nomocratic skepticism

If the state should not be understood as an association of fellow travelers united by their commitment to a common goal, what is the alternative? There are, of course, other kinds of association. Although much of our lives are spent in attempting to secure or satisfy our own purposes or the purposes of a collectivity to which we voluntarily belong, we also engage in such non-purposive relationships as friendship or love and non-purposive activities like stamp-collecting, walking, or reading. Generally, these non-purposive relations and activities are considered to be intrinsically valuable, and, thus, in no need of any external explanation or goal. (This is not to say that no one treats friendship as a means to professional advancement or that no one walks in order to lose weight, but that the character of these activities is not defined by their abuses or by their secondary effects.)

There are other relations which we enter which appear to be non-purposive, as well. As speakers of English, we are related to other English speakers when we converse with them, and, though our relations might be those of goal-seekers or purpose-satisfiers here (I want to buy a haircut and my local barber wants to make a living), our goals and the pursuit of them are conditioned by the general rules of the English language. Our grammar doesn’t prescribe what we say but it does condition how we say it. The barber won’t be able to understand that I want a Mohawk haircut if I resolutely refuse to communicate with him according to the conventions of English (though, of course, these conventions are not a set of rigid and unchangeable formulations, but a fluid set of usages made current by being in use). Thus, our relation as speakers of a language is non-purposive in a general way.

Oakeshott suggests that the most coherent way of conceiving the modern state is as an association of individuals united by their acknowledgment of a common set of general and non-instrumental rules which condition the pursuit of their own purposes. He sometimes calls this conception of the state a nomocracy, and, in a nomocracy, the role of the government is not to manage a common enterprise because there is none, but instead to take care of the rules of association. The government is a ruler because it not only makes the rules but also because it makes rulings about violations of the rules. The analogy of the umpire is useful because the government also punishes violations of said rules. Under such an understanding, the citizens retain their freedom to pursue their own purposes and/or to combine with others in purposive associations to achieve goals. What they do not possess, however, is the right to convert the government itself into a tool to achieve these purposes. Thus, a skeptical politics of an Oakeshottian type actually does have a conceptual content which distinguishes it from a generically skeptical disposition about political life.

This nomocratic skepticism would quite obviously reject any attempt on the part of the citizens or the government to empower the government with the authority to pursue substantive purposes, like the redistribution of some notional ‘national income’ (the state is a not a nation and it has no income), the creation of jobs or of economic growth (the state is not a business enterprise because it is not an enterprise of any sort), or the conversion of the rest of the world to its own peculiar ideology (the state has no ideology as such, but merely a commitment to preserving its non-purposive character), among other things. The government would not necessarily be a weak one, but its power would be appropriate to its authorized duties, which are not comprehensive. The only exception to the general considerations would be if the state’s physical existence were threatened, but, since war-making is an inherently teleocratic activity, nomocracies would quite naturally be reluctant to engage in such risky behavior. For, as we have seen time and again in modern politics, so-called war measures are rarely discarded or abrogated after the war is over, and governing by crisis management is one of the quickest and easiest ways in which governments attempt to convert themselves into teleocracies.