The Supreme Act of Political Virtuosity

The only way out is down

Here is another hardship a tyrant experiences, Simonides. He is just as capable as any citizen of recognising bravery, cleverness and moral rectitude in people, but instead of admiring such qualities, he is afraid of them. He worries about brave people using their courage in the service of freedom, about clever people intriguing against him and about morally good people being chosen by the general populace as their champions. So his fear makes him do away with such people, but then whom is he left with? Only people who are without morality, lack self-discipline and are servile.

-Xenophon, Hiero the Tyrant (trans. Robin Waterfield)

The other day, I returned from overseas to find a pamphlet from the local council sticking out of my letterbox. It contained the image above, showing how every £1 of tax taken in by the council is spent. As you can see, in the Borough of Gateshead, 33p in every £1 of council tax receipts gets spent on social care for adults; 19p is spent on social care for children. That means that about £83 of the £159 I am required by law to pay to the council each month is spent on activities that, in a sane (and, I would also argue, humane) society, would be being performed by extended families, charities, religious groups and local communities rather than the state.¹

I do not, you understand, resent this because of the impact on my wallet or because I have an animus towards foster children. Rather, what initially struck me about the image was that it seemed to say something starkly important about the cost - in purely monetary, rather than moral or spiritual, terms, of course - of familial and social breakdown in the UK. And in this sense it is a microcosm of the bigger picture: huge, monumental expenditure by the state on tasks which until extremely recently in human history were entirely performed by society itself. (The British state currently spends about £250 billion per year on benefits alone, according to one source I found; in comparison, to give an idea of the scale of this expenditure, £60 billion is spent on schools each year, while about £54 billion is spent on national defence).

But then I realised there is another way of looking at things. Seen in a certain light, the image is an illustration of the cruel genius that is at work in the way in which the modern state operates, and of which government in the UK is the true exemplar. It represents in microcosm what Bernard Crick once called the ‘supreme act of political virtuosity’ - namely, the complete subjection of society to government, and the consequent total destruction of the barrier between the public and the private. It is a harbinger in other words of the full achievement of the most wicked of Machiavelli’s pieces of advice to the prince:

A wise ruler must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him.

What more effective way of achieving total loyalty for the state could there be than to replace competing sources of loyalty, particularly the family, which is its greatest and most powerful rival? And how, then, are we to think of societal and familial breakdown - as something which the state regrets because of its associated costs, or welcomes because it is associated with the dissolution of its hated enemies?

Asking these questions gets us to the heart of the problem that lies at the root of politics in modernity, and which will ultimately bring the entire edifice crashing down. And here it is worth dwelling a little further on Crick’s strange declaration - which, it is important to make clear, he did not mean as a compliment. Why is the subjection of society to the state an act of ‘virtuosity’, and why would an act of ‘virtuosity’ prove in the end to be disastrous?

To provide the answer, we have to think a little about the nature of modern ‘regimes’. The American political philosopher Harvey Mansfield helpfully described a ‘regime’ as the rule of a certain ‘some’ over the ‘many’. Any system of government will be in this sense a regime - it could be a rule of the rich (an oligarchy), an autocrat (a tyranny), the representatives of the people (a republic) and so on.

Modernity is defined in political terms as the rejection of givens with regard to status and hierarchy. Modern people do not accept any form of hierarchy that is not able to justify itself in such a way as to satisfy what they take to be rationality or reason. And this means that modern regimes of whatever stripe always have to be able to appeal to reason itself as their foundation: the ‘some’ rule over the ‘many’ not because God says so, because of unquestioned social norms, or because of some appeal to ‘this is just the way things are’ - but rather because there is a indeed a reason why they should.

Since all modern regimes must then be able to provide satisfactory reasons for the ‘some’ ruling over the ‘many’ - satisfactory in terms of satisfying the intellect - then they become constitutionally, as it were, transactional. ‘We will rule over you because it will be better if we do’ becomes the order of the day. And this means, naturally, that modern regimes are driven ineluctably towards a discourse of necessity. The ‘some’ present themselves as necessary to the ‘many’, in order to cement their status in perpetuity - because as soon as the ‘some’ are no longer deemed to be necessary, the ‘many’ will slough them off like so much dead skin.

This, to return us to Machiavelli, puts modern regimes on a ‘princely’ path almost inescapably. Because in modernity everybody is, by default, equal in the sense that there is no prima facie hierarchy that is not subject to the requirement to give satisfactory reasons for its existence, hierarchies - it necessarily follows - can only be established on the basis of purported merit. This makes modern politics, and government, a matter always of asserting a claim on the part of the ‘some’ to be more intelligent, more capable, more wise, more competent, than the ‘many’ who they rule. And this is the logic of the rule of the prince as Machiavelli represented it: the prince is the one who has ‘virtuosity’, or virtù, and that is the reason why - and the mechanism through which - he rules.

Political ‘virtuosity’ in this sense then is to be understood as the possession of the capacity and will to be in charge, and to remain in that position. And this, it will be seen, makes clear what Crick was driving at. If political virtuosity means possessing the capacity and will to be in charge, then the pinnacle of political virtuosity - its most perfect expression and realisation - consists of the absolute elimination of the capacity for self-government among those who are ruled. Where those who are ruled retain the capacity for self-government, the likelihood is always present that some day or other they will decide they do not particularly need the ruler after all. He must, in order to remain in charge, therefore subject them totally to his will by making them absolutely reliant upon him, and thereby expunge any competing source of loyalty and any capacity which society retains to stand on its own two feet.

