The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

This solidarity also helped with the other major objective of the U.S. Constitution—to control the people and their participation in politics. A strong state was useful for keeping order, unifying markets, and providing national defense, but it had to be a state immune from capture by the common people if they got to be excessively interested and involved in politics. So spreading power broadly via the separation of powers and indirect elections wasn’t just a solution to the Gilgamesh problem and the anxieties about the federal state acting despotically of its own volition. It was also a way to make sure that state institutions could not be taken over by the common people. The danger of popular political participation terrified both the Federalists and the Southern elites whose wealth was tied up in their slaves and the plantation economy. So an opportunity was born to kill two birds with one stone: by limiting the ability of the common people to exercise political power, the Federalists would both achieve one of their own objectives and make the whole project more palatable to Southern elites who could otherwise resist their state-building project. Moreover, many of the elites of the day, like Jefferson, were confident that even non-elite whites shared this outlook and so could be granted “certain unalienable Rights” and “freedom,” without much fear that they would share those privileges with the slaves. So the notion of freedom that came out during the process of American state building was at once glorious (for whites) and fettered (for blacks), with predictable consequences.

The Circuitous Path of American State Building

The U.S. Constitution managed, in one fell swoop, to address the key problems confronting the Federalists. It built a state; it made sure that its powers couldn’t be captured by factions or the general population, thus guaranteeing property rights, a particularly important issue for American elites; it preserved the autonomy of the states; and it reluctantly granted people essential rights against potential abuse by the state. Reluctantly, grudgingly, but also with the knowledge that even poorer whites shared many of the interests of the elites—for example in the slave economy, as we have seen.

But spreading power between different bodies and groups ran the risk of creating quite a bit of gridlock. This became particularly apparent later when organized political parties emerged. One party might have a majority in Congress, and a different one might have a majority in the Senate, since it was elected according to different rules. The president, chosen by yet another method, might not be able to gain majority support in either house. Yet this potential for gridlock made it easier to control the federal government, and thus made the Constitution more acceptable to the states. But there was also a clear downside. While the main objective of the Constitution was to create a powerful central state with more capacity, this system generated a fair bit of incapacity as well. This incapacity was particularly damaging for social policies and redistribution of income, since someone could always object and block them. This combination of state strength and weakness, something the Federalists had to put up with to satisfy all of their objectives, and how it has been dealt with over time, is a consequence of American exceptionalism in state building.

In some dimensions American state building worked quite nicely. The weakness of the federal state meant that it could not turn into a Despotic Leviathan, and society knew this. Guarantees such as the police power of states were a crucial element in persuading state elites to ratify the Constitution in the first place and for the most part to refrain from blocking its expansion later on. A powerful Red Queen effect then followed, strengthening state institutions. At the same time, however, the initial weakness endured and made it difficult for the state to meet the growing demands coming from a society in the grips of rapid economic and social change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One initial side effect of this weakness was the lack of revenues. With the newly created federal tax system, the government was able to fund George Washington’s army that marched off to western Pennsylvania to crush the Whiskey Rebellion. But the Constitution stated that “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” So no “direct taxes,” specifically income taxes, for the federal government. With one hand the Constitution gave and with the other it took away. How could the federal state achieve its objectives without revenues?

It had to improvise. This improvisation then turned into a strategy of public-private partnership, with the government relying on the private sector for both implementing and setting the direction of many of its important functions, with its own role limited to providing land, inducement, and some subsidies. For example, the government wanted to make sure that the east and west coasts were linked by a railway line, but could not build one itself. For one thing, before the Civil War, Southern politicians had blocked the route that Northerners preferred. For another, the government did not have the money to build the railway. So it decided to incentivize the private sector to do it. In 1862 Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act. The act gave railway companies not only guaranteed loans backed by the government, but also vast amounts of land along the line of rail. Section 2 of the act granted right of way for two hundred feet on either side of the railways and allowed the railway company to freely take any material needed for the construction of the railway. Section 3 gave the railway companies up to five square miles of land on each side of the line of rail for every mile of track that they laid (the railway companies’ take was doubled in 1864). This created huge incentives for the railway companies to get the work done, since once the railroad was built the land would be valuable and they could sell it for considerable profit. We saw in Chapter 1 how the Union Pacific railway, as soon as it constructed the track in Wyoming, founded the city of Cheyenne and began to sell off the land. None of this required new spending, so the federal government did not need to raise taxes.

The public-private partnership strategy to build the transcontinental railway wasn’t just about spending as little government money as possible. It also aimed at shackling the budding American Leviathan. It focused on incentivizing the private sector to do work that in other parts of the world might have been done by the government, so that the state did not grow too big or too powerful. It kept the private sector involved too, so that the Leviathan remained tightly monitored.

Working with the private sector to provide basic public services was not new in 1862. One of the most iconic institutions of nineteenth-century America, the U.S. Post Office, was also founded on this model. As early as 1792 the first Congress passed the Post Office Act to create a federal postal service and quickly managed to form a huge web connecting the country. The post office soon became the single most important government employer. In 1816, 69 percent of the federal civilian workforce were postmasters. By 1841 this number had risen to 79 percent, and there were over 9,000 postmasters. The New York Times described it in 1852 as the “mighty arm of civil government.” Yet the post office was a public-private partnership as well. The mail was carried by private stagecoaches subsidized by the federal government. By 1828 there were over 700 private mail contractors. This partnership enabled the federal state to establish a widespread presence throughout this vast territory. Relative to population, the United States had twice as many post offices as Britain and five times as many as France at this time. The pervasiveness of the postal service was apparent to Tocqueville during his famous travels in 1831. He remarked:

There is an astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers among these savage woods … I do not think that in the most enlightened districts of France there is an intellectual movement either so rapid or on such a scale as in this wilderness.

He also noted how it provided a “great link between minds” and “penetrates” into the “heart of the wilderness.” The post office wasn’t just indicative of the presence and functionality of the state. It also facilitated the flow of information, and helped ideas spread and spurred new ones. It made many critical economic activities, including patenting and securing intellectual property rights, much easier. Economic historian Zorina Khan notes that “rural inventors in the United States could apply for patents without serious obstacles, because applications could be submitted by mail free of postage. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office also maintained repositories throughout the country, where inventors could forward their patent models at the expense of the Post Office. As such, it is not surprising that much of the initial surge in patenting during early American industrialization occurred in rural areas.” Moreover, already by the 1830s, the Post Office was a modern bureaucratic institution, working and acting quite autonomously.

We see a version of public-private partnership in the federal judiciary as well. The U.S. legal system partially outsourced the business of investigating infringements and bringing lawsuits to private citizens. So when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination in the private sector based upon race, gender, national origin, or religion, it left the enforcement not to government agencies but to private lawsuits brought under Title VII. This decision significantly contributed to the explosion of private litigation over the past five decades. At about 20,000 cases per year, employment discrimination lawsuits are today the second-largest category of litigation in federal courts after petitions by prisoners asking to be freed. Private civil action in courts was also encouraged by potentially large economic damages and attorney fee awards for winning plaintiffs. Similarly, infringements by corporations in the United States are typically policed by private class-action suits, not by the bureaucracy or the prosecutorial power of the U.S. judicial system. Taking the public-private partnership in legal matters to its extreme, U.S. law also came to depend on private lawsuits to deal with fraud against the government. Building on a provision in English common law called qui tam that has long been disused in Britain, U.S. law allows private individuals to bring lawsuits against parties that defraud the government. If a lawsuit succeeds, the plaintiff receives a fraction (ranging between 15 and 25 percent) of the amount the federal government recovers.

This unusual process of judicial evolution has restrained the power of the federal government (with the independent judiciary acting as a barrier against government overreach), developed a legal system rooted in the demands and concerns of (at least some of) its citizens, and made the expanding capacity of the state palatable to powerful segments of society. Like the post office, the judiciary played a key role in knitting the United States together with a common set of rules, which also made westward expansion possible. The first thing that happened while a territory still had less than 5,000 people was the appointment by Congress of a governor and two judges.

Public-private partnerships were complemented with another political compromise: federal-local partnerships. U.S. federalism came to mean not only dividing powers between federal and state and local governments, but also devolving law enforcement and many public services to local authorities. So even though the United States has an education system that relies on public provision of elementary and secondary education, all of this provision is at the local level, carried out and financed by school districts, counties, and states out of their own revenues. The roots of this system go back to the Tenth Amendment, which reserved the power to provide and control education for the states. Even though the power of the federal government to raise revenues was circumscribed, it wasn’t so for states and local governments. So, many states passed legislation during the early Republic to allow their school districts to impose taxes in order to finance local education. In the nineteenth century these revenues financed not only schools in urban areas and townships, but also rural “common schools,” whose distinguishing feature was their local finance and control. The common schools taught elementary subjects, but in a way that was consistent with the preferences and values of their communities. Consistent with the public-private partnership, the federal state again played the role of inducer and subsidizer. The Land Ordinance of 1785, written by Thomas Jefferson, divided federal lands in what was then the Northwest into townships of thirty-six square miles, and each township into thirty-six sections, and the revenues of one section were set aside to finance schools. The states incorporated later in these lands thus had resources for schooling reserved. The same arrangement continued later, with even more sections set aside to generate revenues for schooling in California and the Southwest.

When malnourishment among schoolchildren first became evident in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the cities that started providing free school lunches to children from poor families. The federal government came in only later to subsidize and spread these programs, especially with the National School Lunch Act in 1946. When the extent of discrimination against, and the poor quality of education received by, students with disabilities caught the public’s attention, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, but left the financing for specialized education to school districts and states, which still bear over 90 percent of the cost.

In all of these instances, we are witnessing a highly shackled U.S. Leviathan, forced to develop new and creative methods to expand its capacity in the face of novel and sometimes urgent challenges. Remarkably, in the American version of the Red Queen effect the weakness of the central state has been a source of its strength too. It has encouraged the state to develop new models to work with society and local governments to deal with these problems. It has also constantly reassured actors to cede power to the federal state, safe in the belief that it would remain constrained. So the central state expanded its remit and capacity, while still maintaining its original weaknesses and remaining in the corridor—a brilliant way to create a continually evolving Shackled Leviathan. Yet as we have already anticipated, this success had significant downsides.

We Shall Overcome

The standard narrative of American history is not only deficient in turning a blind eye to the injurious consequences of the compromises and the architecture of the Constitution. It also ignores the critical role that society’s mobilization and the Red Queen played at every turn. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as we have seen, were not a gift of benevolent elites; they were the result of the tussle between elites and the people, and without this ongoing struggle, they would have been as ineffectual as the creation of Enkidu was for liberty in Uruk.

There is no better way to illustrate this than by the activities and successes of the civil rights movement. Perhaps the two most famous fruits of the movement were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the civil rights movement organized and gained adherents in the 1950s, it devised a set of strategies to confront the discriminatory policies of the Southern states, which had until then remained safe in their insulation from the federal Bill of Rights. At first the federal government tried to remain neutral and only intervened when absolutely forced by widespread deteriorations of public order. The civil rights movement then began intensifying its activities to force federal action. One strategy was that of the “freedom riders,” mixed-race groups riding interstate buses in violation of Southern segregation laws. In May 1961 mobs attacked freedom riders in various parts of Alabama, creating such havoc that the Justice Department asked a federal district court in Montgomery, the state capital, to intervene. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother to the president, ordered six hundred U.S. Marshals to Montgomery to protect the freedom riders. Yet the first impulse of the Kennedy government was to try to avoid intervention, and it sought to undermine the solidarity of civil rights activists. One example was the Voter Education Project, which seems to have been intended to channel activists into actions that Kennedy viewed as less disruptive. People in the civil rights movement got the message. In 1963 they launched a plan for disrupting segregationist laws in Birmingham, Alabama, intended to induce such a strong reaction that the federal state would have to intervene more systematically. As activist Ralph Abernathy put it:

The eyes of the world are on Birmingham tonight. Bobby Kennedy is looking here at Birmingham, the United States Congress is looking at Birmingham. The Department of Justice is looking at Birmingham. Are you ready, are you ready to make the challenge? … I am ready to go to jail, are you?

