One of the philosophers who best established the puzzle of the state as a machine is the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He’s most famous for the concept of the Leviathan, an all-powerful state that is necessary in order to prevent violence or the war of all against all. And per Schmitt, in part responsible for the machinic conception of the state that inevitably creeps towards totalitarianism. 

If protection ceases, every obligation to obey also ceases, and the individual once more regains his natural freedom.' The "relation between protection and obedience" is the cardinal point of Hobbes' construction of the state. All one- sided conceptions of totality are incompatible with this construct.

As Schmitt observes, under the leviathan is a mechanical process that takes a desired belief to its natural ends. By conceptualizing the democratic state as a purely derivative process process, the legitimating narrative of the state becomes the fact that it does not take input while implementing the emotive and underspecified goals of the public.

The decisive step occurred when the state was conceived as a product of human calculation. Everything else for example, the development from the clock mechanism to the steam engine, to the electric motor, to chemical or biological processes are the results of the evolution of technology and scientific thinking and do not require any new metaphysical resolution.

In other words, the conception of an “agile” development process which iterates according to user feedback becomes impossible, because the legitimacy of the state comes from its ability to execute without additional feedback. Inability to take feedback is the point. Inability to take feedback is what sells.

As I will later discuss, this comes from a deterministic, near-Calvinist philosophy. Only God is the people, the people are omniscient, the people have specified all you need to know so the machinery of the State must not be able to decide exceptions. 

The eminent English authority of this epoch of religious wars and conceptualizations of the state, John Neville Figgis, said that the God of Calvinism is the leviathan of Hobbes, an omnipotence that is unchecked by law, justice, or conscience?

Can a Hobbesian be Classically Liberal?

Core to Schmitt’s analysis of Hobbes is the tension between the inner freedom of conscience and the outer political order set by the leviathan. I recently met a respected national conservative who took issue with my claim that the classical liberal character of the United States drew from Thomas Hobbes. He correctly pointed out that Hobbes was situated as a conservative, above all focused on defending the existing political order.