Article published in Liberty, January 1998
An American Reader's Digest editor posted in Paris once reflected to me that there are few distinct civilizations in the West. One, he said, is America; another is France. Any American who knows France will understand. France is the country of civilized relations, moral tolerance, formal beauty, sensuousness -- the good life.
France
Food, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, somehow tastes better in France than anywhere else, and there is nothing like a three-hour dinner in a Paris restaurant, capped with a Havana. Interpersonal relations assume a wide variety and richness of forms. Words and stances convey subtle meanings. Youngsters are polite. Living passionately is recognized as an art: as the song says, you live "les aiguilles dans le rouge," i.e., as if your tachometer's needle were always in the red. Motorists drive fast but religiously yield on the right. If you comply with civilized expectations, you always know what to expect.
Women are independent and self-conscious, but seductive, tender, playful. Girls learn their power over men early, how to use it, and how to say Yes or No gracefully. Clean flirting is rampant. In summer months, millions of bare-breasted, and sometimes nude, women invade public beaches. Even caryatids on public buildings or park fountains are so sexy that you are tempted to jump them. A Canadian girl living in France once remarked that hotel rooms are designed not for sleep but for love.
Ideas, debates, and dissent are everywhere present. This is the country of Charles Baudelaire and Benjamin Constant.
America
I spent the Christmas holidays of 1995 with my youngest son, hiking and hunting in the hills of North Carolina near the Tennessee border. Our cabin had no electricity and not much to do with modern America, its wealth and modern conveniences.
But the cabin did convey some idea of the American tradition. This is rugged country, with hard-working, self-reliant, and trustworthy people. Nobody locks his car. People trust their local sheriff, up to a line in the sand that is visible to anybody. Many illegally carry handguns in their cars, and everybody knows that the sheriff knows but won't interfere. A grandmother lent me her Python .357 Magnum. I had obtained a hunting license by mail, merely by declaring that I had held one before. We drove on private roads, my son with a loaded shotgun on his knees, and visited our hosts with handguns on our belts. We bought ammunition at the grocery store.
We felt we were in the hills Thoreau had described, where "the State was nowhere to be seen." In the woods, we met a redneck who, harassed by some environmental regulation pertaining to a river on his farm, had told the feds, "Take your damn water off my land." On the way back, we visited my friend Alan Kors in a Philadelphia suburb. Alan and I were photographed together, proclaiming "Long live liberty, long live Spooner, down with tyranny!"[1] We might even have said, "Down with the state!" After all, this is America, the country of Thomas Jefferson and Lysander Spooner.
France and America, of course, do not exist as such. These collective words are only short-hand to describe patterns of human relations and complexes of meanings. Sometimes, they are used to identify state apparatuses that rule over the territories marked "France" or "America" on maps -- an unfortunate usage that, for some reason, is at least as prevalent in English as in French. In the individualist sense in which I use these concepts, France and America extend beyond the borders that states draw on maps with their hostages' blood; they represent cultures: configurations of values, ways of life, and meanings shared by individuals. You are French if you enjoy formal beauty and celebrate joie de vivre; you are American if you stand up for rugged individualism and self-reliance. True, it is individuals who have cultures and not the other way around, so one can participate in many cultures. But our ideal types help formulate an important question: Can we enjoy the advantages of both France and America?
