The Western philosophical tradition has an especially influential component of political philosophy. The classics in the field, from Plato’s Republic through Rawls’s Theory of Justice, have an importance in our general culture that often exceeds even most other philosophical classics. The subjects discussed in these works include descriptions of the ideal society, the nature of justice, the sources of sovereignty, the origins of political obligation, and the requirements for effective political leadership. One could even argue that the most influential single strand in the Western philosophical tradition is its political philosophy. This branch of philosophy has an extra interest because it has had at various times an influence on actual political events. The Constitution of the United States, to take a spectacular example, is the expression of the philosophical views of a number of Enlightenment thinkers, some of whom were among the framers of the Constitution itself.
In spite of its impressive achievements, I have always found our tradition of political philosophy in various ways unsatisfying. I do not think it is the best expression of Western philosophy. The problem with the tradition is not that it gives wrong answers to the questions it asks, but rather it seems to me that it does not always ask the questions that need to be asked in the first place. Prior to answering such questions as, “What is a just society?” and, “What is the proper exercise of political power?” it seems to me we should answer the more fundamental questions: “What is a society in the first place?” and, “What sort of power is political power anyhow?”
In this chapter I do not attempt to make a contribution to the continuing discussion in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather I shall attempt to answer a different set of questions. My aim is to explore some of the relations between the general ontology of social reality and the specific form of social reality that is political power.
I want to begin the discussion by summarizing some of the elements of a theory I expounded in The Construction of Social Reality (1995). I say almost nothing about politics in that book, but I believe that if we take that book together with my later book, Rationality in Action (2001), there is an implicit political theory contained in these analyses, and in this chapter I want to make that theory explicit, if only in an abbreviated form. I also want to do it in a way that will make fully explicit the role of language and collective intentionality in the constitution of social reality and correspondingly in the constitution of political power.
This project is a part of a much larger project in contemporary philosophy. The most important question in contemporary philosophy is this: How, and to what extent, can we reconcile a certain conception that we have of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free, social and political agents with a world that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless particles in fields of force? How, and to what extent, can we get a coherent account of the totality of the world that will reconcile what we believe about ourselves with what we know for a fact from physics, chemistry and biology. The question I tried to answer in The Construction of Social Reality was a question about how there can be a social and institutional reality in a world consisting of physical particles. This chapter extends that question to the question, How can there be political reality in a world consisting of physical particles?
To begin, we need to make clear a distinction on which the whole analysis rests, the distinction between those features of reality that are observer (or intentionality) independent and those that are observer (or intentionality) dependent. A feature is observer-dependent if its very existence depends on the attitudes, thoughts and intentionality of observers, users, creators, designers, buyers, sellers and conscious intentional agents generally. Otherwise it is observer (or intentionality) independent. Examples of observer-dependent features include money, property, marriage and language. Examples of observer-independent features of the world include force, mass, gravitational attraction, the chemical bond, and photosynthesis. A rough test for whether a feature is observer-independent is whether it could have existed if there had never been any conscious agents in the world. Without conscious agents there would still be force, mass and the chemical bond, but there would not be money, property, marriage or language. This test is only rough, because, of course, consciousness and intentionality themselves are observer-independent even though they are the source of all observer-dependent features of the world.
To say that a feature is observer-dependent does not necessarily imply that we cannot have objective knowledge of that feature. For example the piece of paper in my hand is American money, and as such is observer-dependent: It is only money because we think it is money. But it is an objective fact that this is a ten-dollar bill. It is not, for example, just a matter of my subjective opinion that it is money.
