“It was Montesquieu’s analysis that occasioned the great debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists in the United States in 1787 and 1788. As everyone understood at the time, the fledgling polity was far too large to qualify as a small republic. Federalism was the remedy suggested by Montesquieu. A loose confederation of republics could command sufficient resources to provide for the common defense while its member republics remained small enough to maintain free institutions. Unfortunately, however, most of the states composing the nascent American union were themselves too large to be considered small republics; and, under the constitution proposed by the Federal Convention, the national government had much greater scope than the confederations Montesquieu had in mind.”

The excerpt above is from an article I recently read in The American Interest called “The New Face of Tyranny,” which gives an interesting historical account of the rise of American federalism and extols the dangers of centralized power. Apparently, according the this article, where historical tyrannical government regimes have failed in the past, contemporary despotic centralized governmental powers may finally undermine liberal democracy and prevail due to our ever advanced technology. The author, conservative leaning professor Paul A. Rahe, quotes Montesquie quite a bit with regard to how scary large centralized governments can be:

“In a large republic, Montesquieu observed, “interests become particular; a man senses then that he can be happy, great, glorious without his fatherland; & soon that he can be great solely on the ruins of his fatherland.” One consequence of such a republic’s size is that “the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to the exceptions; it depends on accidents.” The situation “in a small” republic is more favorable: There, “the public good is more fully felt, better known, closer to each citizen; the abuses are less extensive there & as a consequence less well protected.””

While I waver back and forth between a unitary abolish-the-States type position and some sort of democratic confederalist position, I do think more and more that Murray Bookchin and the social ecologists ultimately have it right. Bookchin observes: “Both Marxism and anarchism have always agreed that a liberated, communist society entails sweeping decentralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the abolition of the state, and the breakup of the large cities.” The problem, of course, is that things take a while to catch up with theory that’s well ahead of its time. Marx’s observation, though, that we need to move through various stages to get to the point where we can have complete decentralization (i.e. communism) seems accurate to me… which is why I sometimes think, for the immediate future anyway, that a benevolent unitary system might be a step in the right direction; i.e. I do think (perhaps naively) that a centralized governmental power can be viewed optimistically as a responsible and just provider of social goods, providing positive liberty or “freedom to.” And if by abolishing the states losing our “laboratories of democracy” becomes a concern there really is, as Adam Kotsko has pointed out, “nothing to stop federal agencies from carrying…out [small-scale policy experiments] in whatever administrative units prove convenient — nor indeed from doing so based on recommendations from local activists.”

That said, once again, I do also agree with Bookchin that a positive step toward decentralization would mean a greater focus on and participation at municipal levels. Bookchin again:

“The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—the city, town, and village—where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy.”

So yeah, I still have a healthy anarchistic skepticism when it comes to centralized power… Like I said, I waver back and forth. Either way, regardless, greater citizen participation at local levels of government seems unavoidable and fundamentally critical.

Anyway, my biggest quibble with the Rahe’s article is that the critique only focuses on the political side of things (not surprising for a slightly right leaning political magazine). Rahe writes:

“It foreshadowed Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings concerning the dangers of administrative centralization; and it pertains to virtually every republic on the globe. All of them are based on the English or the American model, and, by now, in all of them, thanks to ambition and emergencies, the administrative state and the executive power loom large. Beneath the benign surface of every republic in the world, there lurks the edifice of a despotism more fully tyrannical than any government in earlier times.”

Not an unfounded fear, one must admit. Perhaps a more comprehensive view, though, would be to apply Tocqueville’s warning about the dangers of administrative centralization and executive power not only to the imperium but to the oeconomia as well (which is why I use the term political-economy when talking about such things because in my mind the two are inseparable); I mean, why not? After all, tyranny isn’t only found in empires associated with the State, it’s found in private corporate empires as well. So while I do understand and sympathize with Rahe’s fears of governments using privately developed profit-making technology to spy on and oppress citizens (Rahe uses CCTV cameras and facial recognition software as examples) it makes zero sense to decentralize governments but continue to allow corporations to retain their global reach, power, and tyrannical administrative centralization.

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Painting above by Rico White

Tags:anarchismBookchincapitlaismCommunismeconomicsmarxMontesquieuPaul A. Rahepolitical ecologypolitics. federalismpowersocialismtechnologytyranny