Counter-Realities
Now, America is also more (or less) than the characterization given above. Starting with the Civil War, and accelerating with the onset of the 20th century, Americans have come to define themselves in terms of citizenship, to depend more and more upon the state, and to cave in before anything that bears the name of law. A few years after the end of the Civil War, George Ticknor of Harvard wrote: "It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I got of political education and principles."[2]
Poor George! Although he did fear "what is likely to happen hereafter," he could not imagine what America would be like today. For many Americans, self-reliance has been replaced by squabbles over government handouts, subsidies, and favors. Personal responsibility means obeying the cops. Although Americans may not yet fill out forms as readily as other people, their identity is now defined by the Social Security numbering system and official documents like driver's licenses. Pressure-group politics and crooked political mores have infected private relations. A growing underclass idealizes violence and lives on welfare. A myriad of regulations has eviscerated the individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Powerful administrative and police agencies crisscross the land. America is also gun controls, Waco and Ruby Ridge, the drug war and civil forfeitures, witch-hunts against insider traders, and parents arrested for taking nude pictures of their children.[3]
A new Puritanism thrives. My North Carolina refuge was in a dry county, but this strange anachronism is nothing compared with BATF control of alcohol marketing, with the war waged on tobacco by government scientists, with Janet Reno's opposition to drug liberalization in California and Arizona, with politically correct sexual behavior, and with the new Comstockery against erotic representations involving young-looking people. The state is everywhere to be seen. In deference to reality, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty should now read:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
Yearning for public education, public health care, and government checks.
I lift my lamp beside the quiet tyranny.France, on the other hand, is the land of Colbert (Louis XIV's finance minister), with a wide net of detailed regulations, prior controls, and confiscatory taxation. It is an imperial republic with well-insulated politicos and bureaucrats who wield wide police powers. The French have gotten used to relying on the state for everything. What economists call "rent-seeking" has reached high plateaus: every organized group can obtain privileges from the state if it can marshal enough street power, while the populace naively applauds. Proud of his free spirit, the individual is often nothing but a bon-vivant ward of the Republic, which keeps him quiet and contented with his wine, cheese, and Folies Bergères.
There are many indications that France is not what it used, or promised, to be. Manners are deteriorating. Large and decrepit public housing projects harbor youth gangs that don't make for better company than their American counterparts. An article in Le Monde recently reported the case of a woman cop who, returning home one night, was attacked by a youth gang on a suburb train, and forced to submit to such degrading abuses that she hid for two days after. Political scandals are on the rise, not because public mores are becoming more ethical, but because politicos and bureaucrats use suspicions of corruption as weapons to advance their careers or harm the careers of their competitors. Even political correctness, the antithesis of the French character, has made inroads in France. Laws against sexual harassment and regulations against smoking have recently appeared on the books.
Incompatible Cultures?
Québec is an interesting case. One might hope that, mixing both cultures, French Canadians would inherit the French attachment to formal beauty, tolerance and joie de vivre, as well as the American commitment to self-reliance, rugged individualism, and the spirit of individual liberty. Quebecers did share some frontier values, exemplified by the spirit of the coureur des bois (runner of the forest) -- the 18th century farmer who took to the woods each winter to trade furs with the Indians. Large families with hard-working fathers and strong mothers were the rule. Thirty years ago, Quebecers were still free of public health insurance, social security numbers, significant firearm regulations, government control of schools (although the more or less official Church filled part of the void), and powerful bureaucracies (in peacetime, at least). The typical Quebecer was probably as sentimentally attached to individual liberty as the average American.
Some of the French spirit is also visible in Québec. Stupid laws are not as strictly enforced in Québec as in the U.S. or in the rest of Canada. This is especially apparent with daily pleasures and innocent vices. For example, there is some doubt as to whether a ban on smoking in restaurants could be enforced here.
Or consider matters relating to sex. Although Québec is not exactly France, it has not yet fallen into U.S.-style, statist Puritanism as blindly as English Canada. In Québec, you can still have nude pictures developed at a chain drug store without fearing that somebody will call the cops. Actually, if the pictures are spicy enough, the technician will probably make a second set of prints for his personal enjoyment.
Quebecers tend to laugh at political correctness. Recently, when asked how things are going, I have gotten into the habit of answering, "Except for sex, money, and my e-mail software, everything is A-1." The typical reaction is exemplified by the oldish woman who owns my favorite convenience store: she burst out laughing, and replied, "Well, Monsieur Lemieux, if that's the only thing wrong, there is no problem." Or take the woman librarian on whom I tried my line. Thinking I was flirting, she quipped back: "As far as money is concerned, I have no solution, but the sex issue could be easily dealt with." A girl student standing nearby was biting her lips (I mean, of course, her smiling lips), trying not to burst out laughing.
