The Computer and the Sovereign
On Liberalism, Legitimacy, and the Future of the British State
This is a response to John Gray’s recent article in the New Statesman in which he rehearses the same arguments against liberalism he’s made for 30+ years without much of a constructive proposal for how to address the problems he identifies. The essay was originally published by IAI News.
1.
A very brief history of the world since the end of World War II goes as follows:-
After the Second World War, the European members of the Allied coalition embarked on a project of cooperation and integration to ensure that no single nation could again dominate the continent. This would yield economic benefits, but it also required a far greater codification of the “rules of the game”—a dense web of laws, regulations, and guidelines designed to insulate states and their citizens from the whims of political personalities. The unconstrained powers of the European dictators were never to be possible again; they would be replaced by the quasi-automatons of the legislative and administrative state. In parallel, governments expanded their control over economic life. The logic was simple: if centralized coordination had worked in war, why not in peace? Britain joined this wider project of codification and control, though with characteristic ambivalence when it came to European integration. Out of this architecture of rules and institutions emerged what might be called the State-as-Computer: a machine designed to replace human judgment with coded procedures.
Meanwhile, the United States followed a similar path, even though it emerged from the Second World War as the largest, richest, and most powerful nation on earth. Its pre-eminence made it indispensable to the network of international agreements and institutions born of this new cooperative spirit. While that allowed America to leave a deep imprint on how the rules were written and enforced, it nevertheless subscribed to the same rules-based order embraced by Europe and the United Kingdom. After all, the United States shared the same conviction: cooperation requires rules. Laws and institutions were to replace individuals as the leading protagonists on both the national and international stage. After the slaughter of millions at the hands of a few deranged but effective dictators, the semi-automatic, if somewhat legalistic, computer of governance may well have seemed a welcome substitute for the uncontrollable explosions of emotional strongmen. That these law- and rule-making institutions often operated out of sight was, perhaps, part of their virtue.
Smaller nations across Africa, Asia, and South America generally sought to join the same international organisations, though many struggled to build comparable legal and administrative frameworks at home. For those still unconvinced by this new rules-based path, China and the Soviet Union stood as reminders of the perils of personality rule and the dangers of laws serving power rather than restraining it.
In the first decades after 1945, with the memory of carnage still fresh, the new order performed admirably. Economic growth was strong, internal peace held, and international cooperation flourished. Gradually, however, dissenting voices emerged: students at the Sorbonne, civil rights activists in San Francisco, and a new generation in Berlin angered by the persistence of former Nazis in government and industry. Economic growth, too, began to slow as the command-and-control model of post-war management reached diminishing returns—just as a handful of oil-rich nations imposed their own rules on their European and American customers.
In response, much of the world—this time including China, albeit very much on its own terms—embarked on a process of “liberalization” intended to revive growth and roll back the frontiers of the State. The effort was partly successful: growth recovered from the malaise of the 1970s, though not dramatically, except in China, whose economy suddenly took flight. Many societies felt re-energized by the new freedoms and rewarded the architects of this shift with repeated re-elections. Financial deregulation—arguably the most consequential reform of the era—unleashed a surge in capital creation and deployment, fuelling expansion in the sectors that produced and managed capital: banks, investment firms, and other financial intermediaries. With so much new money in circulation, debt inevitably rose as well. That this was, in effect, a mortgage on the future was well understood in specialist circles but seldom acknowledged in public.
What did not change was the State’s self-conception as the creator and arbiter of laws and regulations. As economies expanded and the State withdrew from direct production and provision, the demand for rules and guidance governing those who replaced it grew exponentially. Individuals and corporations were liberated from some forms of control—able to move capital freely across borders or to compete with what used to be State monopolies—but over time they became enmeshed in an ever-denser legal and regulatory web. More opportunities appeared on one side of the ledger, but more rules on the other. For a while, this trade-off was tolerable: the private sector’s capacity to create money through the fractional-reserve banking system made regulatory burdens manageable, and, in any case, many of these interventions, whatever their intent, tended to protect, even strengthen, the market position of incumbents.
