Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit, a leading theorist of modern republicanism, wrote this book, The State, as a necessary “prologue” for a subsequent book developing a comprehensive theory of justice based on republican principles. He asks, “Can we really expect [the state] to serve the cause of justice? Is it up to the task?” This book, however, is somewhat more focused on what “is” rather than on what “ought to be.” Pettit aspires in this book to craft a “realist” account of the emergence of the state. But his normative agenda for the next book intrudes repeatedly and, quite frankly, uncomfortably, on the positive or descriptive aspects of the argument Pettit seems to want to advance here.

While there are several emphases in The State, the leading argument Pettit seeks to develop is a “thought experiment” to justify “the idea and institution of the state that first emerged in modern times—in Europe, from about the sixteenth century on—and that has assumed its distinctive form only in the last century or two.” While he deflects that “there is no advance guarantee … that the thought experiment will work out to our tastes,” the governments his argument just happens to justify bear a remarkable resemblance to modern Western states with mixed economies and broad, if variable, commitments to individual rights. In essence, Pettit’s argument provides an alternative methodology to justify a close cousin to the Rawlsian state.

Pettit’s argument moves in two broad steps. He first posits a methodology to justify the state, which he calls a “genealogical” approach. He then uses that methodology to address three topics of perennial interest in political theory.

Pettit’s “Genealogical” Methodology

For Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the state evolves out of a state of nature. That is, it springs from the hypothetical interaction of people in an original position without a state. Rawls begins with a hypothetical “veil of ignorance” in which individuals who do not know their individual attributes choose the political principles that will govern society. Pettit accounts for the rise of his state using a related, although distinctive, methodology that he labels a “counterfactual genealogy.” This, too, is a hypothetical account, although Pettit argues that his “emergentist” story differs importantly from the stories told by social contract theories.

Pettit argues that his genealogical account of state emergence parallels genealogical accounts of the emergence of money. He means it as a hard parallel, and he devotes a fair amount of attention to discussing monetary genealogies: “As the genealogy of money makes sense of the interdependence of practice and concept in that case, so a genealogy of the state should make sense of a parallel interdependence.”

Pettit starts his genealogical argument by inviting the reader to

imagine a prepolitical world with creatures like us living in a situation broadly like ours, where there is a rough balance of power across members. Would a state be robustly likely to arise in such a prepolitical world, emerging as the unplanned result of intelligible adjustments to circumstances?

As with the emergence of money, Pettit sketches something akin to an invisible hand account of the rise of the state (although he doesn’t use the phrase).

Pettit begins his genealogical account of state emergence during the ancient agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution created the conditions in which different societies “inevitably compete for territory.” The “function,” or telos (my word) for the state, both ancient and modern “is that of individually securing its citizens against one another under a regime of law that it safeguards against internal and external dangers.”

From this function or telos, the state emerges following the emergence of “conventions, norms, and laws.” Conventions start first, emerging in communities independent of state or polity. Conventions develop to solve “coordination predicaments.” Conventions gradually become reified and then regulative. (We might note that the sequence of Pettit’s account of state emergence parallels genealogical accounts of monetary emergence. Money, whether emerging first as a measure of account or a measure of exchange, emerges in response to individual needs. Only subsequently does its existence become supported and reified by a state.)

The state emerges from the need for an institution to serve the needs of individuals and communities interacting with each other. The creation of a state is thus not intended in any specific way, but rather evolves or emerges in response to the interaction of individual and social needs.

Yet problems with Pettit’s methodology start at the earliest stages of his discussion, with seemingly contestable assumptions doing a lot of heavy lifting throughout the book.

First, I am skeptical about the analogy between genealogical accounts of the emergence of money and Pettit’s genealogical account of state emergence. After all, the emergence of a state would seem to face substantially more serious collective action problems than monetary emergence. “Money” can arise between any two individuals who happen to agree to regard anything as a convenient medium of exchange or accounting.