Yet, the statist establishment has succeeded in imposing some political correctness with new laws and regulations (against "sexual harassment," for example). Even if their enforcement is nothing compared with the U.S. or English Canada, the trend does not bode well.
Parallel to this insidious demise of French culture, the welfare state has grown so much in both Québec and English Canada that self-reliance is probably considered by most people as a contradiction in terms. The pessimistic scenario is that Quebecers will end up as collectivist rednecks -- the worst of all worlds.
An Argument for the State
Let's go back to our two polar (and simplified) models, France and America. On one side, you have a strong administrative state that passed unchanged from the Old Regime to post-1789 society, and abated for only a few decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the other side, you have the modern ideal of individual liberty that gave rise to America, the least statist society in the history of civilization.
Yet France is characterized by moral tolerance, formal beauty, politeness, and joie de vivre; while America is blemished by self-righteousness, political correctness, vulgarity, and dullness in everyday life. In France, you meet sophisticated individuals who have early morning drinks in bistros, watch poetic TV programs, and take four-course meals with Bordeaux wine. In America, you bump into frustrated teenagers who get dead drunk at the first opportunity, fat people who roam non-smoking shopping malls, and barbarians who drink water while gulping dinner in half an hour. Yuk!
One wonders: did the attractive features of French civilization develop because society was tightly regulated by the state, or in spite of it? And did the ugly features of American culture develop because free and self-reliant individuals must end up as rednecks and bigots?
Indeed, contemporary French sociologist Jean-William Lapierre has attempted to justify the activist state along these lines. Liberty, he points out, requires that individuals generally obey certain spontaneous rules of conduct. Now, so the argument goes, individuals cannot voluntarily adhere to such rules without also submitting blindly to all kinds of social conventions -- that is, without becoming guilt-ridden rule-followers: conservative, dull, and dumb. Thus, a modern, tolerant, innovative, artistic, fun society is inconsistent with the spontaneous order. The state is necessary to liberate individual initiative and diversity from the tyranny of social conventions. Lapierre has developed this argument by comparing primitive societies, with and without states. Anarchy, he argues, is inconceivable without such strong social controls that diversity and innovation are impossible -- and diffuse oppression by the tribe or the village is more intrusive than coercion by formal, well-circumscribed political processes.[4]
Thus, the state was necessary for the development of individual autonomy. Lapierre applies this line of reasoning in contrasting the modern administrative state with the minimal state. By "administrative state," he means a Tocquevillian political power which, though limited, is conceived of as society's board of directors and is capable of regulating the whole complex of social relations. The ideal administrative state, he argues, remains formal and circumscribed, and allows more liberty than either anarchy or the minimal state.
If Lapierre is right, it is precisely the absence of a strong state that explains the tyranny of public opinion and the poverty of culture that Tocqueville observed in 19th-century America -- a condition in marked contrast with the diversity and brilliance of European societies. His theory would also explain why France is freer than it appears at first glance, and why America is more oppressive than it superficially appears to be.
Do America's voluntarily enforced mores and moral rules also allow for the development of a French level of culture? Can people who are, and must be, rednecks when it comes to defending their rights, simultaneously be intellectually curious, artistically minded, and morally tolerant? Can American rednecks simultaneously be French aesthetes? To all these questions, the theory of the autonomy-promoting state answers No.