Beautifully and coherently, this project of liberalization could now be taken global. If individuals and companies were to operate freely at home, why not also abroad? Free trade had a long and respected intellectual lineage, had flourished a century earlier, and promised mutual benefit to both sides of every exchange—importers and exporters, consumers and producers alike. It also appealed to those whose moral calculus was shaped by concern for the world’s poor, for free trade seemed uniquely effective at raising global welfare even if it could cause some dislocation at home. For a time, it could be a zero-downside project that united economic reason with moral virtue.
Yet liberalization required rules. To sustain global commerce, trading standards had to be defined and enforced by national and international regulatory institutions, each backed by state authority. In this way, the regulatory state expanded even as markets were freed. Combined with the rise of the personal computer, the idea of the State as a vast, ultra-sophisticated computer—able to monitor, analyse, and orchestrate thousands of activities across the globe—became eminently plausible. What could such a machine not do? As the Soviet model of organization collapsed and China’s apparent embrace of liberalization gathered pace, optimism—sometimes super-optimism—seemed entirely reasonable, even amid stock-market crashes and acts of terror. The State as Computer, it was thought, could make everyone rich and happy.
There was another feature of the State-as-Computer that made it so attractive and its prospects so promising: everyone could believe they were equal and would be treated equally. A computer, after all, does not distinguish between you and me; it simply reads inputs and produces outputs according to its code. As long as everyone was entered into the machine in the same way, regardless of circumstance, the State would deliver fair and reasonable decisions. Nor was it necessary to know much about the countless sub-computers and the people operating them—there were still many, for such a vast system of centralized rule-making, information management, and decision-making demands enormous resources—as long as one could trust that the overall machine was properly coded and competently run. And by the early 2000s, who was seriously inclined to doubt that it was?
And then the Great Financial Crisis happened.
If the post-war State had become a computer, perhaps Carl Schmitt was the thinker who best understood its limits.
II
Schmitt, the German legal and political theorist, has enjoyed a modest renaissance among English readers over the past quarter century. His style, by the standards of early twentieth-century German academic prose, is relatively clear, and English translations can defang some of the more convoluted syntax to make his texts more intelligible. That he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and remained antisemitic throughout his life is well known, but it seems to weigh little on his current reputation. He was, for what it is worth, in distinguished company. Although never exonerated after the war, he was released without charge by the Allies on the grounds that his role in the Reich had been minor. Once the leading German political thinker of the interwar years, Schmitt had by 1936 already fallen out of favour with the regime – by some accounts, only Hermann Göring’s intervention spared him a harsher, perhaps fatal, reckoning. However, soon he could resume his writing and lecture tours. The main consequence of his brief post-war internment was the sale of his library: the books had been seized by US Army Counterintelligence and later returned, though marked with U.S. occupation requisition stamps – a treatment Schmitt regarded as expropriation. He therefore sold them.
Schmitt’s initial revival coincided with the debate over how America should respond to the attacks of 9/11, and over the scope and limits of executive authority. A great admirer of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt argued in his 1932 The Concept of the Political that politics depends on a distinction between friend and enemy: a boundary of exclusion that recognizes conflict as an essential, identity-forming feature of political life (a view shared by Machiavelli in some form). For Schmitt, this friend–enemy opposition was primarily domestic and, in principle, peaceful—an acknowledgement of difference rather than a call to annihilation, since the “enemy” was still understood as fully human, merely an opponent. Yet the concept lent itself to international application, and it resurfaced prominently during the “war on terror,” when the very humanity of the enemy was sometimes brought into question.
Schmitt’s renewed popularity in this century also owes much to his scepticism about liberalism. He regarded liberal constitutionalism—a discursive political order built on the belief that detailed, prescriptive laws can apply equally to all, including the institutions of the state—as romantic nonsense. As he put it in The Concept of the Political:
Liberalism […] has neither advanced a positive theory of state nor on its own discovered how to reform the state but has attempted only to tie the political to the ethical and to subjugate it to economics. It has produced a doctrine of the separation and balance of powers, i.e. a system of checks and controls of state and government. This cannot be characterized as either a theory of state or a basic political principle.