Most controversial was the “Children’s Crusade” of May 2, when six hundred children were arrested, the youngest being eight years old. President John F. Kennedy had no choice but to conclude that “the events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.” The next month he proposed what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the start of not just reinstating African Americans’ political power but also combating the norms of economic and social discrimination against them especially prevalent in, but not confined to, the South.

The civil rights movement didn’t halt there. Next stop was Selma, Alabama. Beginning in January 1965 civil rights activists started a sustained campaign to highlight the violation of the basic rights of blacks, particularly the right to vote. On March 7 some six hundred activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery. They were attacked by local law enforcement officers: seventeen marchers were hospitalized and another fifty were treated for lighter injuries. By then John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson had become president. Johnson intensified federal intervention in the South, and a local federal judge, Frank Johnson, ruled that “the law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”

Just as the Birmingham demonstrations had paved the way for the Civil Rights Act, the Selma march cleared the way for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, abolishing many of the ruses—specifically literacy tests and poll taxes—that had been used to disenfranchise African Americans. One week after the Selma march, President Johnson made his famous “We Shall Overcome” speech. He began:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy … At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord … So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

Johnson compared the civil rights movement to the U.S. War of Independence by “patriots” in Massachusetts. He was right; both were reactions of society against despotism. Johnson’s speech drove home that the shackled nature of the American Leviathan wasn’t simply a matter of some clever constitutional architecture; it critically depended on the society’s mobilization and growing assertiveness.

Life in the American Corridor

As the nature of challenges changed, the American Leviathan took on more responsibilities, sometimes even temporarily breaking free of the grip of its original weakness. As with the civil rights movement, this was often a response to society’s demands.

A turning point, emblematic of the dynamics of the Red Queen effect, was the Progressive era, when the federal state stepped up to respond to new demands, while social and institutional changes simultaneously intensified society’s checks over the state. The economic opportunities and the unified national market created by the federal state in the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War unleashed rapid industrialization and growth. It was an uneven process, often dominated by and benefiting a handful of companies, especially those who knew how to work the system. As a result, the period Mark Twain described as “the Gilded Age,” from the 1870s to the early twentieth century, witnessed the emergence of huge companies that came to dominate their sectors or even the entire economy. Led by railway tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, industrialists including John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and financiers such as John Pierpont Morgan, these “robber barons” not only invested massively and drove economic expansion, but also built unparalleled fortunes and routinely abused their economic and political power. This was growth, but of a very unequal sort, made worse by the fact that nineteenth-century American institutions were not up to the task of controlling these powerful, unscrupulous men and their “trusts,” as their companies were known at the time.

The American Leviathan reacted to the changing economic and political circumstances by augmenting its capacity to regulate such monopolies, starting with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the first step toward national regulation of industry, followed by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Hepburn Act of 1906, and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Three successive activist presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson used these laws to break up monopolies. Taft not only prosecuted the trusts but also changed the landscape of the American economy in 1913 by proposing the Sixteenth Amendment, which introduced a federal income tax.

But this wasn’t a process in which just the state got stronger. These acts and the election of the activist presidents were consequences of mounting popular mobilization of the Progressive movement, which brought discontented farmers and urban middle classes together to exert a powerful influence on the era’s politics. Media, including journalists known as “muckrakers,” began playing an even more active role in influencing public policy by exposing the abuses of the robber barons and how they were manipulating politics for their own private gain. Major institutional reforms strengthened society against the state and political elites. The Seventeenth Amendment of 1913 dismantled the election of senators by state legislatures and introduced direct elections. This started to reduce the oversized influence of tycoons over the legislature that had been brilliantly satirized in the series of articles David Graham Phillips published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1906, titled “The Treason of the Senate.”

The expansion of the central state’s capacity and its role in the economy accelerated during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. This was once again a response to fresh exigencies created by new economic conditions, this time in the form of the most severe economic downturn of modern times, the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal initiated tighter regulation of banks (with the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933, and especially the founding of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insured small deposits in order to prevent bank runs); a major expansion of government spending on public works with the establishment of the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority; a new program to prop up agricultural prices and farm incomes under the auspices of the newly founded Agricultural Adjustment Administration; and modern Social Security in 1935 and the Food Stamp Plan in 1939, which have remained as the mainstays of U.S. welfare policy. FDR also signed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and created an elaborate bureaucracy to enforce this law, investigating whether firms were in compliance and bringing lawsuits against them if they weren’t (even though, as we have seen, later legislation such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act eschewed this approach and went back to the public-private partnership model).

An equally significant expansion of the role of the federal state in the economy was spearheaded by President Johnson’s “Great Society” program. Johnson introduced the central tenet of the program, the “War on Poverty,” in his 1964 State of the Union address by stating, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

The War on Poverty too was a response to social changes, driven by both high rates of poverty that had long existed in many parts of the United States and the growing disparities between whites and blacks who had come to form a majority in many neighborhoods in inner cities. These economic conditions came to be viewed as the primary cause of the growing crime rates. Huge riots in New York City, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, and especially Los Angeles in 1964 and 1965 added significant urgency to these concerns. In addition to expanding and making permanent New Deal programs such as Social Security and food stamps, the Great Society increased disability insurance payments and coverage, initiated job-training programs for disadvantaged youth in the context of the ambitious Economic Opportunities Act of 1964, and founded Community Action Agencies tasked with helping poor citizens. The two continuing pillars of public funding of healthcare in the United States, Medicare for older Americans and Medicaid for welfare recipients, were both created by the Social Security Act of 1965. Most innovative perhaps were the educational programs, which included Head Start, providing preschool education for poor children; the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 for local school districts to assist children from non-English-speaking families; and the huge expansion of federal aid to universities and students from poor backgrounds for attending college.

Though society’s mobilization has triggered a spectacular growth in the capacity of the federal state, the architecture of the Constitution continued to influence the way that some of these programs were developed as well as their outcomes (Ronald Reagan quipped about the War on Poverty that “the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won”). Consider, for example, FDR’s flagship Social Security Act. Until the New Deal the United States had failed to develop any broad-based social insurance policy while Britain had started to move in that direction in 1906 and Germany even earlier in the 1880s. Private pension plans did exist in the United States but they reached less than 10 percent of the workforce. Most people had to rely on their families or what little they could save themselves to provide for old age. The government provided pensions for veterans, and veterans’ widows, and these represented 85 percent of people who had pensions in 1928. The centerpiece of the Social Security Act was a mandatory system of old-age pensions. The first section stated:

For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to aged needy individuals, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1936, the sum of $49,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title.

So the states were in the heart of the action. The act specified how much you would earn upon retirement, which depended on a person’s salary prior to retirement, but in no case could be more than $85 per month. This was a modest amount, and around one half of average wages at the time; yet it represented a dramatic commitment to a universal welfare program by the government. Ironically, Social Security made private pensions more attractive for companies because they could target them at their higher-paid and more-skilled workers, for whom government pensions would be inadequate. In fact, prior to the Social Security Act private firms were inhibited from introducing pension plans just for highly paid workers without simultaneously doing something for all the workers. But providing such benefits to all workers would have been expensive for employers. Once the act was passed, low-wage workers had access to pensions, reducing firms’ inhibitions in targeting private plans at higher-paid workers. As a spokesman for the National Dairy Producers Corporation noted, “The first thing that came to our attention was that only 1,200 of our total number of employees received over $3,000. Among those 1,200 were practically every employee that had a real influence on how the company went ahead, how it achieved success over its competitors … So we decided … we will have nothing paid into the plan by either employer or employee on salaries below $3,000, and we will let the social-security tax program take care of the salaries under $3,000.”

In effect, firms free-rode on the new policy. In doing so they benefited from the fact that such pension payments were tax deductible for the employer, counting as if they were an expense like wages. These pension benefits for employees, and up to a limit their own contributions, would only be taxed as income when they were drawn on during retirement, shifting tax payments into the future. While the government was introducing universal public pensions, it was simultaneously subsidizing private pensions. Moreover, high-paid workers would earn too much to actually benefit from Social Security. So the basis of a dual system, rather than a universal public pension system that covered everyone, was put in place. Predictably, after the introduction of Social Security, the coverage of private pensions rapidly increased from less than 10 percent of the labor force to 40 percent by the 1970s. Indeed, the coverage of the public system was far from universal to start with, since Southern politicians forced FDR to exclude agricultural and domestic workers so they could avoid giving benefits to African Americans.

If the situation of the United States with respect to pensions diverges from other developed countries, the approach to healthcare, despite Johnson’s Great Society, does so more nakedly. Here there is nothing like Social Security. In fact the only universal policies are Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for some segments of the poor. Otherwise, most Americans receive healthcare through their employers via private health insurance that is heavily subsidized by the government. So the public-private symbiosis is slanted even more toward the private.

The public-private partnerships and the constraints on the state, even as it was getting emboldened, have shaped other dimensions of state actions as well. They explain how the U.S. mobilized for World War II and the way it organized to fight the Cold War. They also account for the controversial role that contractors and companies such as Halliburton and Blackwater played in the Iraq War. It’s worth recalling that Edward Snowden, at the time of his explosive revelations about the National Security Agency’s secret data collection program, was a private contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Who Gets Their Kicks on Route 66?

The shifting mix of private and public provision was an expedient way for the American state to gain greater capacity over time, but it also meant that it was particularly hamstrung in dealing with several critical problems. Many of the pressing challenges facing the country today, ranging from high levels of poverty and lack of access to healthcare (by the standards of other rich nations) to crime (gargantuan compared to other countries) and lack of protection for citizens (easily visible in Ferguson, Missouri, or in Hyde Park, Chicago, where one of us lives), have their origins in this hamstrung state building.

The killing of Michael Brown must be seen in the context of the lamentable state of relations between the citizens and the police force in Ferguson. This is the complex outcome of many things, but it is common across many poor, minority urban neighborhoods. These areas have the same problems everywhere; they disproportionately house racial minorities; they have fewer jobs and economic opportunities than elsewhere in the nation and poverty rates are far higher than normal; they have a severe undersupply of public services; and they have much higher rates of crime, particularly gun crimes and homicides. This last feature is one of the reasons for the tense relations with the police. In the United States there is more or less a gun for every person—that’s over 300 million guns. The country with the next-largest number of guns relative to population is Yemen, though it has only about half a gun per person. Other countries are terribly badly supplied with guns; Britain and China, for instance, have only about one gun per twenty people. There are so many guns in the United States that they get into the capillaries of society, including into the ghettos with their immense social problems. One of the consequences of widespread distribution of guns is that the police are scared and they shoot first and ask questions afterward. They have a right to be scared. The city of St. Louis was the murder capital of the United States in 2015, with Baltimore and Detroit a close second and third. The murder rate in St. Louis in that year was 59 per 100,000 people, meaning that there were 188 homicides. This compares to the U.S. average of 5 per 100,000 for homicides, itself about five times higher than the average in Western Europe.

