The Importance of Associational Government

What is the best way to create a prosperous and free country? Is it through the careful work of an enlightened elite, the imposition of a higher form of government from the top down? Or is it through the peaceful interaction of ordinary people, the slow work of trust-building from the bottom up?

It’s an important issue at a time when the United States is trying to bring democracy to Iraq and wondering what to do about the eruption of left-wing thugs in South America.

In a thoughtful article in TCSDaily Arnold Kling looks at this critical matter, and introduces the work of Meir Kohn. Kohn opposes the concept of “associational government” against “predatory government.” As Kohn writes:

The economic basis of associational government is joint action. A group engaged in any common activity -- whether production, trade, or predation -- will organize itself for joint action whenever it is advantageous to do so. Unlike predatory government, associational government is government from below, it is voluntary, and it derives its authority from the will of the group.

Or to put it in Kling’s words:

Kohn's theory is that the associational state -- meaning limited government that is held accountable to the governed -- is built from the bottom up by smaller forms of associations. Government as we know it is not created by constitutions or democratic vote. Those institutions can help to maintain associational government once it is established, but associational government is possible in the first place only if people have a strong tradition of religious, commercial, and lesser governmental institutions.

The success of self-government in the Dutch Republic, in Britain, and in the United States built upon a solid foundation of voluntary institutions. But the big states like France and Spain had a strong king and weak institutions. It is not therefore an accident that “the commercial and industrial revolutions took off earliest in the associational states” like Britain.

The problem is that this model does not encourage optimism on Iraq. Writes Wretchard at the Belmont Club:

There is total lack of trust among the families, the tribes, and the sectarian factions created by the 35 years of despotism and isolation of the criminal Saddam regime.

Without a foundation of cooperation and trust how can the groups of Iraq get together and govern?

And when we look at the peasant cultures in Venezuela and on the altiplano of Peru and Bolivia we can understand why it is that left-wing thung dictators can battle to power.

The bottom line is, of course, that if you want the prosperity of capitalism you have to build the associational culture of cooperation and trust throughout society. In Marxian terms you would say that the superstructure of freedom depends of the productive forces released by the bourgeois culture of serving the consumer.