Schmitt therefore dismissed those, such as his contemporary Hans Kelsen, a fellow legal theorist (and Jew), who devoted their lives to constructing an “objective theory of law” without designating those whom the law authorizes to enforce it. For Schmitt, effective political action required decisions, not endless debate. No system of rules could anticipate every contingency. True power—true sovereignty—was revealed in the exceptions to those rules, in the unpredictable events that demanded an individual response. Hence his famous postulate in Political Theology, written in 1922: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” a modus operandi brought to life by the frequent use of the exceptional powers granted to the President of the German Reich under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution.
In other words, it was futile to construct a theory of sovereignty—a theory of the state—upon abstract laws without reference to real people: “Sovereignty of law means only the sovereignty of men who draw up and administer this law.” Politics, for Schmitt, is made by people, not by the fictions of legal personality. The sovereign is a real individual who decides, and in doing so, embodies the state itself. The liberal faith that politics can be reduced to government by algorithm, as we might say today, is precisely what Schmitt sought to expose as an illusion at the heart of modern liberalism.
This is also an apt diagnosis of the crisis of legitimacy that has plagued many Western states since the Great Financial Crisis—Britain foremost among them. That crisis exposed the failure of the post-war model of the State as Computer. Centralised, formulaic, impersonal, and legalistic, the Computer could not cope with the complexity, ingenuity, and diversity of human life. Events since have only deepened the problem, as the State doubled down on its program—intensifying regulatory and legal interventions in an effort to repair and optimize the software without ever reconsidering the hardware. Other factors have been at play, in particular the comprehensive destruction of the old centralized system of production and consumption of news and information. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that efforts to mend a dysfunctional machine have failed to halt the erosion of trust in the institutions of the State.
Schmitt’s own life illustrates the flaw in his theory and the danger of conflating the sovereign with a person—if you back the wrong person, you can be in real trouble very quickly. His focus on decisiveness – in his book Dictatorship he argued that dictatorial powers are a necessary legal institution in constitutional law – also led him to abandon any belief in the desirability of a pluralistic democracy: too much debate with no action. Invariably, he ended up with a system of government consisting of one person. It was probably the inevitable intellectual destination of an intelligent, highly conservative and also very Catholic German who somewhat enviously looked at the singular source of power—sovereignty—in the Holy Church. In this view, autonomy within the law rests with the state alone. Individual autonomy has no real place here. Hegel wins, Kant loses. Today, many would describe Schmitt’s appetite for an authoritarian order – for this is not only his revealed preference after 1933, but also the obvious conclusion of his argument – as “realist”, a term beloved by those logicians of statecraft who have only ever read Machiavelli’s The Prince but not his Discourses on Livy. It is certainly very undemocratic. It also carries a kind of epistemological hubris—confidence that the “dictator” would not merely make decisions but make the right ones. In the later Schmitt there is, pace Hobbes, a sense that whatever decisions the leader makes are rendered “right” by the very fact of their occurrence—what he called the “normative power of the factual” in Political Theology.
It is clearly unwise to personalize the State too much. We do not want to be ruled by Kings, and we prefer State actions to be constrained by fundamental rules because our conviction—surely the correct one—is that individuals, and their right to be left alone, rank prior to any rights of the State. The institutional architecture of modern states, therefore, combines checks and balances with focal centers of power – a necessarily intricate jigsaw that, in the United States, Donald Trump is currently trying to pull apart. But Schmitt also reminds us that too little personalization of the State can be equally problematic: government by algorithm risks being both ineffective and dehumanizing. A State without humans is inhuman and, in the long run, unlikely to endure. How can this be achieved without ending up with a king?