About two-thirds of all homicides in the United States involve firearms. The extraordinary number of guns in the country and their role in homicide is directly related to the Constitution and the Second Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” The right to bear arms, nowadays “firearms,” has been endlessly affirmed by the Supreme Court, no matter the extent of carnage inflicted on innocent people. As recently as 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court struck down laws in Washington, D.C., meant to restrict people’s access to firearms and to keep legally owned guns unloaded at home. It asserted for the first time that the ownership of arms was not in any way connected to militia membership but was for self-protection. The original wording of the Second Amendment, an attempt to keep the federal state weak, has left a long trail of violence and death in its wake. Remarkably, the Second Amendment’s scope got expanded over time, reflecting both the general feeling in the population about the importance of individuals protecting themselves (rather than the central state doing so) and the role of private interest groups and organizations, in this instance the National Rifle Association, which has effectively opposed any type of gun control in the U.S.

Yet the collateral damage in Ferguson from the peculiar path of U.S. state building doesn’t begin or end with gun violence. Ferguson has not always been such a hot spot of racial tensions. It used to be a suburban middle-class area, inhabited not by African Americans or other minorities, but by relatively affluent white people in single-family houses. In 1970 less than 1 percent of Ferguson’s population was black. In fact until the 1960s it was a “sundown town”—one of the characteristics of the U.S. illiberty, a town from which African Americans were banned once darkness fell. As we noted in Chapter 2, half of the counties through which the famous icon of personal liberty, Route 66, ran on its way between Chicago and Los Angeles had sundown towns. St. Louis, the first stop mentioned in the song made famous by Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry, had many sundown towns. Ferguson blocked off the main road from the neighboring predominantly black suburb of Kinloch with a chain and construction materials. It only kept open another road during the day so (black) housekeepers and domestic workers could get to their jobs in Ferguson. After 1970, however, the city’s black population rapidly grew, to 14 percent by 1980, 25 percent by 2000, 52 percent by 2010, and 67 percent today. This rapid change reflected some very common dynamics in the nature of U.S. urban areas, which are critical in understanding who got their kicks and how in Ferguson at the time of Michael Brown’s killing.

Let’s pick up the story of how Ferguson became a black neighborhood in the 1930s. So far we’ve seen the New Deal as a period of progressive national policy initiatives such as the Social Security Act, which tried to create universal social welfare policies (even if this was unsuccessful in the face of resistance from Southern states). But the story of dysfunctional policies isn’t just a story of the states. The federal state didn’t only fail to propose progressive policies; it implemented regressive ones. The most relevant example in Ferguson is the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), created by the National Housing Act of 1934. The FHA had worthy goals, one of which was to insure mortgages so as to encourage banks to issue them. If you received a mortgage from a bank but were unable to pay, the FHA would come in and pay the balance. Obviously there were greater and lesser risks, and to take account of these the FHA incorporated “residential security maps” into their 1936 underwriting handbook. These maps, constructed by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, divided urban areas into four zones labeled A, B, C, and D. A denoted the most desirable neighborhoods, and D the worst. In the maps, D areas were demarcated with a red pencil, thus initiating the practice of “redlining.” (The FHA’s redlined map of St. Louis is reproduced in the photography section.) Redlining has since become a catchall term for racial discrimination. There was little ambiguity about what zone D was meant to signify. The underwriting handbook contains a telling section on “Protection from Adverse Influences.” Section 228 advocates the use of “deed restrictions” to protect against such adverse influences. The next section notes that “natural or artificially established barriers prove effective in protecting a neighborhood … from adverse influences” and in particular they prevent the “infiltration” of “inharmonious racial groups.” Further, in valuing an area, “the Valuator should investigate areas surrounding the location to determine whether or not incompatible racial … groups are present,” since naturally they have to assess the “probability of the location being invaded by such groups.” As if this weren’t all clear enough, the manual then notes, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same … racial classes.”

In practice, of course, D areas were largely black neighborhoods, whose residents thus could not get their houses insured by the FHA. Hence African Americans could not get mortgages. Complementary strategies were also utilized to make sure that African Americans could not buy property in A areas, which were mostly white suburban residential neighborhoods. These strategies included explicit “deed restrictions” forbidding residents from selling their properties to a black person.

The net effect of these measures was to solidify a great deal of residential segregation. The FHA had to tone down the racial language of its manual in 1947, and in 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racially explicit covenants were unconstitutional. Yet other practices discriminating against blacks continued. A recent Federal Bureau of Investigation report provides evidence consistent with the claim that Donald J. Trump’s real estate company discriminated against black applicants for its rental apartments. The report quotes a former doorman repeating his supervisor’s instructions as: “If a black person came to 2650 Ocean Parkway [in Brooklyn] and inquired about an apartment for rent, and he, that is [redacted] was not there at the time, … I should tell him that the rent was twice as much as it really was, in order that he could not afford the apartment.”

It is clear that redlining and other discriminatory practices aimed at minorities left a long shadow, and even today one finds large discontinuities in the racial composition of neighborhoods right at the boundaries of those maps drawn in the 1930s. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that

segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.

As the population of the D areas rose and exceeded the available housing units, a few lucky African Americans managed to get homes in previously all-white areas, even in sundown towns. When they did, this opened the door to a process called “blockbusting,” which involved real estate agents scaring white tenants into selling at knockdown prices by warning them that the neighborhood was about to turn black and their property would become worthless. These tactics could quickly “tip” a city from white to black. Ferguson followed this path starting in the 1970s. A collapse in the provision of public services followed, moving the city toward becoming a ghetto. One of the first black people to buy a house in Kirkwood, another white suburb of St. Louis, was Adel Allen. He recalled how when he first moved there,

we had patrols on the hour. Our streets were swept neatly, monthly. Our trash pickups were regular and handled with dignity. The street lighting was always up to par. All of the services were—the streets were cleaned when there was snow, et cetera.

But as the composition of the neighborhood changed, the services went away.

We now have the most inadequate lighting in the city… . Now we have the people from the other sections of town that now leave their cars parked on our streets when they want to abandon them… . What they are making now is a ghetto in the process. The buildings are maintained better than they were when they were white but the city services are much less. Other sections of the city I believe are being forced to take sidewalks, for example. We are begging for sidewalks.

This is pretty much what happened in Ferguson. Take the Normandy school district, where Michael Brown graduated from high school just eight days before his death. The quality of education was so abysmal that in 2013 the state revoked the school district’s accreditation.

The hobbled nature of U.S. federal policies, forcing the government into public-private partnerships and a reliance on local authorities even when this isn’t warranted, generated other adverse consequences as well. Take healthcare. The United States spends about 50 percent more on healthcare as a proportion of national income than the average of the “rich nations club,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Yet it has the highest proportion of the population who lack access to healthcare. The OECD calculated in 2011 that approximately 85 percent of Americans had “health insurance coverage for a core set of services.” Of this figure, about 32 percent came from public insurance and 53 percent from private insurance. Even Mexico did better in terms of the proportion of the population covered. The way to reconcile high levels of spending with poor coverage is to note that the distribution of spending is much more unequal in the United States and cost controls are much weaker than in the rest of the OECD. Both features are a consequence of the peculiar U.S. model based on public-private partnerships. In 1998, before the Obamacare reforms, it was estimated that of the lowest-paid 20 percent of the labor force, only 24 percent were covered by health insurance. The same problems plague the pensions system where the benefits are skewed toward high-paid workers. Again in 1998, of the lowest-paid 20 percent of the labor force, only 16 percent were covered by a private pension, while for the highest-paid 20 percent the coverage rate was 72 percent. When Obamacare attempted to introduce a public option to give people access to low-cost insurance, this was shot down for being too reliant on the public sector. So even when the United States attempted to move toward universal healthcare coverage, this could not deviate much from the public-private partnership model.

This private-public combination ends up shunting the benefits from government subsidies squarely to the wealthiest people as well. The U.S. Treasury Department calculated in 2000 that the total amount of tax subsidies built into the pension and healthcare system added up to $100 billion a year (meaning that if they were removed the government would receive an extra $100 billion in tax revenues). Two-thirds of these subsidies went to the richest one-fifth of Americans. A mere 12 percent went to the bottom 60 percent. At its root, the private-public model is much less equitable than universal programs would be, but the organization of the American state doesn’t allow universal programs.

Why Can’t We Collect All the Signals All the Time?

In hindsight, it is perhaps understandable that the shackles and compromises imposed on the American Leviathan from its founding have kept it weak and forced it to come up with innovative, sometimes unusual solutions to deal with new problems and expand its capacity. It is more surprising that the same architecture has also made it overly powerful and harder to control in other dimensions. The roots of this paradoxical outcome are that when new security challenges and a growing international role made it necessary for the American state to take on more responsibilities, this couldn’t be done easily within the straitjacket that the Constitution had created. The state had to improvise to build these capacities away from the eyes of the public and the control of American institutions—a recipe for unshackling the Leviathan.

The story of the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover illustrates this paradoxical development. The Justice Department was founded in 1870 and charged with upholding laws and fighting crimes, including those against the United States. But it had no police force at its disposal. Reflecting the public-private partnership model, American presidents before Theodore Roosevelt and their Justice Departments had to rely on a private company, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as their police force and sometimes even spies. Roosevelt, as part of his broader state-building drive, wanted to build a federal police force. His attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, went to Congress in 1908 to get permission and money to create such a force. The House of Representatives flatly turned down the request. Representative George E. Waldo, Republican from New York, summarized many lawmakers’ fears when he stated that it would be “a great blow to freedom and to free institutions if there should arise in this country any such great central secret-service bureau as there is in Russia.”

The typical way that the federal government had dealt with such constraints in other matters was to find an arrangement that would assuage the concerns of those worried about its growing powers. But not this time. Bonaparte ignored Congress’s refusal and established a new investigative division using the expense fund of the Justice Department while Congress was in recess. He notified Congress only later and gave it his assurance that the new bureau would not be a secret police force. But the cat was out of the bag. It was never to go back in there once Hoover got to work.

In 1919, Hoover became the chief of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, charged with monitoring “enemies of the state.” By this point, the Radical Division had over a hundred agents and informants, and could arrest people accused of subversion. Allied with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover started drawing up a long list of Communists, anarchists, socialists, and others he viewed as subversives, especially among immigrants. Hundreds were deported because of their political views during the so-called Palmer raids organized by Hoover. Hoover was promoted to head the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, and remained in that post until his death in 1972. During that time he oversaw a massive expansion of the personnel and powers of the bureau, which changed its name to Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. Hoover turned the FBI into a mass surveillance force unaccountable to Congress, courts, or even the president. The FBI under Hoover wiretapped tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and others because of their politics, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lennon; spied directly on the leadership of the Soviet Union and China (something explicitly banned by its charter); and even went so far as to undermine the power and authority of several U.S. presidents. The apogee of the FBI’s covert activities was the program COINTELPRO, between 1966 and 1971, which aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and otherwise neutralizing various domestic political groups and organizations, including anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists and leaders in the civil rights movement, various black organizations, and an assortment of other left-wing groups, the vast majority of which were nonviolent. It was under this program’s auspices that Martin Luther King was wiretapped, publicly discredited and, by means of an anonymous letter, encouraged to commit suicide.

The Church Committee, which was tasked with investigating abuses by the FBI and other agencies in 1975 and led by Senator Frank Church, concluded that

the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the program served the “national security” the law did not apply… . Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that … The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.