Pettit’s functions for the state, however, seem more socially complicated. Consider the protection of territorial integrity—which Pettit identifies as an initial need following the agricultural revolution. Territorial protection would seem to raise issues of incentive compatibility that monetary emergence does not. That is, while everyone wants protection against outside threats, there are individual incentives to free ride on the protective efforts of others, incentives that don’t exist analogously with the use of money. After all, while everyone desires protection, all are better off when someone else bears the cost of risking life to supply that protection. The same argument applies to other forms of social coordination, to wit, that while all may desire a state function, there are social costs to supplying those functions that stories of monetary emergence do not share.

Further, it’s unclear that Pettit’s initial conditions are as straightforward to imagine as initial conditions for monetary emergence. Take the first line of his summary of his argument quoted above, “Imagine a prepolitical world with creatures like us living in a situation broadly like ours.” It’s not clear to me how the reader is to imagine a world in which we are “living in a situation broadly like ours” but that is also a “prepolitical world.” A prepolitical world would necessarily be quite different from ours. While Pettit’s genealogical methodology is admittedly hypothetical, it is supposed to provide an account of how a state could have naturally “emerged”—his word for it—in historically real circumstances.

Pettit’s summary statement also introduces a concept that is foundational for his entire argument. Not only are we to imagine a prepolitical world that is “broadly like” ours, it is also a world in which “there is a rough balance of power across members” of society. This is a strong assumption and one that seemingly plays a crucial role in Pettit’s account of state emergence in this book and his next planned volume. But it’s not entirely clear what Pettit means by this or what kind of power is being considered.

Does Pettit mean to assume that there is a rough balance of power between me and, say, a big human brute—a Goliath—who could individually dominate me or anyone he chose to dominate?

On the one hand, if by assuming a “rough balance of power across members” of a society Pettit rules out the existence of prepolitical environments that include physically-dominating humans like Goliath, then Pettit would seem to be putting his thumb on the emergentist scale, biasing his argument in favor of the emergence of benign states in his genealogical account. For example, in that case, the Japanese village in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film, Seven Samurai, wouldn’t need to hire the samurai to protect against the roving bandits because there’s already a rough balance of power between the village and the bandits.

On the other hand, if Pettit does not assume away the existence of physically dominating people in his prepolitical society, then a “rough balance of power” between society’s members would appear to be implausible in his prepolitical society. The Goliaths would be naturally advantaged relative to the rest of us.

In neither case are the attributes of Pettit’s critical prepolitical assumptions met. As a result, the starting point—the initial condition—for Pettit’s political genealogy is not well defined. And initial conditions can critically affect what subsequently emerges.

Pettit’s Approach vs. Social Contract Theories

Pettit’s genealogical methodology is meant to show how the state is “robustly likely to arise” from his prepolitical world. It is this claimed “robustness” that purportedly distinguishes his approach from those of the social contract theorists (such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rosseau) whose theories, Pettit claims, lack this robustness.

By “robustness” Pettit means that his theory provides “a reason why under certain conditions the state is likely to appear, regardless of a range of contingencies.” The state arises “robustly,” Pettit suggests, if it follows something of an invisible-hand process adjusting to people’s needs and circumstances independent of any particular intention to create a state.

Starting from a world where people have neither political concepts nor political practices, it would explain how concepts and practices would be robustly likely to coevolve as the unplanned result of people’s adjusting to various problems. And in doing that it would offer us a story about the emergence and endurance of something like that state.

In social contract accounts, Pettit writes, “The initiatives required of individuals entering an agreement with one another do not have to be robustly likely, or even likely at all; they may be presented as the product of fortuitous insight and alignment.”

By contrast, in his genealogical approach, “the adjustments required for the appearance and survival of the state must be, not just likely, but robustly or resiliently likely under suitable conditions.”

I have nothing invested in vindicating social contract theories, but it seems to me that at least some social contract theorists do articulate arguments for the Pettitian “robustness” of their theories, while Pettit’s theory may not meet his own “robustness” threshold.

To take each claim in turn.

