This book has aimed to show that justice rather than taxes was at the foundation of representative governance.
If taxes mattered, they did so in an inverse way than that usually assumed: it was not the bargaining advantage of societal groups but the incapacity of elites to avoid taxation and royal justice that catalyzed representative institutions.
This suggests that an important argument can be added to the debate on the desirability of “taxing the rich,” a policy mainly adopted when arguments about fairness have prevailed, as strikingly shown by political scientists Scheve and Stasavage.[1505] When elites are exempt, they lack the incentives to hold government accountable and therefore enough incentives to participate in public institutions. Other social groups lack the power to do so effectively, so representative governance falters. State power is fundamental in this dynamic, however, to keep elites in check. The bargaining model has instead been so influential in modern social science partly because it has been supported by one of the most dominant theories of democracy, the rational median voter theorem. This linked the extension of the franchise with the increase in the size of government via taxation.[1506] Yet revisionist literature has cast doubt on this model,[1507] especially by showing that state capacity, rather than fiscal pressures, was key in shaping institutional and political outcomes,[1508] echoing the conclusions of this book.Acknowledging the importance of state power, moreover, highlights the central role of obligation, successfully imposed, in establishing the representative order. This goes against a liberal predilection to focus on rights, even entitlements, especially the right to escape collective social frames that restrict individual liberty. What the modern constitutional order achieved, rather, was to supplant obligation imposed through a hierarchical system by an authority little bound by consent with obligation defined and derived from below.[1509] Losing sight of how this system emerged through the successful imposition of supra-local obligation obscures a key point: the liberal constitutional order is predicated on the necessary step of forcing broad social groups to define their interests in collective ways.
This set of claims raises a number of insights and questions, only a few of which can be covered in these concluding remarks. First, our theories of emergence often draw from observed or preferred outcomes, which I have called the normative/empirical inversion. Second, highlighting the importance of state capacity and power begs the question of how such power was first constituted; I offer some observations on this difficult question. Finally, one may ask how we can reconcile this account of inversions with the early modern accounts of English weakness and French (and other) strength. The remaining pages will address these points.
14.1