This example shows that in addition to the distinction between observer-dependent and observer-independent features of the world we need a distinction between epistemic objectivity and subjectivity, on the one hand, and ontological objectivity and subjectivity, on the other. Epistemic objectivity and subjectivity are features of claims. A claim is epistemically objective if its truth or falsity can be established independently of the feelings, attitudes and preferences, and so on, of the makers and interpreters of the claim. Thus the claim that van Gogh was born in Holland is epistemically objective. The claim that van Gogh was a better painter than Manet is, as they say, a matter of opinion. It is epistemically subjective. On the other hand, ontological subjectivity and objectivity are features of reality. Pains, tickles, and itches are ontologically subjective because their existence depends on being experienced by a human or animal subject. Mountains, planets and molecules are ontologically objective because their existence is not dependent on subjective experiences.
The point of these distinctions for the present discussion is this: Almost all of political reality is observer relative. For example something is an election, a parliament, a president or a revolution only if people have certain attitudes toward the phenomenon in question. And all such phenomena thereby have an element of ontological subjectivity. The subjective attitudes of the people involved are constitutive elements of the observer-dependent phenomena. But ontological subjectivity does not by itself imply epistemic subjectivity. One can have a domain such as politics or economics whose entities are ontologically subjective, but one can still make epistemically objective claims about elements in that domain. For example the United States presidency is an observer relative phenomenon, hence ontologically subjective. But it is an epistemically objective fact that George W. Bush is now President.
With these distinctions in mind, let us turn to social and political reality. Aristotle famously said that man is a social animal. But the same expression in the Politics, “zoon politikon”, is sometimes translated as “political animal”: “Man is a political animal.” Quite apart from Aristotelian scholarship, that ambiguity should be interesting to us. There are lots of social animals, but man is the only political animal. So one way to put our question is to ask: What has to be added to the fact that we are social animals to get the fact that we are political animals? And more generally: What has to be added to social reality to get to the special case of political reality? Let us start with social facts.
The capacity for social cooperation is a biologically based capacity shared by humans and many other species. It is the capacity for collective intentionality, and collective intentionality is just the phenomenon of shared forms of intentionality in human or animal cooperation. So, for example, collective intentionality exists when a group of animals cooperates in hunting their prey, or two people are having a conversation, or a group of people are trying to organize a revolution. Collective intentionality exists both in the form of cooperative behavior and in consciously shared attitudes such as shared desires, beliefs, and intentions. Whenever two or more agents share a belief, desire, intention or other intentional state, and wherever they are aware of so sharing, the agents in question have collective intentionality. It is a familiar point, often made by sociological theorists, that collective intentionality is the foundation of society. This point is made in different ways by Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Though they did not have the jargon I am using, and did not have a theory of intentionality, I think they were making this point, using the nineteenth-century vocabulary that was available to them. The question that—as far as I know—they did not address, and that I am addressing now, is: How do you get from social facts to institutional facts?
Collective intentionality is all that is necessary for the creation of simple forms of social reality and social facts. Indeed, I define a social fact as any fact involving the collective intentionality of two or more human or animal agents. But it is a long way from simple collective intentionality to money, property, marriage, or government, and consequently it is a long way from being a social animal to being an institutional or a political animal. What specifically has to be added to collective intentionality to get the forms of institutional reality that are characteristic of human beings, and in particular characteristic of human political reality? It seems to me that exactly two further elements are necessary: First, the imposition of function and, second, certain sorts of rules that I call “constitutive rules”. It is this combination, in addition to collective intentionality, that is the foundation of what we think of as specifically human society.
