Double Aspect

In years past, I had an occasional series of posts going to address the various meanings and implications of “Lord Acton’s Dictum” — power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have canvassed the insights on it we can get from The Lord of the Rings and from The Master and Margarita; explored the relationships between power and deceit and power and morality; and discussed an article about the scientific findings on the effects of power on its wielders. Except for the last one, these were all written before the beginning of the first Trump Presidency, and I think they hold up very well in light of its 0bject lessons on the subject of power and corruption.

After a long hiatus, this post is an addition to that series. Mostly, it consists of quotations from Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, of which I had already read parts and which I am currently going through more methodically. A complete edition of the Principles in French, in which they were of course written, is not so easy to get one’s hands on, or at least wasn’t when I managed it a few years ago, but an English one, from which I am quoting below, fortunately is freely available from the Online Library of Liberty.

As part of a broader argument for a government limited to defence, the suppression of crime, the redress of torts, and the enforcement of contracts, Constant warns against putting those who exercise public power on any sort of pedestal. They are just people, he insists, and no better people than the rest of the educated class from which they are likely to come in a democracy. But in some ways, they are likely to be worse. This is because the pursuit of power in a democracy requires, and the wielding of power in any system produces, what we might call intellectual corruption.

As to the pursuit of power, Constant points out

that the qualities which lend authority to a government founded on popular choice are always more or less mutually exclusive of those other qualities particularly relevant to the spread of enlightenment. To gain the confidence of the great mass of the people calls for tenacious ideas, a one-sidedness in opinion, a positive way of seeing things and acting, more force than finesse, and greater quickness in grasping the whole picture than subtlety in discerning the details. These things are excellent for purposes of repression and surveillance, for everything in the functions of government which is set, established, or precise. But carried over to the world of intelligence, opinion, enlightenment, or morality, they have about them something primitive, inflexible, and coarse, which goes against the aim of improvement or the perfecting of things one has in view. 

And once it has been attained, democratically or otherwise,

There is something about power which more or less warps judgment. Force is far more liable to error than weakness is. Force finds resources in itself. Weakness needs thought. All things equal, it is always likely that the governors will have views which are less just, less sound, and less impartial than those of the governed. Suppose there are two equally enlightened men, one in power, the other a plain citizen. Do you not feel that the first, endlessly called upon to act, more or less compromised in his actions, in a more exposed position, will have less time to reflect, more reason to persist, and thus more chance of mistakes than the second, who can reflect at leisure, is not pledged to any line, has no reason to defend a wrong idea, has compromised neither his power, nor safety, nor self-esteem, and who finally, if he does embrace that wrong idea passionately, has no way of making it prevail?

These issues, I would add, affect the wielders of power of all sorts, bureaucratic as well as democratic. Progressives, in both the original and the contemporary senses of the word, as well as latter-day theocratic/integralist/post-liberal fantasists think they can avoid the problems of democracy by delegating power away from those who must seek it through the grubby process of election and to an enlightened bureaucracy. But Constant shows that this bureaucracy is likely to be just as intellectually bankrupt as any legislature.

This problem, Constant adds, is the more acute the broader a government’s functions. Those of what has come to be known as the nightwatchman state do not require a great deal of intellectual firepower. But those of a government that seeks not only protect people’s security but to promote their well-being in all sorts of ways? That’s a different story. Thus the greater power a government has, the more damage its corrupting effects produce. But the nature of power itself is such that its possession corrupts human beings intellectually, as well as morally, as discussed in a previous post in this series.

As ever, some caveats are in order. We can think of occasional examples of intelligence and enlightenment in high political office. Pierre Trudeau is the obvious Canadian one. But these are exceptions. As to the general tendency, Constant — who, recall, was writing with few examples of meaningful democracy, and none of real mass democracy — turned out to be quite right. He was, I suspect, rather optimistic about “weakness need[ing] thought” — at least in the age of mass media, thoughtless emotion seems to do the trick. Even short of that, academics, journalists, and other fairly powerless people are liable to hasty judgment and to persistence in error out of vanity. But that doesn’t undermine Constant’s point about those who exercise power; it should, on the contrary, make us reflect on the pressures they are under, and on the unlikelihood of their avoiding this intellectual corruption.

Most importantly, perhaps, we can — and should — structure public decision-making in ways that mitigate, though they cannot eradicate, some of the problems to which constant points. Both legislatures and administrative agencies have procedures that, when they operate correctly, force them to slow down and deliberate. Agencies and ministers are told that they must not give undue, or any, weight to the political repercussions of their decisions, and that they must not blindly follow guidelines for the sake of either convenience or foolish consistency. But of course these safeguards are not always observed, and even when they can be enforced by the courts, the enforcement itself carries significant costs of all sorts (not least in slowing down the implementation of those decisions that are in fact necessary or at least unobjectionable). The better safeguard, as Constant argues, is to reduce the size of government — ideally, to a bare minimum.