Plain Old Patronage A Theory Of Government - Road to the Middle Class

In order to ensure that the Arbiter’s decision is final, and that the loser does not resort to violence, people have to give the Arbiter overwhelming power to quell violence. I call this overwhelming power the Golden Scepter.

This, of course, is the contract theory of government upon which our own constitution and government is based. It assumes that the people forming “a more perfect union” get together from a state of nature without government to write a contract to govern their relations.

But anthropology teaches us something different. People do not start out in a Hobbesian state of nature. They start out in families.

And in families it is usual for the father to resolve disputes. In the old days the father had the power of life and death over all members of the family. That is what patriarchy means: rule of the fathers.

Of course, even in those days, fathers went to bed. And in the interval between going to bed and getting up in the morning, they often found that they had made the wrong decision. So they changed their minds. Nobody knows how this happened, although Agatha Christie in her Autobiography hints at how it worked in the notoriously patriarchal Edwardian age.

The movement of the progressive peoples, wrote Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law, is from status to contract. So it is, but in the movement from family and clan to city, government grows from an outgrowth of fatherly justice to an organized entity with its own interests, interests separate and distinct from the interests of fathers.

And so we find, as Maine found in Roman society, that government slowly supplants the power of the father with the power of the government.

It takes over something else besides the power to resolve disputes. It takes over the power of patronage.

Yes. You noticed. Patronage and patriarchy both start with the Latin root patr-, as in pater, father.

Our modern welfare state is a living testimony to the fact that people still want to live under a father. They want to enjoy his patronage, to receive his favors, to nestle within the circle of his power.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the people to rage most bitterly against the patriarchy are the ones who insist on the fatherly embrace of the welfare state.

So Arnold Kling’s Arbiter with the Golden Scepter is really just a father.

When do you think that the people of the welfare state will grow out of their adolescence and choose to live as free human beings, free from the protection and the power of the father?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.