When I listen to critics of the “dysfunctional British state,” I’m often struck by their confidence in the very structure they condemn. They seem to believe that, if only different people—better civil servants, smarter politicians, perhaps themselves—were in charge, the ship could be steered back on course. Instead, they find themselves surrounded by enemies and a “hostile state.” This, then, situates Schmitt’s “exception” squarely in the present, providing a rationale for increasingly drastic, unitary, quasi-dictatorial interventions that not only suspend many constitutional arrangements but also centralize an already extremely centralized State—culminating in the cushioned office of one person from which executive orders spill out like ticker tape. This series of decisive actions is then to endow people with that longed-for “sense of purpose”, a sentiment as metaphysically powerful – and elusive – as King Pellinore’s Questing Beast. All via the great leader… One suspects these people may have read rather too much Carl Schmitt. The same can probably be said of those Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs who are reinventing themselves as political philosophers.
Surely, the better path is to reconfigure the original Computer that has been the cause of so many of the problems that are still afflicting the modern state, and in particular the British State. The United Kingdom requires not more central control but less: a radical redistribution of authority to reduce the distance between the people operating the computer and those operated by it, making the State more personal, more immediate, more responsive as a result. The dysfunction, if that’s what it is, stems from the concentration of fiscal and administrative power in Whitehall and the myth that a handful of mandarins and ministers can steer a society of 70 million through complex global currents. If legalistic ultra-centralization has been the problem, how can it also be the solution? Reform should begin by decentralizing decision-making, funding, and accountability—granting smaller “mini-states” genuine fiscal autonomy and allowing experimentation in service provision, regulation, and taxation. The task of the center—call it the “maxi-state”—should be to provide reinsurance capital to these mini-states and manage certain extreme risks and investment programs that most likely benefit from the economies of scale of a centralized organization.
Decentralization of this kind would require a reconfiguration of Parliament to make it more legitimate and more representative. This can be achieved by making the House of Commons the sole chamber—will anyone really mourn the passing of the House of Lords?—and by introducing an electoral system that combines first-past-the-post and proportional systems, giving each citizen in effect two votes, one as residents of a “mini-state,” one as citizens of the United Kingdom, the “maxi-state.”
Alongside these structural reforms, the British State should reconsider its essential purpose—and focus on doing a few things really well: building a world-class education system, an integrated health & social care insurance framework, and a national investment initiative forming the basis of an expanded retirement program, all supported by more hypothecated funding. Centralized regulation by computer should give way to more bespoke self-insurance structures in which firms take over primary regulatory responsibilities and are on the hook via industry-wide mutual guarantee schemes. The banking system, after the abolition of State-backed deposit insurance, would be an obvious candidate for this.
This State would be smaller yet more legitimate, with power more decentralized but also more personal. Decisions could be made at many levels rather than in a single centre. Schmitt need not worry: decisive sovereignty would persist, only in plural form and many layers. There is every reason to believe that such a State could be highly effective—and numerous examples, Switzerland among them, show that it already is.
When we look back at the history of the (Western) world since 1945, we see that a system of governance that worked well for a time gradually ceased to do so. This should not be too surprising—complex systems are, well, complex, and to remain effective they must keep pace with the ever-evolving complexity of their environment. That is no easy task, and probably an impossible one for social organizations such as the State. But a need for reform, even radical change, does not mean that the end of the world is at hand. Critics of liberalism often engage in a kind of competitive gloomerism. John Gray wrote in The New Statesman recently: “If what Hobbes called ‘commodious living’ cannot be reinvented by a strong state, our future will be a war of all against all, fought out not between individuals but identity groups—a life that might not be solitary or necessarily short, but will be nasty, brutish and certainly poor.” Yet what is to be done? Too often these critics stop short of that essential question – why go beyond Hobbes’ famous and beguiling line? It carries a certain aesthetic of destruction that is undeniably appealing, but not constructive.
History, however, offers many examples of radical state transformation achieved in times of peace: Norway after 1814, Japan after 1868, Turkey after 1923, Singapore in the mid-1960s, Greece and Iceland more recently. Reprogramming the State’s hardware is no small task—but unlike the old Computer, this one might have more human, and more humane, features. And it is achievable without being preceded by a war of all against all.