Federalism’s Origin and Operation

This comparison begins with anthropology—the study of humans and human nature. Two different anthropologies prevail in the standard political science model. Thomas Hobbes presents an anthropology which claims that humans are by nature individualistic (that is, non-social) and are motivated by their natural appetites and aversions.

Some humans possess an appetite for power. They use their reason to acquire power and, once acquired, use that power and their reasoning to reshape society by building rewards and punishments into the political, legal and social systems. Ever present, however, is the potential for war between those with an appetite for power. To prevent that competition from destroying civilization, Hobbes favours sovereignty and top-down control to create a unified society. This, if done correctly, Hobbes claims, can lead to an absence of conflict. While Hobbes would empower the Leviathan with near-absolute control, he does think nature will impose some limitations on the sovereign's powers.

Riker's explanation of federalism's origin and operation presumes a Hobbesian competition for power and control, where leaders seek power when possible; otherwise, they compromise and cooperate to consolidate the power they have. Neither Riker nor Hobbes thinks there is a natural human inclination to social cooperation or a natural moral sense that would constrain human behaviour.

The standard model's other major anthropology proclaims that human nature is plastic, or easily mouldable. In the words of John Locke, humans are a ‘blank slate' to be written on by their environment. From this perspective, nurture completely shapes human behaviour, which means that humans and human society are perfectible (Pinker 2002).

Plato, the despiser of democracy, and Rousseau, the champion of the general will, similarly believe that humans are malleable.

They differ from Locke by distrusting individual judgement as a basis for governance. To achieve a reordered and perfected state, Plato favours philosopher kings, who use a noble lie and rigged lotteries to break the natural human bonds of family and community. Rousseau and Marx similarly empower a new aristocracy, the tribunate and the vanguard, to rework human desires and society. Post-modern theorists, like Foucault and Marcuse, posit that humans unintentionally ‘construct' nearly all aspects of their reality, from gender and race to power and exploitation, because the exercise of power ‘reifies' and justifies itself. What unites these philosophers is the belief that humans are a blank slate shaped haphazardly by the environment they inhabit or consciously engineered by elites.

These philosophers share another assumption of modern, positivistic science—that order must be imposed, arranged and continually maintained. Such an assumption fits the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.

These two different anthropologies dominate the standard model of positivistic social science and post-modernism. Despite their differences, they share a few assumptions about human nature and the nature of order. First, they believe that humans and human society can be significantly reordered and, hence, favour designing human institutions and beliefs to construct their vision of the best society. Second, they reject the notion that nature has a natural method of ordering and organizing that makes social interaction beneficial. Two conclusions flow from these assumptions. First, the primary objective of political activists is to acquire power. Second, once acquired, power should be used to reorder society, often from the top down.

These two competing anthropologies share the same means and thereby find themselves pitted in a fierce, zero-sum competition to acquire power and direct a top-down restructuring of society.^[3] This is why so much modern political science, like Riker's, focuses on power as the primary causal variable, and views the acquirement of power as a zero-sum game.

These anthropologies have something else in common: they are both wrong. According to a strong consensus among evolutionary biologists, cognitive psychologists and sociologists, humans possess a strong nature that will resist radical social engineering. This new consensus supports the Hobbesian idea that humans possess an innate nature, which includes a drive for dominance, selfinterest and tribalism. But, in contrast to Hobbes and the blank-slate philosophers, that nature also includes a moral sense that fosters cooperation, support for liberty and opposition to oppression (Haidt 2012; Pinker 2002; Plomin 2018; Ridley 1996; Tomasello and Moll 2010; Tuschman 2013; Wilson 1993).

What the new understanding of human nature means for the social sciences is not clear. But it obviously means that Riker's anthropology based on power-seeking is too narrow and pessimistic, and that theories which presume human perfectibility are impossible.

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Source: Fenwick Tracy B., Banfield Andrew C. (eds.). Beyond Autonomy: Practical and Theoretical Challenges to 21st Century Federalism. Brill | Nijhoff,2021. — 265 p.. 2021

Federalism’s Origin and Operation

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