The Invisible Government

April 1st, 2013

Peter Nolan

by
Robert A. Nisbet

When the
modern political community was being shaped at the end of the
18th century, its founders thought that the consequences of republican
or representative institutions in government would be the reduction
of political power in individual lives.

Nothing seems
to have mattered more to such minds as Montesquieu, Turgot, and
Burke in Europe and to Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the United
States than the expansion of freedom in the day-to-day existence
of human beings, irrespective of class, occupation, or belief.

Hence the
elaborate, carefully contrived provisions of constitution or law
whereby formal government would be checked, limited, and given
root in the smallest possible assemblies of the people.

The kind
of arbitrary power Burke so detested and referred to almost constantly
in his attacks upon the British government in its relation to
the American colonists and the people of India and Ireland, and
upon the French government during the revolution, was foremost
in the minds of all the architects of the political community,
and they thought it could be eliminated, or reduced to insignificance,
by ample use of legislative and judicial machinery.

What we have
witnessed, however, in every Western country, and not least in
the United States, is the almost incessant growth in power over
the lives of human beings power that is basically the
result of the gradual disappearance of all the intermediate institutions
which, coming from the predemocratic past, served for a long time
to check the kind of authority that almost from the beginning
sprang from the new legislative bodies and executives in the modern
democracies.

The 18th-century
hope that people, by their direct participation in government, through
voting and office holding, would be correspondingly loath to see
political power grow, has been proved wrong. Nothing seems so calculated
to expand and intensify the power of the state as the expansion
of electorates and the general popularization of the uses of power.

Even so, I
do not think we can properly explain the immense power that exists
in modern democracies by reference solely to the enlargement of
the base of government or to the kinds of parliaments Sir Henry
Maine warned against in his Popular
Government. Had political power remained visible,
as it largely did down until about World War I, and the manifest
function of legislature and executive, the matter would be very
different.

What has
in fact happened during the past half century is that the bulk
of power in our society, as it affects our intellectual, economic,
social, and cultural existences, has become largely invisible,
a function of the vast infragovernment composed of bureaucracy’s
commissions, agencies, and departments in a myriad of areas. And
the reason this power is so commonly invisible to the eye is that
it lies concealed under the humane purposes that have brought
it into existence.

The greatest
single revolution of the last century in the political sphere
has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from
the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally
sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into
being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters.

It is this
kind of power that Justice Brandeis warned against in a decision
nearly half a century ago.

Experience
should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when
the governments’ purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom
are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

What gives
the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness is indeed its liaison
with humanitarianism, but beyond this fact is its capacity for
entering into the smallest details of human life.

The most
absolute authority, wrote Rousseau,

is that
which penetrates into a man’s inmost being and concerns itself
no less with his will than with his actions.

The truth
of that observation is in no way lessened by the fact that for
Rousseau genuinely legitimate government, government based upon
the general will, should so penetrate. Rousseau saw correctly
that the kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes,
represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was
in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy
of government resting on the general will could bring about.

Tocqueville,
from a vastly different philosophy of the state, also took note
of the kind of power Rousseau described.

It must
not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave
men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined
to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in
the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one
without the other.

Congresses
and legislatures pass laws, executives enforce them, and the courts
interpret them. These, as I have said, are the bodies on which
the attentions of the Founding Fathers were fixed. They are the
visible organs of government to this day, the objects of constant
reporting in the media. And I would not question the capacity
of each of them to interfere substantially with individual freedom.

But of far
greater importance in the realm of freedom is that invisible government
created in the first instance by legislature and executive but
rendered in due time largely autonomous, is often nearly impervious
to the will of elected constitutional bodies. In ways too numerous
even to try to list, the invisible government composed
of commissions, bureaus, and regulatory agencies of every imaginable
kind enters daily into what Tocqueville calls “the
minor details of life.”

Murray Weidenbaum,
in an important study of this invisible government, Government
Mandated Price Increases, has correctly referred to “a
second managerial revolution” that is now well under way in
American society. The first managerial revolution, described originally
by A.A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means in their classic book The
Modern Corporation and Private Property and given explicit
identity by James Burnham, concerned, as Weidenbaum points out,
the separation of management from formal ownership in the modern
corporation.

The second
managerial revolution is very different. “This time,”
writes Weidenbaum,

the shift
is from the professional management selected by the corporation’s
board of directors to the vast cadre of government regulators
that influences and often controls the key decisions of the
typical business firm.

Weidenbaum
concerns himself almost entirely with the business sector
pointing out incidentally that this whole cadre of regulation
is a by now deeply embedded cause of inflation but the
point he makes is just as applicable to other, nonbusiness areas
of society.

In the name
of education, welfare, taxation, safety, health, the environment,
and other laudable ends, the new despotism confronts us at every
turn. Its effectiveness lies, as I say, in part through liaison
with humanitarian rather than nakedly exploitative objectives
but also, and perhaps most significantly, in its capacity to deal
with the human will rather than with mere human actions.