Let us go through these features in order. Human beings use all sorts of objects to perform functions that can be performed by virtue of the physical features of the objects. At the most primitive level, we use sticks for levers and stumps to sit on. At a more advanced level we create objects so that they can perform particular functions. So early humans chiseled stones to use them to cut with. At a more advanced level we manufacture knives to use for cutting, and chairs to sit on. Some animals are capable of very simple forms of the imposition of function. Famously, Köhler’s apes were able to use a stick and a box in order to bring down bananas that were otherwise out of reach. And the famous Japanese macaque monkey, Imo, learned how to use seawater to wash sweet potatoes and thus improve their flavor by removing dirt and adding salt. But, in general, the use of objects with imposed functions is very limited among animals. Once animals have the capacity for collective intentionality and for the imposition of function, it is an easy step to combine the two. If one of us can use a stump to sit on, several of us can use a log as a bench or a big stick as a lever operated by us together. When we consider human capacities specifically we discover a truly remarkable phenomenon. Human beings have the capacity to impose functions on objects, which, unlike sticks, levers, boxes and salt water, cannot perform the function solely in virtue of their physical structure, but only in virtue of a certain form of the collective acceptance of the objects as having a certain sort of status. With that status comes a function that can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance by the community that the object has that status, and that the status carries the function with it. Perhaps the simplest and the most obvious example of this is money. The bits of paper are able to perform their function not in virtue of their physical structure, but in virtue of the fact that we have a certain set of attitudes toward them. We acknowledge that they have a certain status, we count them as money, and consequently they are able to perform their function in virtue of our acceptance of them as having that status. I propose to call such functions “status functions.”
How is it possible that there can be such things as status functions? In order to explain this possibility, I have to introduce a third notion, in addition to the already explained notions of collective intentionality and the assignment of function. The third notion is that of a constitutive rule. In order to explain it, I need to note the distinction between what I call brute facts and institutional facts. Brute facts can exist without human institutions; institutional facts require human institutions for their very existence. An example of a brute fact is that this stone is larger than that stone, or that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. Examples of institutional facts are that I am a citizen of the United States and that this is a twenty-dollar bill. And how are institutional facts possible? In general, institutional facts require human institutions. To explain such institutions we need to make a distinction between two kinds of rules, which, years ago, I baptized as “regulative rules” and “constitutive rules”. Regulative rules regulate antecedently existing forms of behavior. A rule such as “drive on the right-hand side of the road” regulates driving, for example. But constitutive rules not only regulate, they also create the very possibility of, or define, new forms of behavior. An obvious example is the rules of chess. Chess rules do not just regulate the playing of chess, but rather, playing chess is constituted by acting according to the rules in a certain sort of way. Constitutive rules typically have the form: “X counts as Y”, or “X counts as Y in context C”. Such and such counts as a legal move of a knight in chess, such and such a position counts as checkmate, such and such a person who meets certain qualifications counts as President of the United States, and so on.
The key element in the move from the brute to the institutional, and correspondingly the move from assigned physical functions to status functions, is the move expressed in the constitutive rule. It is the move whereby we count something as having a certain status, and with that status, a certain function. So the key element that gets us from the sheer animal imposition of function and collective intentionality to the imposition of status functions is our ability to follow a set of rules, procedures or practices whereby we count certain things as having a certain status. Such and such a person who satisfies certain conditions counts as our president, such and such a type of object counts as money in our society, and, most important of all, as we shall see, such and such a sequence of sounds or marks counts as a sentence, and, indeed, counts as a speech act in our language. It is this feature, the distinctly human feature, to count certain things as having a status that they do not have intrinsically, and then to grant, with that status, a set of functions, which can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of the status and the corresponding function, that creates the very possibility of institutional facts. Institutional facts are constituted by the existence of status functions.
At this point in the analysis a philosophical paradox arises. It has the form of a traditional paradox concerning the origin of obligations. Here is how it goes. If the existence of institutional facts requires constitutive rules or principles, then where do the constitutive rules or principles come from? It looks like their existence might itself be an institutional fact, and if so we would plunge into an infinite regress or circularity. Either way the analysis would collapse. The traditional form in which this paradox arises has to do with the obligation to keep promises. If, on the one hand, the origin of the obligation to keep a promise comes from the fact that everybody has made a promise to the effect that they will keep their promises, then the analysis is obviously circular. If, on the other hand, that is not the origin of the obligation to keep a promise, then it looks like we have not shown where the obligation to keep a promise comes from. I hope it is clear that the form of the paradox for constitutive rules has the same logical form as the traditional puzzle about the nature of promises. For promises the puzzle is: How can the obligation of promises come into existence without a prior promise to abide by promises? For institutional facts the puzzle is: How can the constitutive rules that underlie institutional facts exist without some institution consisting of constitutive rules within which we can create constitutive rules?