The creeping increase of the unaccountable power of security agencies did not stop with the FBI. The CIA, which came out of the Office of Strategic Services and the Strategic Services Unit, two agencies tasked with espionage, information gathering and analysis, counterintelligence, and other covert operations during World War II, was officially established in 1947. Its mission and monitoring were poorly defined from the beginning. The CIA has been involved in several coups against foreign governments, typically unknown and uncontrolled by other branches of government. These included successful coups against several democratically elected leaders of foreign governments, such as the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddegh, in 1953, Guatemala’s president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and Chile’s president Salvador Allende in 1973, as well as several unsuccessful plots in Syria, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Vietnam before the war. Although the CIA is not supposed to operate against American citizens, it has also been engaged in domestic wiretapping and “extraordinary renditions,” which involved the extrajudicial transfer of individuals suspected of terrorism to secret prison sites or to countries where they were likely to be subject to torture.

Though the military remains one of the most trusted institutions among the U.S. public, its role and power have expanded as America’s involvement in foreign affairs and its engagement in the Cold War and then the war on terror have deepened. All of this has happened almost entirely away from the monitoring of society and the legislature. Even though President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself ordered some of the CIA operations against foreign governments, in his farewell address in January 1961 he expressed concerns about the unchecked power of the U.S. military, especially when allied with companies supplying it with arms and equipment. Eisenhower prophesied that

we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Well said. But how can the citizenry do that if it has no idea about what the FBI, the CIA, or the military are up to?

The revelations about the NSA wiretapping programs should thus be seen as a continuation of this trend of expanding military and security powers away from the supervision and monitoring of either other branches of the government or society at large. Information revealed by Edward Snowden indicates that the NSA used several different media, ranging from Internet servers and satellites to underwater fiber-optic cables and phone records in order to collect information about both foreigners, including leaders of American allies such as Germany and Brazil, and millions of Americans. The expansion of the NSA’s data collection mission appears to have taken place mostly under the auspices of Keith Alexander, its chairman between 2005 and 2014, whose unhinged approach is summarized by his question “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?”

The irony of the NSA debacle is that, even though the agency appears to have clearly and massively overstepped its purported boundaries and unconstitutionally collected information against American civilians, it has done so in a distorted version of the public-private partnership; it relied on private contractors and it compelled (or received the cooperation of willing) phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon and tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo! to share their customers’ data.

The Paradoxical American Leviathan

It is possible, perhaps even compelling, to see the rise of the American Leviathan as a success story—a society committed to liberty, a Constitution enshrining rights and protections, a state born with shackles on and remaining and evolving in the corridor because of the weight of the shackles. A case of the Red Queen gradually empowering the state to increase its reach and capacity without breaking free of the constraints imposed on it by society and its founding constitution. We may even argue that the American story has much to teach other nations about how to balance the power of the state and society. But we have also seen that there are two important elements missing from this optimistic reading of American history. First, the liberty that has been created by the American Leviathan is as much due to society’s mobilization as to clever design in the Constitution. Without the mobilized, assertive, and irreverent society, the Constitution’s protections wouldn’t be worth much more than empty promises. Second, the architecture of the Constitution, to the extent that it has been important, has had a dark side too. The compromises it introduced have made the federal state unable and unwilling to protect its citizens against local despotism, enforce its laws equally on all, or supply the type of high-quality and broadly available public services that other rich nations routinely provide to their peoples. When notable exceptions to this slumber of the federal state came, they were triggered by the mobilization of society and sometimes its more discriminated-against, disadvantaged parts. Paradoxically, however, beyond the weakness and incapacity of the state created by the Constitution, other dimensions of the state have developed out of the purview of society and even of other branches of government, and have become increasingly unshackled. An exceptional American success, but a very mixed one.

In this light, a pressing issue is whether the American state, encumbered as it is by the tight constraints imposed at its founding and the public-private partnership model that developed as a result, is up to the task of dealing with the increasingly complex challenges on the horizon. Can it better protect its citizens and generate more opportunities for its entire population? How can it gain the flexibility to come up with new models to augment its capacity and face new social and economic problems while still remaining shackled by society and institutions? Is U.S. society up to the task of pushing the state to confront these challenges while increasing its own vigilance? We’ll return to these questions in the final chapter.

Chapter 11

THE PAPER LEVIATHAN

Patients of the State

It’s a spring day in September 2008 in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. Summer is on the way, but it’s chilly. Paula is trying to register for a welfare program called Nuestras Familias (Our Families) to receive the welfare payments that poor Argentines are entitled to. “This has been the longest wait,” she told the sociologist Javier Auyero. “I’ve been in this since March. They asked me to come many times; there was always something (a document, a paper) missing.” But “you have to be calm, to be patient. Here you have to have patience. This is an aid that the government gives you, so you have to be patient.”

Patience is a prime virtue for those hoping to access public services in Argentina. Leticia, another aspirant for Nuestras Familias, “is by herself, standing alone in the back of the waiting room.” She has come to the office three times in the last two weeks. “I’m used to waiting, I have to wait everywhere. But the worst thing is that they make you go here and then there … I came two weeks ago; they told me to come back in three days. I came back and the office was closed. I returned the next day, and they told me there were no funds in the program.” She concludes, “You have to wait, because that’s how things are here. You have to come many times because if you don’t show up, you don’t get anything.”

Another of Auyero’s testimonies brilliantly characterized the nature of the interaction between the Argentine state and its citizens.

María: They delay attending to you. They don’t listen to you, they are there but they don’t listen to you.

Interviewer: They don’t pay attention to you?

M: I don’t know if they are eating breakfast, until 10 they eat breakfast, drink mate, [eat] cookies; they talk a lot among themselves.

I: And how do you get their attention?

M: No, I wait for them to assist me.

I: You just wait for them to pay attention to you?

M: It’s that you just have to wait.

I: Of all the times that you have gone, do you remember if there was any time a commotion was made there?

M: One time yes … a patient fought shouting …

I: What patient, some kind of health patient?

M: No, a patient here, a woman who waited.

Argentines are not citizens with rights, they are patients of the state who may or may not be tended to. Milagros, another “patient,” talks about how you are given the “runaround.” “You feel despondent here, because [the welfare agents] tell you to come on day X … They tell you to come on Monday, and then Wednesday, and then Friday … and those are working days.” The previous time she came to the office she “left with nothing” feeling “impotent,” but she emphasizes, “Here I didn’t say anything.”

The state is arbitrary, creating uncertainty and frustration, manipulating and disempowering people who are reduced to waiting and begging. There is an absence of routine, there are endless exceptions; when does the office open? What are the procedures? What documents do I need? Nobody is ever really sure. Many Argentines say “they kick us around like balls.”

Auyero wrote in his fieldnotes:

September 11. A woman from Paraguay obtains her appointment even when she doesn’t have the birth certificate with the apostille (official seal of approval). Today I meet Vicky. She is here for a second time because the first time she came they denied her an appointment because her birth certificate was missing the apostille.

Auyero’s research took him not just into the waiting rooms of Nuestras Familias, but also to the office where you apply for a national identity card, a DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad). In principle the office opens at 6 a.m. and starts giving appointments until 10 a.m., when it closes. It reopens from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. People start queueing the night before. But the rules and the opening times change all the time. “October 26: I come back … after the morning observations expecting a big line outside. It’s 2:50 p.m. And it’s empty! There’s nobody outside. No people, no vendors, nobody! A cop tells me that: “People from the office came out and said they’d close for the day.” Alternatively the doors may open and admit people at any time. Or not. “October 24: There’s no more waiting outside … People wait inside the building in a big waiting room. November 7: People make a line outside the building. They are told that it is forbidden to wait in line outside and that they should come back at 6 p.m. Officials try, unsuccessfully, to dissolve the line. November 9: Officials now let people form a line outside—and they also allow a line in the exterior hall.” Auyero continues:

October 2, 2008: A woman asks me if I think Monday will be a holiday. They told her to come back on Monday (October 12 is a holiday in Argentina). I tell her that if they instructed her to come back on Monday it is because it will not be a holiday. I assume that they don’t give appointments for impossible days. The woman corrects me and tells me that the last time they gave her a Sunday appointment.

As it turned out, Monday was a holiday.

*

—

So far we have focused on three sorts of Leviathans: Absent, Despotic, and Shackled. The Argentine state doesn’t seem to be any of these. It is not absent; it exists, it has elaborate laws, a large army, a bureaucracy (even if its bureaucrats don’t seem to be interested in doing their jobs), and it appears to function to some degree, especially in the capital city, Buenos Aires (though much less in other areas). It’s not a Despotic Leviathan either. Certainly, the Argentine bureaucrats we’ve just encountered seem unaccountable and unresponsive to society (the hallmark of a despotic state) and are quite capable of displaying cruelty toward people. As Argentines witnessed during the “dirty war” of the military dictatorship between 1974 and 1983, when as many as 30,000 people “disappeared” (secretly murdered by the junta), its officers and policemen can turn to murderous violence. But the despotism of the Argentine state is disorganized and erratic. It is far from the sort of authority that the Chinese state uses to control its people. When the civil servants wanted to stop people queueing outside, they were ignored. They are often incapable of regulating the economy or enforcing laws throughout the country. This is obviously not a Shackled Leviathan either; it lacks both the sort of state capacity we have associated with the Shackled Leviathan and society’s ability to influence and control the state. What sort of state is the Argentine state?

We’ll see in this chapter that it is a sort of state that is common in Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the world. In fact, it has a lot in common with the state in India in being founded on and supported by the weakness and disorganization of society. It combines some of the defining characteristics of the Despotic Leviathan, in being unaccountable to and unchecked by society, with the weaknesses of the Absent Leviathan. It cannot resolve conflicts, enforce laws, or provide public services. It is repressive but not powerful. It is weak itself and it weakens society.

Gnocchi in the Iron Cage

Auyero’s study was about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is vital to state capacity. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, its great theorist was the German sociologist Max Weber. In Weber’s theory what distinguished the modern world from the past was “rationalization.” This was manifest in modern firms that calculated costs, revenues, profits, and losses. It was there too in governments, rationalizing policy making and imposing impersonal administrative structures. Weber called this “rational-legal authority” and saw bureaucracy as its epitome. He wrote:

The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff … that consists … of individual officials who are appointed and function according to the following criteria: (1) They are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations. (2) They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices. (3) Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence in the legal sense… . (5) Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications … They are appointed, not elected … (7) The office is treated as the sole, or at least the primary, occupation of the incumbent … (9) The official works entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without appropriation of his position. (10) He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office.

So the bureaucracy was run on impersonal lines; bureaucrats were professionals, beholden to nobody except their official obligations; they were selected and promoted on merit; and they would be disciplined if they stepped out of line. In Weber’s view the power of bureaucracy could not be resisted. In a section titled “The Technical Superiority of Bureaucratic Organization,” he wrote:

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity … reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

For Weber the triumph of rational-legal authority was inevitable. But he also recognized that it could be dehumanizing. He argued that while in the past people may have labored because they chose to, now “we are forced to do so.” In the modern world there is an order “bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” To capture how insidious this force could be, Weber coined the metaphor of the “iron cage” in which we were trapped by this spread of rational-legal authority.

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files … It doesn’t sound like what Auyero observed in Buenos Aires. The bureaucracy he witnessed was slow, ambiguous, and uncertain, and there was copious ignorance about the files. Where was Argentina’s iron cage?