By the very
existence of one or another of the regulatory offices of the invisible
government that now occupies foremost place, the wills of educators,
researchers, artists, philanthropists, and enterprisers in all
areas, as well as in business, are bound to be affected: to be
shaped, bent, driven, even extinguished.

Of all the
social or moral objectives, however, which are the taking-off points
of the new despotism in our times, there is one that stands out
clearly, that has widest possible appeal, and that at the present
time undoubtedly represents the greatest single threat to liberty
and social initiative. I refer to equality, or, more accurately,
to the New Equality.

The foremost,
or indeed the sole, condition required in order to succeed in
centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is
to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus,
the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been
simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

The words are
Tocqueville’s, toward the end of Democracy
in America, in partial summary of the central thesis of
that book, which is the affinity between centralization of power
and mass equalitarianism. Tocqueville yielded to no one in his appreciation
of equality before the law. It was, he thought, vital to a creative
society and a free state.

It was Tocqueville’s
genius, however, to see the large possibility of the growth in
the national state of another kind of equality, more akin to the
kind of leveling that war and centralization bring to a social
order. It is only in our time that his words have become analytic
and descriptive rather than prophetic.

There is
a great deal in common between military collectivism and the kind
of society that must be the certain result of the doctrines of
the New Equalitarians, whose aim is not mere increase in equality
before the law.

In fact this
historic type of equality looms as an obstacle to the kind of equality
that is desired: equality of condition, equality of
result. There is nothing paradoxical in the fondness of equalitarians
for centralized power, the kind that the military best evidences,
and the fondness of centralizers for equality. The latter, whatever
else it may signify, means the absence of the kinds of centers of
authority and rank that are always dangerous to despotic governments.

Equality
of condition or result is one thing when it is set in the utopian
community, the commune, or the monastery. The Benedictine Rule
is as good a guide as we need for the administration of this kind
of equalitarian order, small enough, personal enough to prevent
the dogma of equality from extinguishing normal diversity of strength
and talent.

For countless
centuries, everywhere in the world, religion and kinship have
been contexts of this kind of equality; they still are in theme.

Equality
of result is a very different thing, however, when it becomes
the guiding policy of the kind of national state that exists in
the West today founded in war and bureaucracy, its power
strengthened by these forces throughout modern history, and dependent
from the beginning upon a degree of leveling of the population.

We may have
in mind the ideal of equality that the monastery or family represents,
but what we will get in actual fact in the modern state is the
kind of equality that goes with uniformity and homogeneity
above all, with war society.

Tocqueville
was by no means alone in his perception of the affinity between
equality and power. At the very end of the 18th century, Edmund
Burke had written, in Reflections
on the Revolution in France, of the passion for leveling
that exists in the militant and the military: those, he wrote, “who
attempt to level, never equalize.”

The French
Revolution, Burke believed correctly, was different from any revolution
that had ever taken place before. And the reason for this difference
lay in its combination of eradication of social diversity on the
one hand and, on the other, the relentless increase of military-political
power that expressed itself in the timeworn fashion of such power.

All that
tended toward the destruction of the intermediate authorities
of social class, province, church, and family brought simultaneously
into being, Burke noted, a social leveling and a transfer to the
state alone of powers previously resident in a plurality of associations.

“Everything
depends upon the army in such a government as yours,” he
wrote; “for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions
and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which
support government.”

In words
prophetic indeed, since they were written in 1790, Burke further
declared that the crisis inherent in “military democracy”
could only be resolved by the rise of “some popular general
who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who
possesses the true spirit of command.” Such an individual’
“shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.”

The theme of
military democracy, of the union of military and social equality,
was strong in certain 19th-century critics. We see it in some of
Burckhardt’s writings, where he refers to the future rise of “military
commandos” in circumstances of rampant equality.

We see it,
perhaps most profoundly, in James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity, though what is most evident in
that remarkable work is much less the military, save by implication,
than the implacable conflict Stephen discerned between equality
and liberty.

There were
others Henry Adams in America, Taine in France, Nietzsche
in Germany who called attention to the problem equality
creates for liberty in the modern democratic state. Nor were such
perceptions confined to the pessimists.

Socialists
such as Jaures in France saw in the citizen army, based upon universal
conscription, an admirable means of instilling in Frenchmen greater
love for equality than for the liberty associated with capitalist
society.

It is evident
in our day how much more of a force the ethic of equality has
become since these 19th-century prophecies and prescriptions were
uttered. Two world wars and a major depression have advanced bureaucracy
and its inherent regimentations to a point where the ideology
of equality becomes more and more a means of rationalizing these
regimentations and less and less a force serving individual life
or liberty.

April
1, 2013

Robert
Nisbet (19131996), the eminent sociologist, taught at Columbia
University and made his mark on intellectual life through observing
the intermediating structures in society that serve as a bulwark
between the individual and the state. He was known as a conservative,
and his work is on every list of conservative contributions to the
social sciences, but far from being a typical conservative, he blasted
conservatism as a species of militarist and invasive interventionism,
one that abused people’s public and private pieties in the service
of a ghastly civic ethic of statism. He is the author of The
Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America and Twilight
of Authority.

Copyright
© 2013 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided
full credit is given.

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