Despite Rawls, Liberalism Begets Oligarchy

Crispin Sartwell

5 December 2024

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates describe the process by which, he thinks, political systems, more or less inevitably, degenerate and get replaced. One key moment of political disaster, according to Socrates, is the transition from oligarchy to democracy, which Socrates strongly opposes. (Well, his students were the sons of oligarchs that the democracy had overthrown, and the Athenian democracy eventually sentenced him to death.) In an oligarchy, according to the Republic, the oligarchs build more and more wealth for fewer and fewer people. It starts to occur to the have-nots that they are the majority and can take the oligarchs' stuff if they band together.  

That leads to rule by the mob or rabble, which is how Socrates characterizes democracy. Then the democracy in turn falls to demagogues and devolves into a disastrous anarchy.

Now, we might not, ourselves, regard the transition from oligarchy to democracy as a sign of societal degeneration. First of all, we don't have the sorts of democracies that the Greeks had, which involved direct legislation by the citizenry and selecting officials by lot, for example. We (Americans, most Europeans, the Japanese, etc) have something sometimes called 'liberal' democracy: 'representative' democracy, with extremely large state sectors and very indirect procedures for registering popular will.

This sort of liberal democracy is marked by a hierarchy of political power that the Athenian direct democracy was consciously constructed to forestall: liberal democracies often feature large military establishments, sprawling prison systems, and a relatively few people who operate a great deal of political power. In today's liberal democracies, something like half the economy or more is directly state-connected. (Government spending as a percentage of GDP in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund: US 36%, France 58%, Japan 44%, Italy, 57%, and so on. And those figures hardly exhaust the effects of liberal governments on their nations' economies).

The power of the people in liberal democracies is the power to select between two or several parties' candidates. By contrast, the power of officials, whether tax collectors or prison guards, CIA directors or presidents, is the direct coercive power of the state: the power to tax and imprison, to establish or end welfare programs (and hence to feed or starve certain individuals or groups), to fund educational institutions, to make war.

Not coincidentally, as you may have noticed, liberal democracies have an inveterate tendency toward oligarchy. If I said that the US was a liberal democracy, people might nod along. If I characterized it as an oligarchy, people might nod along too. Unfortunately, we do not have to choose between these; they amount to the same thing, practically. That's my assertion: liberalism, because it begins by recognizing the legitimacy of state power and by qualifying or making indirect the connection of the "will of the people" to the shape of the government, leads inevitably to oligarchy.

The basic reason for this is what I term "the principle of hierarchical coincidence": in a given society, hierarchies tend to coincide. It would be odd, for example, to find a society where members of the politically ascendant group (religion, class, race, and so on) were poorer on average than members of politically oppressed groups. In contemporary liberal democracies, officials control and dispose of about half the society's resources.

This is the sort of thing one hardly has to say: if you're running the place, you ain't broke. In fact, members of politically ascendant groups have, on average, much better access to all good things: incomes, education, health care, life expectancy, nutrition, and so on. In particular, resources chase political power and vice versa, and people in political ascendency will assign disproportionate portions of all goods to people like themselves, while people with wealth will seek to influence or control or merge with political power, and are likely to be successful. You might have noticed this.

One way to see the problems this raises is by focusing on the overwhelming contradiction at the heart of the philosophy of liberalism's greatest recent philosophical champion (if it's not Jürgen Habermas): John Rawls. I might give much longer versions of this argument, but let's cut to the chase.

Rawls developed an intuitively compelling conceptual defense of liberalism. His principles of justice, which I regard as plausible, run like this, roughly: Justice demands equality in the distribution of all goods (food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and so on: goods are things all rational people can be presumed to want), except where inequality helps those lowest down (or, in an alternative and less excellent formulation, where inequality makes everyone's situation better). This may seem unlikely but, for example, having incentives for greater productivity in the form of monetary rewards might make the whole economy more productive, lifting all boats.

Now, one of the basic goods that a society needs to distribute, Rawls allows, is political power itself. So a just society must make everyone politically equal, except where inequality of power helps those who are least empowered. That's going to be a lot harder case to make in any given situation than the previous argument about productivity. But at any rate, on this conception you can be legitimately disempowered only if that helps people like you, or helps everyone. Neither of these seems offhand to be likely. Your being systemically disempowered, in most cases, harms you and helps the people who are exercising power over you.

However, Rawls's theory of justice does presuppose that we will have an active and effective government. We might define 'government' in the classic manner as a group of people exercising an effective monopoly of violence over a certain geographical area or a certain population. In any society with a government and in the ideal society Rawls describes, the distribution of political power is radically unequal. Some people have extremely little (perhaps only one vote among 200 million, let's say), and some people (Donald Trump, Gavin Newsome, the director of the CIA, Elon Musk) have a great deal. Members of the second group can, if they decide to, confiscate all the goods of the first, or just set up procedures whereby the wealth of the society steadily moves toward themselves.

This creates overwhelming problems for Rawls's theory of justice, and those problems reflect the astonishing incoherence of classical liberalism as a whole. If Rawls wants to maintain his principles of justice in any form, he cannot countenance a state, which is itself a distribution of goods completely incompatible with Rawls's principles of justice and which practically entails the unjust distribution of all other goods. Rawls endorses equality. But he achieves only extreme hierarchy.

And that is the problem with liberalism as a whole. If it is committed to any plausible conception of justice, or any degree of equality in the distribution of goods, it must foreswear the political state, the very nature of which flatly contradicts all of liberalism's professed values.

Sincere, consistent liberals, that is, starting with John Rawls, are obliged to be anarchists. Indeed, Rawls's theory of justice, though he did not know this, amount to a knock-down argument for anti-statism. We anarchists should express our gratitude.

However, we should also point out that classical liberalism as it stands, and to the extent that it retains its statism, simultaneously endorses equality and pervasive hierarchy in the distribution of all goods, as per the principle of hierarchical coincidence. Rawls's version shows clearly, and despite his best efforts how, contra Plato, democracy disintegrates into oligarchy.

Crispin Sartwell is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.

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