Auyero’s evidence shows that the Argentine state was greatly personalized: if you didn’t get involved personally, there was no chance of getting services; that was the point of being a “patient”—you had to build a personal relationship with a bureaucrat in order to expect anything. His evidence does not directly speak to other aspects of Weber’s ideal notion. Perhaps the bureaucrats that María or Leticia interacted with were recruited on merit as Weber foresaw? Unlikely, since recruitment into the Argentine bureaucracy is dominated by “gnocchi.”

Gnocchi are an Italian gastronomic speciality, delicious dumplings that were brought to Argentina by Italian immigrants. In Argentina they are traditionally served on the twenty-ninth of each month. But the word has a double meaning in Argentina; it also means government “ghost workers,” people who don’t actually ever show up for work but who collect their paychecks. There are a lot of gnocchi in Argentina. When Mauricio Macri became the new president of Argentina in 2015, he fired 20,000 gnocchi who he claimed had been appointed by the previous government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of the Peronist Party (named after its founder, Juan Domingo Perón). However the 20,000 gnocchi got hired, they were certainly not “selected on the basis of technical qualifications.” It’s also clear that working for the government was not the “sole, or at least the primary, occupation of the incumbent.” One might also doubt that they were “subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of office.” They were typically party workers and supporters of the Peronist Party who got their “jobs” because of their political connections. That insulated them from any disciplinary actions that might have been a threat if they did not do their job, whatever that was supposed to be. The presence of gnocchi probably played a big role in what Auyero observed. Having 20,000 people like this running around in the bureaucracy can have seriously negative impacts on state capacity, even beyond the fact that they are totally useless. These impacts were all too easy to see during the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

As we discussed in Chapter 2, a central function of the government is to collect information on its citizens both to understand society’s needs and to control it. You’d think that Hobbes’s Leviathan would pay quite a bit of attention to collecting information on its citizens. Yet we also saw that that’s not quite how things work in Lebanon, and it’s not how they work in Argentina either. In 2011 Argentina was the first country ever censured by the International Monetary Fund for failing to provide accurate price level and national income data. The Economist magazine stopped reporting data from Argentina because it deemed the data totally untrustworthy. That’s one of the downsides of filling the iron cage with gnocchi.

But we are still left with a puzzle. Weber thought that the iron cage was inevitable and the rationalization of society was unstoppable. He claimed, “The needs of mass administration make it today completely indispensable. The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration.” How do we explain Argentina? Dilettantism?

Failing the Duck Test

Argentina in the 2000s had a modern-looking state, with a bureaucracy, judiciary, ministers, economic and social programs, representatives in all the international bodies such as the United Nations, and a president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at the time of Auyero’s research, who got the red carpet treatment from other heads of states. The Argentine state had all the trappings of the modern state and looked like a Leviathan. To adapt the “duck test” to our context, if it looks like a state, swims like a state, quacks like a state, then it probably is a state. But is it?

Not really, not in the way we’ve been describing states so far. Both Despotic and Shackled Leviathans have quite a bit of capacity to get things done. Not so with the Argentine state. The Chinese dictator Mao Zedong used to call the United States a “paper tiger” to imply that its power was illusory. We’ll call states such as those in Argentina, Colombia, and several other Latin American and African countries that fail the duck test and, despite appearances, lack anything beyond the most rudimentary state capacity Paper Leviathans. Paper Leviathans have the appearance of a state and are able to exercise some power in some limited domains and in some major cities. But that power is hollow; it is incoherent and disorganized in most domains, and it is almost completely absent when you go to outlying areas of the country they are supposed to be ruling over.

Why is it that Paper Leviathans do not accumulate more power? After all, wouldn’t the political elites controlling the state and the state bureaucrats themselves want to have more capacity to get things done? To dominate society? To enrich themselves more, steal more if possible? What happened to the “will to power” that spurred powerful state-building efforts? The answers to these questions tell us a lot about the nature of many states around the world. It’s not that there is no will to power in societies that have come to house the Paper Leviathan, but that the dangers to political leaders and elites of pursuing that will to power are too overwhelming. There are two fundamental reasons for this.

The first, paradoxically, relates to the Red Queen effect, which we have seen as powering the simultaneous development of state and society in the corridor. The Red Queen effect originates in society’s desire to better control and better protect itself against a more capable state and more assertive political elites. The same impulses are present outside the corridor too; if the state gets more despotic, you’d better find a way of protecting yourself against that. But unless state builders are sure that they can quash any unwanted reaction from society and cling to power against rivals, these impulses would also spell trouble. We are going to refer to these perceived dangers of state building as the “mobilization effect”—in their attempt to build capacity, political leaders may end up mobilizing opposition against them. This is not unrelated to the slippery slope that creating a political hierarchy would set in motion. In the same way that some societies that were powerful enough to severely curtail political inequality were nonetheless afraid of the slippery slope, political elites who are ostensibly unrestrained by society may be concerned about reactions and competition that deepening state capacity would usher in. The mobilization effect was present in some of the iconic examples of state building such as the creation of the Islamic state pioneered by Muhammad or state building in China. But in these cases state builders were either powerful enough to be less worried about such mobilization, for example, because they had an “edge” (as we saw in Chapter 3), or they had no choice given outside threats or competition that they were locked into (the Qin state and Lord Shang had other, more existential things to worry about in the Warring States period, as we discussed in Chapter 7). Yet we’ll see that, in other circumstances, the mobilization effect can be a paralyzing force against the building of state capacity.

The second reason why Paper Leviathans are quite common and unwilling to rise up from their slumber is that lack of state capacity is sometimes a powerful tool in the hands of unscrupulous leaders. To start with, exercising political control is much more about persuading others to follow your orders than naked repression. Tools to reward compliance are very useful in this endeavor, and handing out positions in the bureaucracy to friends and supporters, or those you want to turn into supporters, is a very powerful tool indeed. But imagine that you start building state capacity by institutionalizing a meritocratic recruitment and promotion system in the bureaucracy, in the way that Max Weber envisaged. That would mean no more gnocchi, no more opportunities to use these positions as rewards (how would the Peronist Party survive in that case?). This creates a powerful political logic for abandoning meritocracy and the building of state capacity.

It’s not all high politics, of course. There are other, more mundane benefits from being able to use the judiciary and bureaucracy at your discretion. Soon after President Macri fired the gnocchi, he had to ban members of the government from hiring their own family members. The labor minister’s wife and two of his sisters were out of jobs, as were the interior minister’s mother and father.

This is a much more general pattern. Impersonal rules in the judiciary and bureaucracy, which come with state capacity, limit the ability of rulers and politicians to use laws in the way the former Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas purportedly expressed it: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” Such legal discretion, very different from the way the law evolved in the corridor in Europe, allows the political elite to use state institutions, such as they are, to suppress their opponents while enriching themselves, grabbing land from others, granting monopolies to friends, and directly looting the state. Like the mobilization effect, the ability to benefit from the discretionary use of the law encourages state incapacity and disorganization, not just in Argentina, but in many other Paper Leviathans.

That Paper Leviathans fail to build state capacity is a two-edged sword for their citizens. A less capable state is a state less capable of repressing its citizens. Could this be the basis of some liberty? Alas, this isn’t typically the case. Rather, citizens of Paper Leviathans have the worst of both worlds. These states are still pretty despotic—they get very little input from the people and continue to be unresponsive to them, and then don’t have many scruples about repressing or murdering them. At the same time, citizens miss out on the role of the state as resolver of disputes, enforcer of laws, and provider of public services. Paper Leviathans make no attempt to create liberty or relax norms inimical to liberty. In fact, as we’ll see, Paper Leviathans often tighten the cage of norms rather than relaxing it.

No Place for Roads

What could trigger the mobilization effect in practice? The historian Eugen Weber, in his study of the making of the French state and society, Peasants into Frenchmen, proposed several “agencies of change”—factors that he thought had been crucial in the development of modern French society. He led with a chapter called “Roads, Roads, and Still More Roads.” In his view basic infrastructure, by creating a national community, can mobilize society, change their demands, and transform the political agenda. In short, it can generate what we’ve called the mobilization effect.

The Colombian state, another perfect specimen of a Paper Leviathan, has never been interested in building roads. Today quite a few departmental capitals are not connected to the rest of the country except by air, or maybe river. Can you imagine Augusta, Maine, not being connected by road to the rest of the United States?

An interesting example is from the department of Putumayo in southern Colombia, whose capital is Mocoa (see Map 14). In 1582, Fray Jerónimo de Escobar noted:

This town is next to the mountains, far away from the road, so that it is a great travail to enter. Said town of Agreda [Mocoa], is not growing … it scares people away. There is no way to communicate [with] … everyone having a miserable life.

Things hadn’t gotten much better by 1850 when a prefect of the then Territorio de Caquetá, just to the north of Putumayo, noted that “the journey from Pasto [capital of the neighboring department of Nariño] to this city [Mocoa] is gruelling, often bumping into horrifying places. Those of thin build travel on the back [of] Indians in a ridiculous, extravagant, and painful position: fastened with bale-rope and tied like pigs.”

Map 14. Colombia: Elites, Paramilitaries, and the Trampoline of Death

Putumayo was a scary place for people from the capital, Bogotá. Future president Rafael Reyes wrote in his autobiography of his days prospecting in the region:

Those virgin and unknown forests, those immense spaces, fascinated and attracted me to explore them, to traverse them and … to open roads for the progress and welfare of my country; those forests were absolutely unknown to the inhabitants of the cordillera, and the idea to penetrate them terrified me since the popular imagination populated them with wild beasts and monsters, besides the numerous savage cannibals found there.

Reyes had a solution to this isolation; in 1875 he proposed the construction of a road from Pasto, the capital of the neighboring department of Nariño, to Mocoa (which is also shown in Map 14). By 1906, Reyes was president and he authorized a study of potential routes. An engineer, Miguel Triana, was given the contract with the expectation that he would lay out the road. He did the survey, but the road was not started. Another contract was given to a Victor Triana, but by 1908 the new project was abandoned for lack of funds. In 1909 the national government decided to put the Capuchin friars of the Sibundoy Valley in charge of construction, with the governor of Nariño in charge of the money. With the aid of coerced indigenous labor, the Capuchins managed to finish the 120 kilometer road from Pasto to Mocoa in 1912, but only after an attack by Peruvian soldiers on a Colombian military garrison at La Pedrera on the Caquetá River induced the national government to provide 36,000 pesos. By the end of 1912, however, the road was in a bad state. A local administrator wrote to the minister of government that “regarding to state of the road from Pasto to this place [Mocoa] … most of the road has suffered grave damages due to collapsing of slopes and platforms and destruction of palisades in the flat and swampy areas, to the point that the traffic, even for pedestrian travellers, is now extremely difficult.” An engineer reported that there were serious problems with the road design and construction; the bridges were “poorly built” and the road width was “inadequate for traffic needs.”

The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett had a motto: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” It might have been written for Paper Leviathans. In 1915 the national government put out a public tender to repair the road and finish the part to Puerto Asís on the banks of the Putumayo River. In December 1917 the government canceled the contract because the contractor had not met his obligations. The government put it back in the hands of the Capuchins. A telegram to the Ministry of Public Works from Mocoa in June 1919 read “National road totally abandoned. From here to San Francisco thirty landslides; from here to Umbría, all bridges destroyed.” In 1924 the road was taken away from the Capuchins again due to “unsatisfactory execution of works” and a contract given to an engineer in Pasto. A 1925 a law decreed the upgrading of the first 25 kilometers of the road out of Pasto to a motor road. But in 1928 the government removed the funding with 5 kilometers built. In 1931 Law 88 incorporated the road into the national road network, which meant that the portion up to Puerto Asís would have to become a motor road.