In the case of the logical form of constitutive rules the problem can be stated without putting it in the form of a paradox. Even if the existence of the constitutive rule is not itself an institutional fact, at least it is an observer-relative fact. And that already makes it dependent on the consciousness and intentionality of agents, and one wants to know, what exactly is the structure of that consciousness and intentionality? How rich an apparatus is necessary in order to have the appropriate mental contents?
Here, I believe, is the solution to the paradox. Human beings have the capacity to impose status functions on objects. The imposition of those status functions can be represented in the form, “X counts as Y in C”. In primitive cases you do not require an established procedure or rule in order to do this, consequently for the simplest kind of cases of the imposition of status functions, a general procedure in the form of a constitutive rule is not yet required. Consider the following sort of example. Let us suppose that the members of a primitive tribe simply regard a certain person as their chief or leader. We may suppose that they do this without being fully conscious of what they are doing, and even without having the vocabulary of “chief” or “leader”. For example, suppose they do not make decisions without first consulting him, his voice carries a special weight in the decision-making process, people look to him to adjudicate conflict situations, members of the tribe obey his orders, he leads the tribe in battle, and so on. All of those features constitute his being a leader, and leadership is a case of an imposed status function on an entity that does not have that function solely in virtue of its physical structure. They accord to him a status, and with that status a function. He now counts as their leader.
When the practice of imposing a status function becomes regularized and established, then it becomes a constitutive rule. If the tribe makes it a matter of policy that he is the leader because he has such and such features, and that any successor as leader must have these features, then they have established a constitutive rule of leadership. It is especially important that there should be publicly available constitutive rules, because the nature of status functions requires that they be collectively recognized in order to do their work, and the collective recognition requires that there be some antecedently accepted procedure in accordance with which the institutional facts can be acknowledged. Language is the obvious case of this. That is, we have procedures by which we make statements, ask questions, and give promises. And these are made possible in a way that is communicable to other people only because of publicly recognized constitutive rules. But constitutive rules do not require other constitutive rules for their existence, at least not to the point of an infinite regress. So the solution to our initial puzzle is to grant that a regularized practice can become a constitutive rule, but there does not always have to be a constitutive rule in order that a status function be imposed in the simplest sorts of cases.
There are two things to notice about status functions. First, they are always matters of positive and negative powers. The person who possesses money, owns property, or is married has powers, rights, and obligations that he or she would not otherwise have. Notice that these powers are of a peculiar kind because they are not like, for example, electrical power or the power that one person might have over another because of brute physical force. Indeed, it seems to me a kind of pun to call both the power of my car engine and the power of George W. Bush as President “powers” because they are totally different. The power of my car engine is brute power. But the powers that are constitutive of institutional facts are always matters of rights, duties, obligations, commitments, authorizations, requirements, permissions and privileges. Notice that such powers only exist as long as they are acknowledged, recognized, or otherwise accepted. I propose to call all such powers deontic powers. Institutional facts are always matters of deontic powers.
The second feature to notice is that where status functions are concerned, language and symbolism have not only the function to describe the phenomena but are partly constitutive of the very phenomena described. How can that be? After all, when I say that George W. Bush is President, that is a simple statement of fact, like the statement that it is raining. Why is language more constitutive of the fact in the case where the fact is that George W. Bush is President than it is in the fact that it is raining? In order to understand this we have to understand the nature of the move from X to Y whereby we count something as having a certain status that it does not have intrinsically, but has it only relative to our attitudes. The reason that language is constitutive of institutional facts, in a way that it is not constitutive of brute facts, or other sorts of social facts, or intentional facts in general, is that the move from X to Y in the formula X counts as Y in C can only exist insofar as it is represented as existing. There is no physical feature present in the Y term that was not present in the X term. Rather the Y term just is the X term represented in a certain way. The ten-dollar bill is a piece of paper, the president is a man. Their new statuses exist only insofar as they are represented as existing. But in order that they should be represented as existing there must be some device for representing them. And that device is some system of representation, or at the minimum some symbolic device, whereby we represent the X phenomenon as having the Y status. In order that Bush can be President, people must be able to think that he is President, but in order that they be able to think that he is President, they have to have some means for thinking that, and that means has to be linguistic or symbolic.