First, it seems to me that at least some social contract theorists meet the criterion of “robust” emergence “under suitable conditions.” For example, in Chapter IX of John Locke’s Second Treatise, Locke suggests that risk aversion and the greater individual transaction and enforcement costs of individually-defined violations and individually-administered punishments in a state of nature “quickly” drive people into political society. So, too, social-level enforcement allows for the realization of scale economies in protection that cannot be realized in the state of nature. These individual-level incentives seem both sufficiently generic and sufficiently sizable to meet Pettit’s threshold for robustness.

More recently, Robert Nozick’s account of the emergence of the state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia would seem to draw implicitly on something analogous to Pettit’s genealogical approach, both as a description of how the state emerges in the first instance as well as, like Pettit, drawing normative implications from the genealogy.

Pettit seems to regard the assertion of natural rights as some sort of immediate theological implication of belief in a deity.

Further, I don’t see any clear evidence that the “robustness” of Pettit’s genealogy dominates those of standard social contract accounts. After all, even at the level of abstract statement, Pettit’s qualification that he need only demonstrate robust likelihood under “suitable conditions” and in “certain circumstances” reduces any commitment to the “likelihood” that Pettit’s robustness requirement ostensibly requires to be met. The emergence of a phenomenon only under a narrow range of “suitable conditions” or “circumstances” means that the emergence of that phenomenon is not really all that likely.

None of this is to suggest Pettit’s account is any worse or less interesting than social contract theories. Rather it’s only to observe that, on my reading at least, Pettit’s account of state emergence does not meet the robustness condition he asserts it will meet.

Autocracy, Democracy, and Multiple Forms of State Emergence

Pettit’s genealogical account of state emergence incorporates normative conditions as well as descriptive or positive genealogical predictions. But these normative assumptions of Pettit’s theory create tensions with the descriptive-genealogical aspect of his theory. To take the most striking example, Pettit repeatedly makes use of the premise that “we must assume a corresponding balance of power among the members of the society from which the genealogy starts.”

But why this assumption “must” be made, aside from the normatively convenient outcomes it generates for Pettit’s theory, is never clear.

This premise allows Pettit to make the convenient, but not particularly persuasive, claim that repressive states are not really states. He advances this as an empirically-predictive claim as well as a normative claim:

The state is likely to remain in place, then, so long as rulers continue to exercise power effectively and do not gain the preponderance of power that would enable them to be brutally repressive. … If the state ceased to ensure such security, however, there is little reason to think that it would retain its hold on the affections of its citizens and continue to elicit their support.

…

This account of the state proper allows us to see why a repressive regime should count as an outlier form of the institution, barely of the name of state.

This claim echoes the familiar affirmation in natural law theory that an unjust law is no law. (Although even there, theorists recognize that there is something we want to call “law” even when the law is unjust.) Pettit’s claims here, however, are dubious both as descriptive matters and as normative matters.

First, as an empirical claim, I am unsure that “brutally repressive” regimes are generically less “likely to remain in place” relative to less repressive regimes. Survival of a repressive regime would seem to depend on a number of factors, including state capacity, just how repressive the regime is, how competent its repression is, control of people’s abilities to communicate and coordinate their activity, etc. So, too, at least in the ancient and medieval worlds, because of factions and sizable decision costs, “democracies” did not have a reputation for lasting all that long.

More generally, however, and again on an empirical level, it seems to me that most observers unproblematically recognize the existence of a “state” in any number of repressive regimes both historically and in the current global environment. Indeed, many would suggest that the problem of repressive regimes is that the state is too strong, too much “there” rather than not a state at all. And it is possible to classify different types of states, distinguishing the “unjust” or “repressive” from the “just” or welfare-enhancing states.

Further, some genealogical theories of state emergence suggest that autocracies emerge as easily, perhaps even more easily, than democratic states.

For example, David Stasavage’s genealogical account of the rise of the state in The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today, identifies multiple paths for state emergence. One path results in the emergence of democratic states, but others result in the emergence of autocratic states. And unlike Pettit’s hypothetical genealogy, Stasavage draws on existing empirical accounts of the rise of the state. While Stasavage normatively favors democratic governance, his positive account of state emergence recognizes the robust emergence of autocracies as well as of democracies.