In Chapter 9 we discussed Charles Tilly’s maxim “War made the state, and the state made war.” If it did, in 1932 the Colombians might’ve caught a break. In that year, a border conflict started with Peru, and the Colombian government labeled the road a “national defense road” and allocated 120,000 pesos to maintain and expand it. An engineer’s evaluation concluded that the road was “little less than an eyesore.” The gravel road reached Puerto Asís in November 1957, twenty-five years after Peru had won the war and annexed a large slice of Colombian territory. No roads and not much state in the Colombian case, wars or no wars.

Though a road of sorts was open to Puerto Asís, it soon acquired a sinister but descriptive nickname: the Trampoline of Death. In 1991 the national newspaper El Tiempo reported: “The entire road to the Putumayo is horrifying. The drivers that cross it daily call it the road of death … [and] travelers are constantly threatened by the guerrilla.” In 2005, President Álvaro Uribe promoted the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America plan. By 2016 some 15 kilometers of the road had been built, and then the work was suspended because of lack of funds.

What sort of society does the absence of roads in Colombia create? One dispersed into isolated pockets. In 1946 in an address to the Society of Agriculturalists, Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was to become the Colombian president in 1958, observed:

When we refer to campaigns of rural health, credit or education that are going to save the campesino, don’t we know that most of these programs reach [only] the villages [aldeas] and the upper echelon of Colombian society? … Among the 71 percent of our [rural dwelling] fellow citizens and the rest of society, there is no direct communication, there is no contact, there are no roads, there are no channels of direct interchange. Fifteen minutes from Bogotá there are campesinos who belong to another age, to another social class and culture, separated from us by centuries.

But that’s the way a Paper Leviathan likes it; a very fragmented society focused on parochial issues. In the British case, we saw in Chapter 6 that parochial issues disappeared as society was further mobilized in response to state building. Not so in Colombia. In 2013, the country was convulsed by a series of strikes and protests. In July of that year striking miners overwhelmed Quibdó, the capital of the department of Chocó (also shown in Map 14). The miners insisted that informal miners be recognized, and they wanted “subsidies and preferential credit for miners, as well as technical assistance.” In addition they asked the government “to cease the selling of land to multinational mining companies” and “to subsidize fuel for mining purposes.” There were no demands in the list other than the immediate ones of the miners. Tellingly, there is no road from Quibdó to the rest of the country. The same was true of the many other strikes that took place in different parts of the country. The Dignidad Cafetera (literally “coffee dignity”), in the coffee-growing region of Colombia, wanted the government to give them price subsidies for coffee; they demanded the democratization of the National Federation of Coffee Growers, and insisted that mining in coffee-growing areas be regulated more stringently. The Dignidad Papera, Lechera y Cebollera (“potato, milk and onion dignity”) was an organization that claimed to represent the producers of potatoes, milk, and onions. They also asked for price subsidies, but this time for their crops. They advocated that the rehydration of powdered milk should be banned, and that they should be compensated for the importation of powdered milk and frozen or precooked potatoes. The Dignidad Panelera (“raw sugar dignity”), organized by the producers of raw sugar, wanted the government to introduce higher tariffs on imported substitutes for sugar, and they demanded that the government purchase 3,500 tons of panela (the raw cane sugar that they produced). This is a society with little prospect of mobilization, and that’s very convenient for Colombian elites and very easy for the Colombian government to manage. A few subsidies here, and a few purchases of panela there, and the genie is back in the bottle.

The Orangutan in a Tuxedo

It’s not just the absence of infrastructure. Like Argentina, Colombia doesn’t do bureaucracy, and for similar reasons. In 2013 in some national ministries 60 percent of the employees were “provisional staff,” recruited outside the meritocratic rules and hired most likely through patronage. Colombians are less fond of gnocchi than are Argentines, but they still manage to house a fair number of them in the civil service.

The consequences of the lack of rules and bureaucratic procedures were dramatically illustrated by the tenure of Samuel Moreno, elected mayor of the capital city of Bogotá in 2008. Once he was in power, Moreno created a “shadow government” for Bogotá, which he delegated to his brother Iván. Iván constructed what Colombians now call the “contract carousel,” which was in charge of allocating all of the contracts for the city. The brothers used this as a way to extract bribes, which were often 50 percent of a contract. To hide all the illegal activities, they frequently met in Miami, traveling by private plane. The brothers developed a slang: their cut in a contract was called a bite—una mordida—the same slang we saw in Guatemala in Chapter 9. The jewel in the crown of bites was the contract to run the city’s integrated public transport system, which carries millions of people per day. The Morenos’ cut was eight pesos per passenger. The brothers did not stop there. They looted everything. Existing hospitals were very lucrative, but building new ones created even better opportunities for stealing, and between 25 and 30 percent of the outlays went to the Morenos. They decided who got the ambulance contract, and then the brothers and their cronies took half of what was allocated. If you didn’t pay the bite, you didn’t get the contract and were told by the brothers that you were “too cheap.” So 45,000 million pesos (US$15 million) were set aside to build a bridge linking Carrera 9 to Calle 94 to address the traffic jams in part of Bogotá. The construction work was never begun and the money vanished. Nobody really knows how much the brothers bit off; one conjecture is that it could be as high as US$500 million.

Samuel Moreno was not an outsider to Colombian politics. His grandfather Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was a military dictator in the 1950s who tried to reinvent himself as a democrat in the 1960s. Like Moreno, Colombian political elites have a habit of looting the state budget. When they have the opportunity, they are happy to loot the land as well.

An extensive amount of rural Colombia is classified legally as baldío (wasteland) and owned by the government. Since the nineteenth century the Colombian government has promulgated many laws that have shaped the distribution of this land and the issuing of titles. Law 160, passed in 1994, specified that people who had been settled on baldío for five years or more could petition the agrarian reform institute INCORA (Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria) for the title to the land they occupied. This type of concession applied only to citizens who were landless. Supposedly poor or displaced people got priority, and the amount of land a person could claim was limited to an “Unidad Agrícola Familiar” (Agricultural Family Unit), an amount of land judged by the INCORA to allow a family “to live with dignity.” But it turned out that this system could be easily gamed by well-connected elites, especially when they had the help of sophisticated Bogotano law firms, well versed in the art of bending the law. A notorious case involves Riopaila Castilla, a sugar company in Valle del Cauca. The company gamed the system by creating twenty-seven Anonymous Simple Societies in 2010 with the aid of the law firm Brigard Urrutia. They bought 42 parcels of baldío in the eastern department of Vichada (see Map 14), equivalent to 35,000 hectares, all intended for the poor and the displaced but instead destined for Riopaila. Similar strategies allowed Luis Carlos Sarmiento, the wealthiest person in Colombia, to acquire 16,000 hectares of baldío land for himself. When asked by a journalist how a respectable law firm could facilitate such blatant violations of the law, a lawyer from Brigard Urrutia stated:

The law is there to be interpreted. Here they are not white or black.

The fragmented, ineffective nature of the Paper Leviathan has major consequences for liberty, in particular, for the control of violence. Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Because of the way they use power, Paper Leviathans cannot have such a monopoly of physical force, legitimate or otherwise. Colombia also illustrates the devastating consequences of the lack of monopoly of violence by the state.

In his research in Colombia, James Robinson, and his collaborators Maria Angélica Bautista, Juan Diego Restrepo, and Juan Sebastián Galan, documented how in 1977 Ramón Isaza, a former soldier and farmer, started a group he named the Shotgunners. Isaza had a farm in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo in the east of the department of Antioquia (see Map 14). Court documents recorded how in the mid-1970s the Marxist guerrilla group the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) had created a new front in the area and initiated a policy of “taxing” local farmers and expropriating their livestock. In 1977, Isaza purchased ten shotguns, an act that christened the group. They ambushed the FARC, killed them, and stole their guns. By the year 2000 the Shotgunners had changed their name to the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of the Middle Magdalena, received support from landowners, and expanded to six fronts. One front was led by Isaza’s son-in-law Luis Eduardo Zuluaga (nicknamed MacGyver, after the U.S. television character). MacGyver commanded the José Luis Zuluaga Front (FJLZ), named after his brother, who had been killed by the guerrillas. The FJLZ controlled an extensive territory whose core covered around 5,000 square kilometers. The front had a written legal system of estatutos (statutes), which was 32 pages long, and they tried to enforce it equally even to the extent of applying it to both their members and civilians. The FJLZ also had a bureaucracy and was separated into a military wing made up of about 250 uniformed fighters, a civilian wing of “tax collectors,” and a “social team” focused on their political project of combatting the Marxist guerrillas. They regulated trade and social life; they had a mission statement, an ideology, a hymn, a prayer, and a radio station called Integration in Stereo. The front even awarded medals, including the Order of Francisco de Paula Santander and the Grand Cross of Gold. How did they pay their bureaucrats and soldiers? They taxed landowners and businessmen in the area they controlled and also attempted to tax production, specifically of milk and potatoes. The front built tens of kilometers of roads, extended the electric grid, and constructed schools. In La Danta, where they were based, the front built a health clinic, reconstructed an old-people’s home, built houses that they allocated by lot to poor people, started an artisan center, and constructed a bullring, though MacGyver claimed, “I don’t approve of bullfighting, it is cruel to the animals.”

The area was controlled not by the Colombian state but by Isaza and MacGyver. In a statement to the magistrate following the group’s demobilization in 2006, Ramón Isaza explained their role in elections in the following way:

What we did do was in the veredas, such as La Danta, also in San Miguel or Cocorná which didn’t have police, that were little towns removed from the main roads and there was no military or police force. There we protected these regions but we didn’t tell anybody to vote for a particular person. Rather we looked after—what did we look after?—that maybe elections wouldn’t be spoiled, that maybe fights or quarrels occurred. This we did in this and all the regions where these towns were; we provided security for the elections.

Colombians often excuse their Paper Leviathan by pointing out that the country has high mountains and jungles. In fact, Isaza and his fronts were placed on the main road between the two largest cities, Bogotá and Medellín, right under the nose and in full view of the Colombian state. As another powerful Colombian paramilitary boss, Ernesto Báez, ironically put it to a different judge: “How could a small independent state work inside a lawful state such as ours?” The answer is: quite easily in a Paper Leviathan.

The Colombian state doesn’t just neglect and ignore its citizens, it actively victimizes them. One illustration comes from the so-called false-positives scandal. When Álvaro Uribe was elected president in 2002, his mandate was to intensify the fight against left-wing guerrillas. He introduced a series of powerful incentives for the military, such as financial bonuses and holidays, if they produced dead guerrillas. A consequence was that members of the army murdered as many as 3,000 innocent civilians and dressed them up as guerrillas. One Colombian judicial prosecutor even referred to a military unit, the Batallón Pedro Nel Ospina, as a “group of assassins dedicated to creating victims which they then pretended were killed in combat.” If the guerrillas and paramilitaries don’t get you, the army might.