Seen in this light, the modern welfare state is exposed for what it is - the means by which the loyalty of the population is secured, gradually but inexorably from its humble beginnings in sickness insurance to its epic modern size. By no means have the totalising tendencies inherent within it yet been fully realised, but the extent to which it permeates society - the extent to which it has rendered the barrier between public and private porous - is often disguised by its very ubiquity. Though in every country it is given different names and acronyms it is present in everything from childcare to pensions, from disability benefits to healthcare provision, from tax credits to housing. And it is no exaggeration to say that almost everybody in a developed country relies on its existence, directly or indirectly, to some degree or other.

This has had the effect, of course, of destabilising or dissolving all other potential repositories of loyalty - rendering them contingent, subordinating them to the state’s interests, or eliminating them altogether. And this has had the obvious knock-on consequence of setting each and every individual in society in a direct relationship with the state itself: everybody known to it, legible to it, transparent to it, paying to and receiving money from it. We are not so much its slaves as we are its children, dependent on it at every turn for safety and succour, and definitionally lacking in the capacity to rely on ourselves or look out for our own interests. This, then, is what political virtuosity really looks like: the infantilisation of the population, the elimination of their autonomy and self-governing capacity, and the perpetuation of the existing governing framework indefinitely, in ever-increasing strength.

I earlier, though, said that it was political virtuosity in this sense that would bring the entire edifice of the modern regime crashing down. And readers will already have likely identified the reason why this is inescapably the case: modern regimes, which always have to have a rationalistic account as to why the ‘some’ should rule the ‘many’, must always be in a position to demonstrate that they are somehow making things better. But it is a feature of human societies that prosperity only emerges in conditions in which the capacity for self-government within the population is large. This puts the modern regime exactly in the middle of a gulf between a rock and a hard place; it is driven by its internal logic to render the population totally reliant on its existence, but in doing so it can only destroy the means by which a productive economy is brought into being.

We already know this, of course, in the abstract sense. To stick with the example of the UK, national debt now runs at 101.3% of GDP (as of December 2023) and is projected to hit 270% of GDP by 2070; we spend £89 billion a year servicing the interest on debt alone. This is the case even as the number of people on out-of-work benefits goes through the roof. Growth and productivity, meanwhile, are anaemic; the tax burden seems set only to increase. As the state renders us reliant upon it, in other words - as it completes its project of political virtuosity - it appears to be destroying the very basis of our prosperity and the means by which our society generates wealth.

But to understand it in a more concrete sense, just go to the most impoverished areas of the town or city nearest to where you live. In it you will find people who have, and whose parents and grandparents and perhaps even great-grandparents have, been systematically deprived of their dignity, autonomy and means of self-reliance by an overweening form of welfarism, and who have as a consequence been made completely reliant on the state not just for nice middle-class goodies like free childcare, but for the very means of sustenance - food, housing, etc. - from day to day and week to week.

It is now, in other words, the case in most developed Western countries that a significant proportion of the population would have no means to support themselves if the state were to disappear, and who moreover have barely ever encountered in their daily life anybody who would be in a position to do so. Consider for a moment what life would look like in the kind of neighbourhood I am talking about if the state ceased to provide welfare: this is the logic of political virtuosity in a nutshell, and this is what it looks like in its purest, most potent form - where the state provides the minimal conditions separating mankind from abject impoverishment and total social cataclysm, but in doing so nonetheless creates conditions of abject social and moral decay through a perpetual project of enervation.

I do not mean to suggest that the path which we are on leads to a universalisation of the conditions of social deprivation that prevails in the kind of places which I am talking about - there will be a course correction before that happens, because there will necessarily have to be. As the old economists’ saying goes, if something cannot go on forever, then it will stop - and since we cannot go on spending hundreds of billions of pounds on the welfare state each year, sooner or later the practice will have to come to an end. But when it does, things are going to look seriously ugly, for the very reason that the political virtuosity of successive generations of political leaders has rendered so much of society incapable of governing itself, and has caused its capacity for self-reliance (and here I should of course emphasise that I mean society’s, rather than the individual’s, capacity to rely on itself) to seep away. What happens to a society that has come to rely on the state for material wellbeing when the state is forced by circumstances to shrink?

The grim irony of this is that as we pass that crucible, it may force us to concentrate our minds on the question of what is actually necessary for the state to do and what the justifications for its existence really are. Because, of course, even while we recognise that modern regimes function by making themselves appear indispensable, we also recognise that this is not solely a matter of appearance. There are some activities - the maintenance of law and order, the existence of a judiciary, the security of borders, national defence - that are unambiguously necessary for the state to engage itself in. And these things, the maintenance of law and order in particular, seem set to become increasingly significant when the welfare state begins its inevitable unwinding. In the process of decay and collapse, then, we may - as people tend to do during times of genuine crisis - start to rediscover our capacity to think clearly about what justifications there really are for the regime which governs us. But we have, I fear, plenty more virtuosity to get through before that happens.

1. I leave aside the fact that in a sane society the local council would also not be making investments, promoting public health and wellbeing, trying to ‘grow’ the economy, and so on and so forth.