So, too, Macur Olson’s discussion of stationary versus roving bandits provides a robust genealogical account of state emergence. The dynamic he identifies can generate autocratic states as well as democratic states. At the same time, the assumptions of Olson’s analysis implicitly reject Pettit’s initial premise that “we must assume a corresponding balance of power among the members of the society from which the genealogy starts.”

Applying Pettit’s Genealogical Approach of State Emergence

In the second half of The State, Petitt applies the theory developed in the first half of the book to respond to three sets of claims. He seeks to justify people-instigated constitutional change as against Hobbesian absolutism. He seeks to justify a more-than-minimal state as against Nozickian minimalism (while also taking swipes against natural rights theories). Finally, he seeks to criticize what he styles as the view of “laissez-faire theorists” that the state should leave the market entirely unregulated.

Many critiques could be offered of this section, not least that it is unclear how the arguments follow from the theory presented in the first half of the book.

Two further items are of particular note, however. First, while Petitt is especially interested in justifying a more-than-minimal state contra Nozick, he also uses the occasion to swipe broadly against natural rights theories more generally. He writes,

Whether in the libertarian form or not, natural rights are hard to take seriously as metaphysical posits. … On the face of it, they belong with the notion of a god and a god-given law and have little to be said for them when they are taken as independent posits.

Where does one start? On the one hand, it appears that Pettit is unaware of works of the New Natural Law theorists, such as John Finnis and his Natural Law and Natural Rights, which use the necessity of avoiding self-refuting propositions as the analytical workhorse that generates the natural law and natural rights. Finnis does not build his theory on an appeal to God.

On the other hand, Pettit seems to regard the assertion of natural rights as some sort of immediate theological implication of belief in a deity. This misconceives the relationship of God even to natural law and natural right theories in which God plays a central role. God’s existence affects the identification of natural right (and natural law) by way of identifying what the human teleology is or should be. For example, in Thomas Aquinas’s theory, “happiness” is necessarily defined with reference to the beatific vision. Therefore the Christian God naturally plays an important role in identifying the content of Aquinas’s natural law theory. But natural law is defined with respect to the human telos, whatever that may be. There is no inherent requirement, even in Aquinas, that natural law theory define the human telos with respect to a divine end.

For example, in Aristotle, human happiness results from the virtuous life independent of the existence of a particular god or gods. This is a critical difference between Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s theories. If there is a human telos, then there are corresponding natural laws and natural rights to that telos. A different telos for humanity implies a different content for the natural law, but it is natural law nonetheless in the Aristotelian sense of “nature.” Hence, even Petitt’s arguments in The State posits a human telos by which a state is judged, and thus is properly ascribed to the set of natural rights theories, his objections notwithstanding.

So, too, Pettit starts with a caricature of what laissez-faire theorists hold. Pettit writes that state-defined “criminal law … tort law … contract law … and commercial law … give the lie to laissez-faire theory.” Yet all the laissez-faire theorists I know argue that the state necessarily has a minimal set of commitments to protect people from unjustified coercion, and this minimal set of commitments includes robust forms of criminal law, tort law, contract law, and commercial law.

My reading of laissez-faire theorists is that they all would agree with Pettit that “far from being autonomous and self-regulating, the modern market economy depends for its very existence on the law and the state.” They would disagree about where the line should be drawn between market-supporting protective activities on the part of the state. Laissez-faire theorists generally argue that the state goes too far in intruding on peaceful exchanges between consenting adults.

To be sure, there is much that one could contest in hard commitments to laissez-faire economics: a truncated recognition of the scope of externalities, the appropriateness of collective action to promote the common good, rectification for consequences of unjustified state activities in the past (a la Nozick), and more. But there’s no reason to caricature the starting point of the laissez-faire argument.

Pettit’s book, The State, is an initial entry into the topic, with another book intended to integrate Pettit’s theory of republicanism with the argument of this book. While the wide-ranging argument in the book provides suggestive insights and analysis on any number of specific points, the broad arc of Pettit’s argument from its genealogical methodology to its curiously limited application leaves too many gaps to provide a persuasive account of the emergence of the state.