Another consequence of the Colombian Paper Leviathan was noted almost two hundred years ago by Simón Bolívar, Latin America’s “liberator,” who led its revolution against Spanish colonial rule, when he stated:

These Gentlemen think that Colombia is full of simple men they’ve seen gathered around fireplaces in Bogotá, Tunja, and Pamplona. They’ve never laid eyes on the Caribs of the Orinoco, the plainsmen of the Apure, the fishermen of Maracaibo, the boatmen of the Magdalena, the bandits of Patia, the ungovernable Pastusos, the Guajibos of Casanare and all the other savage hordes of Africans and Americans that roam like deer throughout the wilderness of Colombia.

Bolívar is claiming that Colombians elites don’t really know or understand the country they claim to be governing (and are looting). Indeed, the famous nineteenth-century Colombian president Miguel Antonio Caro, the mastermind of the 1886 Constitution that was in force until 1991, never left Bogotá his entire life (nor for that matter did one of the subsequent presidents, José Manuel Marroquín). Who was he writing the constitution for? The gentlemen of “Bogotá, Tunja, and Pamplona,” of course. The periphery of the country was run from Bogotá and received few resources or public services. Of 18,500 kilometers of roads in 1945, only 613 kilometers (none paved) were in the peripheral territories that made up three quarters of Colombia’s land area. Political elites in Bogotá made sure that the periphery stayed peripheral. But before you conclude that this implies that things were all right in Bogotá, at least when Samuel Moreno wasn’t in power, next time you are there try posting a letter. What would Tocqueville have said?

The Colombian politician Dario Echandía once quipped that Colombian democracy was like “an orangutan in a tuxedo.” It’s a remark that captures the nature of the Paper Leviathan. The tuxedo is its outward appearance of an orderly state with a functioning bureaucracy, even if it is sometimes used for looting the country and is often disorganized. The orangutan is all the things the Paper Leviathan cannot and doesn’t wish to control.

Plowing the Sea

None of this was created overnight. To understand how the Colombian state evolved, let’s turn to Bolívar again, now lying ill with tuberculosis in the port city of Barranquilla. On November 9, 1830, he wrote to his old friend General Juan José Flores. By 1830 continental Latin America was free from Spanish colonialism and Spain retained only the islands of Cuba, parts of Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. Yet Bolívar was disillusioned. He wrote:

I have ruled for twenty years, and I have derived from these only a few sure conclusions: (1) America is ungovernable, for us; (2) Those who serve the revolution plow the sea; (3) The only thing one can do in America is emigrate; (4) This country will fall inevitably into the hands of the unrestrained multitudes and then into the hands of tyrants so insignificant they will almost be imperceptible, of all colors and races; (5) Once we’ve been eaten alive by every crime and extinguished by ferocity, the Europeans won’t even bother to conquer us; (6) If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos, it would be America in her last hour.

Why was he so pessimistic? Why did he think that trying to govern “America,” by which he meant Latin America, was like “plowing the sea,” an impossible task? There were several reasons. Perhaps the most important was that Latin American society had been created on a premise of political hierarchy and inequality. Colonial society was an institutionalized hierarchy with white Spaniards on top and indigenous people and, in many areas black slaves, at the bottom. Over time, the Spanish elites became native to Latin America and were known as Creoles (Bolívar was one of them), and as miscegenation took place, an elaborate system of caste (casta in Spanish) was created to identify who was superior to whom. The castas were memorialized in a famous series of paintings in colonial Mexico, one of which we reproduce in the photography section. Caste mattered, since laws and taxes applied differently to people depending on their social station, and if you were sufficiently powerful, the laws didn’t apply to you at all. Without any equality before the law, the law itself was illegitimate in the eyes of most Latin Americans, making them adopt the famous motto of the colonial era, Obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but I do not comply); I recognize your right to issue laws and orders but I maintain my right to ignore them. Even more important, it meant a great degree of hierarchy, dominance, and inequality, as indigenous people and black slaves were systematically exploited. Hierarchy, dominance, and inequality are still on display today.

Their origins can be seen by returning to the road between Pasto and Mocoa, which ran through the Sibundoy Valley. After the conquest of the Americas the indigenous peoples of the valley had been given in a grant of encomienda, literally “entrusted,” to a Spaniard, known as the encomendero. Many indigenous people had died of the infectious diseases the Spanish brought with them from the Old World, but there were still 1,371 people left to exploit. According to the encomienda, a lot of animals, birds, and produce of Indians had to go to the abbey and the cacique (the word imported into Latin America from the Caribbean and used to designate an indigenous chief or ruler). Also, it specified “145 Indians to work in the mines for eight months,” 10 Indians to work on the land of the encomendero, “8 Indians for the cacique’s domestic service,” and so on with the coercive labor practices.

This highly unequal society was ultimately held together by force, and Latin Americans knew that it could never survive under the type of democratic institutions that had emerged in the United States. By the nineteenth century there were no encomiendas left, but they had been replaced by a new exploitative system in which Indian “tribute” continued to provide the fiscal basis of the state. The extent of inequality at this point was if anything more intense than ever. The perpetuation of this system, Bolívar and others reasoned, required much stronger autocratic power than any U.S. president was going to get. But that didn’t mean it would be easy to maintain such a society. Here the second main factor leading to ungovernability becomes important.

Like many colonies, Spanish America had some state institutions imposed by the colonists (most notably sufficient force to repress the indigenous people), but it was governed “indirectly” by Spain. The encomienda of the Sibundoy Valley gave a lot of the produce, birds, and pigs to the cacique because he was the indirect representative of the Spanish. The Spanish created no bureaucracy and no state administration to run the encomienda; they manipulated the indigenous political hierarchy to do this. At the time of the revolt against the Spanish, leaving aside the military, there were just 800 people working for the Spanish state in the whole of Colombia.

These two factors left a society with enormous inequality and hierarchy, but without an effective state. That meant no state institutions or legal apparatus to control the “Caribs of the Orinoco, the plainsmen of the Apure, the fishermen of Maracaibo, the boatmen of the Magdalena, the bandits of Patia, the ungovernable Pastusos, the Guajibos of Casanare.” Creole elites stuck with what they knew. They tried to create an autocratic, centralized society to the extent they could, but just to be sure they backed it up with many of the same strategies that the Spanish had used to rule over their colonial empire. There was no room for a Weberian state. Rather, the government was a tool for controlling power and the law an instrument for stabilizing this unequal status quo.

The difference between Latin American and U.S. concepts of limits on presidential power is perhaps best illustrated by the speech Bolívar gave in 1826 in Lima, Peru, after he had personally written a constitution for the new country of Bolivia, now liberated from the Spanish. It’s worth pointing out that the name Bolivia came from Bolívar himself. How many people have countries named after them? One is Christopher Columbus, who had his name given to the country of Colombia. The Saud family have Saudi Arabia named after them, and the Luxembourg family, one of the surviving remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, also have a country named for them. The great entrepreneur of British colonialism in Africa, Cecil Rhodes, had one named after him, Rhodesia, until 1980, when the name was changed to Zimbabwe. It’s a small and exclusive club, and you typically don’t become a member if you are running a country democratically. Introducing his constitution for Bolivia, Bolívar focused on the role of the president:

Under our constitution, the president of the republic is like the Sun, immovable at the center of the universe, radiating life. This supreme authority should be permanent … a fixed point around which magistrates and citizens and men and events revolve … Give me a fixed point, said an ancient, and I will move the earth. For Bolivia, this point is a president for life.

The Bolivian constitution specified a president for life and made him “the Sun.” Initially that person would be chosen by “legislators.” Subsequent presidents would be chosen by the existing president for life. The notion of a president choosing who would follow him turned out to have a long half-life in Latin America. As recently as 1988, Mexican presidents were chosen by the dedazo. Google Translate hasn’t managed to figure out how to translate that word into English yet, but the root of the expression is the Spanish word dedo, “finger.” A dedazo is when you tap someone on the back with your finger, meaning “your turn now.” It’s hard to translate, but Bolívar knew what it meant; it was a surefire guarantee that the presidency would stay in safe, elite hands. After all, it seemed highly likely that he was going to be chosen as the first president, and indeed he was. On paper, the Bolivian Constitution had some separation of powers and checks and balances, but it also allowed the president for life to personally appoint all military officers and command the army. Mix that with a bit of Obedezco pero no cumplo and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s true that just as the U.S. War of Independence against Britain unleashed all sorts of radical energy and movements, so did the Latin American wars of independence. But again and again, Latin American elites were able to construct political institutions to control this energy even if Bolívar himself never managed to really implement his plans. We find that even when Latin American constitutions allowed for the types of checks and balances and even rights for citizens that the U.S. Constitution enshrined, these were always trumped either by strong formal presidential powers or a disregard for the law. Ramón Castilla, the authoritarian president of Peru, clearly explained this logic in 1849:

The first of my constitutional functions is the preservation of internal order; but the same constitution obliges me to respect the rights of the citizen… . the simultaneous fulfillment of both duties would be impossible. The former … could not be accomplished … without some measures to check the enemies of that order in a manner more stringent than was provided for by the laws. Ought I to have sacrificed the internal peace of the country for the constitutional rights of a few individuals?

If constitutional rights got in the way, then so much the worse for constitutional rights. The mastermind of the Chilean state, Diego Portales, articulated this view even more forcefully:

With the men of the law one cannot come to an understanding; and if it’s that way, what [expletive] purpose do Constitutions … serve, if they are incapable of providing a remedy to an evil that is known to exist … In Chile, the law doesn’t serve for anything but to produce anarchy, the lack of sanctions, licentiousness, eternal law suits … Damned law then if it does not allow the Power to proceed freely in the opportune moment.

The view that “the Power” should be able to “proceed freely in the opportune moment” is rather different from how the state is expected to behave in the corridor.

This notion of power is again rooted in Latin America’s history. Alexis de Tocqueville identified its origins in his 1835 book, Democracy in America, when he argued that in South America the Spanish found territory “inhabited by peoples … who had already appropriated the soil by cultivating it. To found their new states they had to destroy or enslave many populations.” But, he went on, “North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes who did not think of using the natural riches of the soil. North America was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a wilderness land, that awaited inhabitants.” Tocqueville’s claim that North America was an “empty continent” is not correct, but the gist of the argument, that North America could not develop based on the exploitation of sedentary indigenous peoples, is on target. This meant that the type of highly unequal and hierarchical society that emerged in South America could not be reproduced in the North (even though the early English settlers did try). The slave society of the U.S. South looked a lot like Latin America, including low levels of public services, prosperity for the elites, and of course no liberty for the majority. But the U.S. South was embedded in an institutional setting partly created by the very different state-society dynamics of the North, and when it tried to fight in the Civil War to free itself from these dynamics, it lost. That wasn’t the end of the despotic and exploitative system of the U.S. South, as we saw in the previous chapter, but it did put the whole of the United States on a different path from Latin America’s.

In Latin America, society remained emaciated and unable to shape politics and control the state and the elites, paving the way for the Paper Leviathan, with predictable consequences for liberty.

Mississippi in Africa

Paper Leviathans are hardly restricted to Latin America. They are also the characteristic form of state in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact both mechanisms underpinning the continued weakness and disorganization of the state operate in Africa with a vengeance. Let’s take them one at a time: first, the fear of societal mobilization.

One of the best documented examples of this fear comes from Liberia in West Africa. In 1961 the newly created United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent a team of scholars off to Liberia to study its development. They began with their usual ideas about why poor countries are poor. Yet they soon realized the situation was very different. As one of them, the social anthropologist George Dalton, later put it:

The economic backwardness of Liberia is not attributable to the lack of resources or to domination by foreign financial or political interests. The underlying difficulty is rather that the traditional Americo-Liberian rulers, who fear losing political control to the tribal people, have not allowed those changes to take place which are necessary to develop the national society and economy.