But what about language itself? Isn’t language itself an institutional fact, and would it not thereby require some means of representing its institutional status? Language is indeed the basic social institution, not only in the sense that language is required for the existence of other social institutions, but also that linguistic elements are, so to speak, self-identifying as linguistic. The child has an innate capacity to acquire the language to which it is exposed in infancy. The linguistic elements are self-identifying as linguistic precisely because we are brought up in a culture where we treat them as linguistic, and we have an innate capacity so to treat them. But in that way, money, property, marriage, government and presidents of the United States are not self-identifying as such. We have to have some device for identifying them, and that device is symbolic or linguistic.
It is often said, and indeed I have said it myself, that the primary function of language is to communicate, that we use language to communicate with other people, and, in a limiting case, to communicate with ourselves in our thinking. But language plays an extra role, which I did not see when I wrote Speech Acts (1969), and that is that language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality. In order that something can be money, property, marriage, or government, people have to have appropriate thoughts about it. But in order that they have these appropriate thoughts, they have to have devices for thinking those thoughts, and those devices are essentially symbolic or linguistic.
So far I have gone, rather rapidly, through a summary of the basic ideas that I need in order to explore the nature of political power in its relation to language. In a sense our enterprise is Aristotelian, in that we are seeking progressively more refined differentia, to get from the genus of social facts to progressively more refined specifications that will give us the species of political reality. We are now on the verge of being able to do that, though, of course, we need to remind ourselves that we are not following the essentialism that characterized Aristotle’s approach.
So far the account is fairly neutral about the distinctions between different sorts of institutional structures, and it might seem from such an account that there is nothing special about government, that it is just one institutional structure among others, along with families, marriages, churches, universities, and so forth. But there is a sense in which in most organized societies, the government is the ultimate institutional structure. Of course the power of governments varies enormously from liberal democracies to totalitarian states; but, all the same, governments have the power to regulate other institutional structures such as family, education, money, the economy generally, private property and even the church. Again, governments tend to be the most highly accepted system of status functions, rivaled by the family and the church. Indeed, one of the most stunning cultural developments of the past few centuries was the rise of the nation-state as the ultimate focus of collective loyalty in a society. People have, for example, been willing to fight and die for the United States, or Germany, or France, or Japan in a way that they would not be willing to fight and die for Kansas City or Vitry-le-François.
How do governments, so to speak, get away with it? That is, how does the government manage as a system of status function superior to other status functions? One of the keys, perhaps the most important key, is that typically governments have a monopoly on organized violence. Furthermore, because they have a monopoly on the police and the armed forces, they in effect have control of a territory in a way that corporations, churches, and ski clubs do not control a territory. The combination of control of the land plus a monopoly on organized violence guarantees government the ultimate power role within competing systems of status functions. The paradox of government could be put as follows: Governmental power is a system of status functions and thus rests on collective acceptance, but the collective acceptance, though not itself based on violence, can continue to function only if there is a permanent threat of violence in the form of the military and the police. Though military and police power are different from political power, there is no such thing as government, no such thing as political power, without police power and military power (more about this later).