The Moralistic State
Lapierre's argument for the state has a certain charm, but I don't find it convincing. Consider the transition from primitive stateless societies to state-administered societies. The historical fact that civilization developed in the latter, and that the former were selected out by social evolution, does not prove that the only two alternatives are barbarism and the state. The problem might just be that the state appeared before market-based societies had time to develop. We now understand how markets, decentralization, diversity, and entrepreneurship keep a spontaneous order from becoming rigidly rule-bound. Given a chance, anarchy-cum-markets could conceivably have fostered individual development much better than the state.[5]
Now, suppose that even a market-based anarchic society would turn out to be hopelessly rule-bound and conservative (of course, we can't know this until we try). In a market context, a Nozickian minimal state would then be expected to emerge and combine the advantages of anarchy with the benefits of formalized rules protecting individual autonomy and social diversity. If Lapierre is right that anarchic societies are necessarily rule-bound and oppressive, the minimal state would seem sufficient to maintain a general context of market relations, individual experimentation, and autonomy. What can a more powerful state do better?
The theory that individual autonomy increases with state power could be true only up to a point. At some point, government power starts compounding, instead of alleviating, the uniformizing tendencies of social rules and norms. Could this optimal point be the administrative state?
All we know about political power suggests a negative answer. Political power cannot aim at administering the whole society and regulating individual lives without reinforcing social uniformity along some dimension. The administrative state is bound to become a Moralistic State. This conclusion is supported historically by a generally negative correlation between the extent of state power on the one hand, and economic entrepreneurship and social diversity, on the other hand. It is reinforced by the tragic experience of Leninist states.
Once a certain threshold of state power is reached, it actually strengthens social pressures furthering state control. In authoritarian states, brainwashed individuals rat on their neighbors. Even in the U.S., the administrative state has passed this threshold, with corporate whistle-blowers doing the job of the state by wearing FBI-provided tape recorders when they meet with business colleagues.
The administrative state sometimes appears to be a liberating force. During the 1960s, moral tolerance and openness in sexual matters grew in parallel with mounting state power . But over the past ten or 15 years the correlation has reversed, and political correctness now goes hand in hand with advancing administrative tyranny. This strongly suggests that statism is not a causal factor in individual liberation. It seems more likely that the administrative state actually hampers the coexistence of French formal beauty with the American spirit of rugged individualism. According to local and historical circumstances, the Moralistic State will attack one or the other more directly, but in the long run it is the enemy of both. One must realize that all Western democracies are now administrative states, and that French and American statism differ only by degrees. The first one crushes the American spirit, the second one concentrates its fire on what I have called French culture.
The Hedonist Redneck
Why should we care about all this anyway? Would not a libertarian be happy to live in the North Carolina hills or at Walden Pond? Isn't the absence of physical coercion a sufficient condition for individual liberty and happiness? What makes something like French culture desirable for someone who treasures liberty? I submit that there are two kinds of reasons. The first can be found in the economists' concept of subjective preferences; the second, in the realm of the philosophers' objective good.
There are a certain number of free individuals who want to have both America and France, and would be willing to trade some America for some France. If people who want some French culture must transform North Carolina into Massachusetts, we have lost America. And if one has no place to live but dry Graham county, the good life is lost.
Some philosophers argue that the development of an individual's full potential is a moral good that transcends individual preferences. And there seems to be something to this. Consider: a culture of self-reliance and the flourishing of vibrant, sophisticated ways of life are linked; we cannot long maintain one without the other. This would mean that there is more to libertarian values than merely a formal argument against physical coercion. A decent society must be committed both to the value of human development and to individual autonomy; to have a free and pleasurable society, we need people who share both commitments. In fine, for liberty, we need both France and America.
Redneck and hedonist libertarians of the world, unite!
1. This snapshot is available on my Web site. [Return to main text]
2. Quoted by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996), p. 333. [Return to main text]
3. See James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1994. [Return to main text]
4. Jean-William Lapierre, Vivre sans État? Essai sur le pouvoir politique et l'innovation sociale (Paris: Seuil, 1977). [Return to main text]
5. Cf. Pierre Lemieux, "Chaos et anarchie," in Alain Albert (Ed.), Chaos and Society (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 1995). [Return to main text]
Liberty Magazine, © Copyright 1997, Liberty Foundation