The sense in which the government is the ultimate system of status functions is the sense that old-time political philosophers were trying to get at when they talked about sovereignty. I think the notion of sovereignty is a relatively confused notion because it implies transitivity. But most systems of sovereignty, at least in democratic societies, are not transitive. In a dictatorship, if A has power over B and B has power over C, then A has power over C, but that is not really true in a democracy. In the United States, there is a complex series of interlocking constitutional arrangements between the three branches of government and between them and the citizenry. So the traditional notion of sovereignty may not be as useful as the traditional political philosophers had hoped it would be. Nonetheless, I think we will need a notion of the ultimate status function power in order to explain government.
Because I do not have a lot of space I am going to summarize some of the essential points about political power as a set of numbered propositions.
1. All political power is a matter of status functions, and for that reason all political power is deontic power.
Deontic powers are rights, duties, obligations, authorizations, permissions, privileges, authority and the like. The power of the local party bosses and the village council as much as the power of such grander figures as presidents, prime ministers, the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court are all derived from the possession by these entities of recognized status functions. And these status functions assign deontic powers. Political power thus differs from military power, police power and the brute physical power that the strong have over the weak. An army that occupies a foreign country has power over its citizens but such power is based on brute physical force. Among the invaders there is a recognized system of status functions and thus there can be political relations within the army, but the relation of the occupiers to the occupied is not political unless the occupied come to accept and recognize the validity of the status functions. To the extent that the victims accept the orders of the occupiers without accepting the validity of the status functions they act from fear and prudence. They act on reasons that are desire dependent.
I realize, of course, that all of these different forms of power—political, military, police, economic, and so on—interact and overlap in all sorts of ways. I do not suppose for a moment that there is a sharp dividing line, and I am not much concerned with the ordinary use of the word “political” as it is distinct from “economic” or “military”. The point I am making, however, is that there is a different logical structure to the ontology where the power is deontic from the cases where it is, for example, based on brute force or self-interest.
The form of motivation that goes with a system of accepted status functions is essential to our concept of the political, and I will say more about it shortly. Historically, the awareness of its centrality was the underlying intuition that motivated the old Social Contract theorists. They thought that there is no way that we could have a system of political obligations, and indeed, no way we could have a political society, without something like a promise, an original promise, that would create the deontic system necessary to maintain political reality.
2. Because all political power is a matter of status functions, all political power, though exercised from above, comes from below.
Because the system of status functions requires collective acceptance, all genuine political power comes from the bottom up. This is as much true in dictatorships as it is in democracies. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were both constantly obsessed by the need for security. They could never take the acceptance of their system of status functions for granted, as a given part of reality. It had to be constantly maintained by a massive system of rewards and punishments and by terror.
The single most stunning political event of the second half of the twentieth century was the collapse of communism. It collapsed when the structure of collective intentionality was no longer able to maintain the system of status functions. On a smaller scale a similar collapse of status functions occurred with the abandonment of Apartheid in South Africa. In both cases, as far as I can tell, the key element in the collapse of the system of status functions was the withdrawal of acceptance by large numbers of the people involved.
3. Even though the individual is the source of all political power, by his or her ability to engage in collective intentionality; all the same, the individual, typically, feels powerless.
The individual typically feels that the powers that be are not in any way dependent on him or her. This is why it is so important for revolutionaries to develop some kind of collective intentionality: class consciousness, identification with the proletariat, student solidarity, consciousness raising among women, or some such. Because the entire structure rests on collective intentionality its destruction can be attained by creating an alternative and inconsistent form of collective intentionality
I have so far been emphasizing the role of status functions and consequently of deontic powers in the constitution of social and political reality. But that naturally forces a question on us: How does it work? How does all this stuff about status functions and deontic powers work when it comes to voting in an election or paying my income taxes? How does it work in such a way as to provide motivations for actual human behavior? It is a unique characteristic of human beings that they can create and act on desire-independent reasons for action. As far as we know, not even the higher primates have this ability. This I believe is one of the keys to understanding political ontology. Human beings have the capacity to be motivated by desire-independent reasons for action. This leads to point number 4.
4. The system of political status functions works at least in part because recognized deontic powers provide desire-independent reasons for action.
Typically we think of desire-independent reasons for action as intentionally created by the agent, and promising is simply the most famous case of this. But one of the keys to understanding political ontology and political power is to see that the entire system of status functions is a system of providing desire-independent reasons for action. The recognition by the agent, that is to say by the citizen of a political community, of a status function as valid gives the agent a desire-independent reason for doing something. Without this there is no such thing as organized political and institutional reality.
What we are trying to explain is the difference between humans and other social animals. The first step in explaining the difference is to identify institutional reality. Institutional reality is a system of status functions, and those status functions always involve deontic powers. For example, the person who occupies an office near mine in Berkeley is the Chair of the Philosophy Department. But the status function of being Chair of the Department imposes rights and obligations that the occupant did not otherwise have. In such ways there is an essential connection between status function and deontic power. But, and this is the next key step, the recognition of a status function by a conscious agent such as me can give me reasons for acting, which are independent of my immediate desires. If my Chairman asks me to serve on a committee then, if I recognize his position as Chairman, I have a reason for doing so, even if committees are boring and there are no penalties for my refusal.
More generally, if I have an obligation, for example, to meet someone at 9:00 A.M., I have a reason to do so, even if in the morning I do not feel like it. The fact that the obligation requires it gives me a reason to want to do it. Thus, in the case of human society, unlike animal societies, reasons can motivate desires, instead of all reasons having to start with desires. The most obvious example of this is promising. I promise something to you and thus create a desire-independent reason for doing it. But it is important to see that where political reality is concerned, we do not need to make or create desire-independent reasons for action explicitly, as when we make promises or undertake various other commitments. The simple recognition of a set of institutional facts as valid, as binding on us, creates desire-independent reasons for action. To take an important contemporary example, after the year 2000 elections, many Americans did not want George W. Bush as President, and some of them even thought he got the status function in an illegitimate fashion. But the important thing for the structure of deontic power in the United States is that with very few exceptions they continued to recognize his deontic powers and thus they recognized that they had reasons for doing things that they would not otherwise have a desire to do.
It is a consequence of what I am saying that, if I am right, not all political motivation is self-interested or prudential. You can see this by contrasting political and economic motivation. The logical relations between political and economic power are extremely complex: both the economic and the political systems are systems of status functions. The political system consists of the machinery of government, together with the attendant apparatus of political parties, interest groups, and the like. The economic system consists of the economic apparatus for creating, distributing, and sustaining the distribution of wealth. Though the logical structures are similar, the systems of rational motivations are interestingly different. Economic power is mostly a matter of being able to offer economic rewards, incentives, and penalties. The rich have more power than the poor because the poor want what the rich can pay them and thus will give the rich what they want. Political power is often like that, but not always. It is like that when the political leaders can exercise power only as long as they offer greater rewards. This has lead to any number of confused theories that try to treat political relations as having the same logical structure as economic relations. But such desire-based reasons for action, even when they are in a deontic system, are not deontological. The important point to emphasize is that the essence of political power is deontic power.
5. It is a consequence of the analysis so far that there is a distinction between political power and political leadership.
Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do something whether they want to do it or not. Leadership is the ability to make them want to do something they would not otherwise have wanted to do. Thus different people occupying the same position of political power with the same official status functions may differ in their effectiveness because one is an effective leader and the other is not. They have the same official position of deontic power, but different effective positions of deontic power. Thus both Roosevelt and Carter had the same official deontic powers—both were presidents of the United States and leaders of the Democratic Party—but Roosevelt was far more effective because he maintained deontic powers in excess of his constitutionally assigned powers. The ability to do that is part of what constitutes political leadership. Furthermore, the effective leader can continue to exercise power and to maintain an informal status function even when he or she is out office.
6. Because political powers are matters of status functions they are, in large part, linguistically constituted.
I have said that political power is in general deontic power. It is a matter of rights, duties, obligations, authorizations, permissions and the like. Such powers have a special ontology. The fact that George W. Bush is President has a different logical structure altogether from the fact that it is raining. The fact that it is raining consists of water drops falling out of the sky, together with facts about their meteorological history, but the fact that George W. Bush is president is not in that way a natural phenomenon. That fact is constituted by an extremely complex set of explicitly verbal phenomena. There is no way that fact can exist without language. The essential component in that fact is that people regard him and accept him as President, and consequently they accept a whole system of deontic powers that goes with that original acceptance. Status functions can only exist as long as they are represented as existing, and for them to be represented as existing there needs to be some means of representation, and that means is typically linguistic. Where political status functions are concerned it is almost invariably linguistic. It is important to emphasize that the content of the representation does not need to match the actual content of the logical structure of the deontic power. For example, in order for Bush to be President people do not have to think “We have imposed on him a status function according to the formula X counts as Y in C”, even though that is exactly what they have done. But they do have to be able to think something. For example, they typically think “He is President,” and such thoughts are sufficient to maintain the status function.
7. In order for a society to have a political reality it needs several other distinguishing features: First a distinction between the public and the private sphere with the political as part of the public sphere, second, the existence of nonviolent group conflicts and third, the group conflicts must be over social goods within a structure of deontology.
I said I would suggest some of the differentia that distinguish political facts from other sorts of social and institutional facts. But, with the important exception of the point about violence, the ontology I have given so far might also fit nonpolitical structures such as religions or organized sports. They too involve collective forms of status function and consequently collective forms of deontic powers. What is special about the concept of the political within these sorts of systems of deontic powers?
I am not endorsing any kind of essentialism, and the concept of the political is clearly a family resemblance concept. There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that define the essence of the political. But there are, I believe, a number of typical distinguishing features. First, our concept of the political requires, I believe, a distinction between the public and private spheres, with politics as the paradigm public activity. Second, the concept of the political requires a concept of group conflict. But not just any group conflict is political. Organized sports involve group conflict, but they are not typically political. The essence of political conflict is that it is a conflict over social goods, and many of these social goods include deontic powers. So, for example, the right to abortion is a political issue because it involves a deontic power, the legal right of women to have their fetuses killed.
8. A monopoly on armed violence is an essential presupposition of government.
As I suggested earlier, the paradox of the political is this: In order that the political system can function there has to be an acceptance of a set of status functions by a sufficient number of members of the group sharing collective intentionality. But, in general, in the political system that set of status functions can only work if it is backed by the threat of armed violence. This feature distinguishes governments from churches, universities, ski clubs, and marching bands. The reason that the government can sustain itself as the ultimate system of status functions is that it maintains a constant threat of physical force. The miracle, so to speak, of democratic societies is that the system of status functions that constitutes the government has been able to exercise a control through deontic powers over the systems of status functions that constitute the military and the police. In societies where that collective acceptance ceases to work, as, for example, in the German Democratic Republic in 1989, the government, as they say, collapses.
One way to get at the aim of this chapter is to say that it is an attempt to describe those features of human political reality that distinguish it from other sorts of collective animal behavior. The answer that I have proposed to this question proceeds by a number of steps. Humans are distinct from other animals in that they have a capacity to create not merely a social but an institutional reality. This institutional reality is, above all, a system of deontic powers. These deontic powers provide human agents with the fundamental key for organized human society: the capacity to create and act on desire-independent reasons for action.
Some of the distinguishing features of the political, within the system of desire independent reasons for action, are that the concept of the political requires a distinction between the public and the private spheres, with the political as the preeminent public sphere; it requires the existence of group conflicts settled by nonviolent means, and it requires that the group conflict be over social goods. And the whole system has to be backed by a credible threat of armed violence. Governmental power is not the same as police power and military power, but with few exceptions, if no police and no army, then no government.
1. I am grateful to Bruce Cain, Felix Oppenheim and Dagmar Searle for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.