Who were these “Americo-Liberian rulers”? To understand this, we need to recall that the country of Liberia was started as a colony in 1822 by the American Colonization Society (ACS) as a home for freed and repatriated African slaves from the United States. The descendants of these repatriated slaves became the Americo-Liberians. In 1847 Liberia declared itself independent of the ACS, and in 1877 the True Whig Party (TWP) emerged and dominated politics until they were overthrown by a military coup headed by Samuel Doe in 1980. The TWP was spearheaded by Americo-Liberians, who in the 1960s made up less than 5 percent of the population. As Dalton describes it, “Like the Portuguese in Angola or the Afrikaners in South Africa, the rulers of Liberia are the descendants of an alien minority of colonial settlers. Americo-Liberian families.”

Liberia became a two-class society. Different laws, different public services, and differential access to education governed Americo-Liberians and “tribal people.” Before 1944 the hinterland had no political representation whatsoever. Dalton observed, “Ironically, it is the ethic of Mississippi that most nearly characterizes their outlook: to retain power in traditional fashion and keep the natives in their place.” Now you begin to see why the Americo-Liberians feared societal mobilization. Building an effective state might have mobilized the indigenous Liberians who made up the other 95 percent of the nation.

Map 15. Kinship in Liberia: The Political Appointments of President Tubman in 1960

The other fundamental mechanism supporting Paper Leviathans—the usefulness of discretionary power in a nonmeritocratic, disorganized bureaucracy and judiciary—is also clearly visible in Liberia and other African countries. The Liberian state was systematically used to reward followers. For instance, Dalton found in the 1960s that “to understand Liberian politics, knowledge of kinship connections is more useful than knowledge of the Liberian constitution.” He presented elaborate data on how political elites filled bureaucratic positions with their immediate family. (Map 15, for example, shows the bewildering family connections of Liberia’s political elite in 1960 during President Tubman’s rule.)

The nonmeritocratic nature of African states is also highlighted in Tony Killick’s seminal book Development Economics in Action. Killick worked for the government of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in the early 1960s and witnessed the disastrous economic failures of Nkrumah’s regime firsthand. Killick wanted to understand what caused them. He recorded the construction of a fruit-canning factory “for the production of mango products, for which there was recognized to be no local market, [and] which was said to exceed by some multiple the total world trade in such items.” The government’s own report on this factory is worth quoting.

Project: A factory is to be erected at Wenchi, Brong Ahafo, to produce 7,000 tons of mangoes and 5,300 tons of tomatoes per annum. If average yields of crops in that area will be 5 tons per acre per annum for mangoes and 5 tons per acre for tomatoes, there should be 1,400 acres of mangoes and 1,060 acres of tomatoes in the field to supply the factory.

The Problem: The present supply of mangoes in the area is from a few trees scattered in the bush and tomatoes are not grown on commercial scale, and so the production of these crops will have to start from scratch. Mangoes take 5–7 years from planting to start fruiting. How to obtain sufficient planting materials and to organize production of raw materials quickly become the major problems of this project.

Killick wrote, “It is difficult to imagine a more damning commentary on the efficiency of project planning.” What was going on? The factory wasn’t meant to further economic development. Rather, it created innumerable opportunities to employ political supporters in a region where President Nkrumah wanted support. It made no economic sense to build the factory there, and projects like this undermined the coherence of the civil service and the “efficiency of project planning.” But it made good political sense. As Nkrumah told Sir Arthur Lewis, his Nobel Prize–winning economic adviser, “The advice you have given me, sound though it may be, is essentially from an economic point of view, and I have told you, on many occasions, that I cannot always follow this advice as I am a politician and must gamble on the future.”

Killick additionally documented that Nkrumah’s government also lived in fear of initiating societal mobilization. Standard development economics at the time maintained that it was critical for a developing country to generate a strong “entrepreneurial class” of businesspeople who could lead the transformation toward a more industrialized economy. Yet Killick observed:

Even had there been the possibility [of creating an indigenous entrepreneurial class] it is doubtful that Nkrumah would have wanted to create such a class, for reasons of ideology and political power. He was very explicit about this saying “we would be hampering our advance to socialism if we were to encourage the growth of Ghanaian private capitalism in our midst.” There is evidence that he also feared the threat that a wealthy class of Ghanaian businessmen might pose to his own political power.

In fact E. Ayeh-Kumi, one of Nkrumah’s main economic advisers, noted that “[Nkrumah] informed me that if he permitted African business to grow, it will grow to becoming a rival power to his and the party’s prestige, and he would do everything to stop it, which he actually did.” His solution was to limit the size of Ghanaian businesses. Killick notes, “Given Nkrumah’s desire to keep Ghanaian private businesses small, his argument that ‘Capital investment must be sought from abroad since there is no bourgeois class amongst us to carry on the necessary investment’ was disingenuous.” He goes on to add that Nkrumah “had no love of foreign capitalists but he preferred to encourage them rather than local entrepreneurs, whom he wished to restrict.” Better foreign capitalists than societal mobilization.

Another seminal book on African economics and politics, Robert Bates’s Markets and States in Tropical Africa, illustrates how the discretionary use of the law was a powerful political strategy. Bates was trying to explain the dismal economic performance of African nations after independence and particularly why the agricultural sector, which should have been the engine for growth, was performing so badly. The simple answer he gave is that urban-based governments, such as that of Nkrumah in Ghana, were taxing the agricultural sector at punitive rates. Farmers stopped investing and producing because the tax rates were so high. How could the government respond? An obvious way would have been to increase prices, reduce taxes, and restore incentives. But Bates observed, “Were the governments of Africa to confer a price rise on all rural producers, the political benefits would be low; for both supporters and dissidents would secure the benefits of such a measure.” Instead, governments kept prices low and used other policy instruments, which they could target in a discretionary way.

The conferral of benefits in the form of public works projects, such as state farms, on the other hand, has the political advantage of allowing the benefits to be selectively apportioned.

The same was true of subsidized fertilizer given to supporters and withheld from opponents. Bates asked a suffering cocoa farmer in 1978 why he did not try to organize resistance against the government policies.

He went to his strongbox and produced a packet of documents: licenses for his vehicles, import permits for spare parts, titles to his real property and improvements, and the articles of incorporation that exempted him from a major portion of his income taxes. “If I tried to organize resistance to the government’s policies on farm prices,” he said while exhibiting these documents, “I would be called an enemy of the state and I would lose all these.”

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” Ghanaian-style.

Postindependence governments in Ghana did not operate in a social vacuum. Recall in Chapter 1 how we introduced the notion of the cage of norms using Robert Rattray’s research in Ghana. When the country became independent a mere thirty years after Rattray wrote, the forces he described were still powerfully present. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recalls being told by his father growing up in Kumasi in the 1960s “that one must never inquire after people’s ancestry in public.” Appiah’s “auntie” was the child of a family slave. As another Asante proverb puts it, “Too much revealing of origins spoils a town.” The dense web of norms, mutual obligations, and the remnants of the supporting institutions lived on. This cage of norms heavily shaped how postindependence politics worked and why Nkrumah organized the state the way he did. The networks of reciprocity and kinship and ethnic relations translated into a very non-Weberian state wherein those in power were pushed into using their influence to favor their dependents, as witnessed by the factory in Wenchi. Similarly, the dependents were obliged to help and support their benefactors, for example in elections. The cage of norms created a social environment that perpetuated the Paper Leviathan, blocking society’s ability to act collectively while at the same time stunting the state’s capacity. The more the Paper Leviathan exploited the network of mutual dependences and ethnic ties, the more it reaffirmed the cage of norms that these created in many African societies.

The Postcolonial World

Paper Leviathans are not restricted to Latin America and Africa; they inhabit many different parts of the world. Several of them, like the ones we discussed in this chapter, have one thing in common—they are products of European colonization. This is true even for Liberia, which wasn’t a colony so much as an outpost for later-freed slaves of a European colony, the United States of America. This is because the way that European colonial powers governed and manipulated the institutions of many of their colonies created the conditions for Paper Leviathans to emerge.

What is it about the residues of colonization that created such a state? As we have already seen in the Latin American context, two axes were particularly important. First, colonial powers introduced state institutions, but without any way for society to control them (especially since the colonizers had no interest in Africans controlling the state or its bureaucracy). Second, they tried to do all this on the cheap, propagating “indirect rule” where power was delegated to locals, such as chiefs in Africa, and this meant that no meritocratic bureaucracy or judiciary emerged. Remember how we explained in Chapter 2 that Lugard wanted to rule Nigeria indirectly. To achieve this, he had to establish a political body he could deal with, which in practical terms meant state-like structures. But who would be the bureaucrats, tax collectors, judges, and legislators of this state? Not the British. In 1920 there were just 265 British officials in the whole of Nigeria. There was nobody but the traditional chiefs and this meant that there was no national administrative apparatus to work with at independence.

The lack of capacity and dearth of public services were constants during colonial times. But things only got worse after independence in 1960, when the British up and left Nigeria so that the Nigerians could rule themselves. But with what state? A Leviathan of sorts, but paper-thin in its ability to resolve conflicts, raise taxes, provide public services, and even maintain basic order. The political incentives we have seen in Argentina, Colombia, Liberia, and Ghana then kicked in.

To the legacy of haphazardly imposed state institutions and indirect rule was added a third factor, further weakening both state and society—the arbitrary nature of postcolonial countries. One of the reasons it was so attractive for Nkrumah to use the state as a political tool was that Ghana had no coherence as a nation. There was no national language; there was no common history, no common religion or identity, and no legitimate social contract. Instead, the country had been cobbled together by the English in the late nineteenth century from various African polities with very different levels of centralization and disparate political traditions. In fact Ghana ranged from one of the most highly centralized states in precolonial Africa, the Asante in the south, to completely stateless societies like the Tallensi, in the north. This incoherence meant that there was little societal mobilization, and this made it particularly attractive for leaders such as Nkrumah to make discretionary use of the state and the law to maintain power. In essence Paper Leviathans formed in the terrain left by colonial empires, which created weak states and weak societies and a situation wherein both were likely to perpetuate each other.

A final factor completed the foundations of the Paper Leviathan—the international state system. The postwar world was ostensibly based on independent states following international rules, cooperating in international bodies, and respecting one another’s borders. It worked (partly because the West imposed it). It is remarkable that though cobbled from different types of societies and myriad entities with no natural borders and no national unity, African states fought essentially no wars with one another over the last sixty years (even if civil wars have been commonplace in the continent and spilled across national boundaries in some notable cases such as the Great War in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo). This system cemented the Paper Leviathans, because it conferred international legitimacy on these states, even if they completely failed the duck test. Once you have the red carpet treatment from the international community, and once you can get most of the looting you want domestically, the fact that your power is really hollow matters less.

We can put all of these threads together using the figure we introduced in Chapter 2, which we replicate here as Figure 4. Our discussion implies that Paper Leviathans are found near the bottom left corner, on the side of the Despotic Leviathan—little societal power, little state power, but still despotic. This provides some more insights into the fear of the mobilization effect—an increase in the power of society can throw a Paper Leviathan into the orbit of the Absent Leviathan or even ultimately push it into the corridor, with detrimental effects on the ability of elites to control politics. In this context, it is also useful to contrast the Paper Leviathan with the Indian state. We saw in Chapter 8 that the Indian state is disorganized and feeble too, and this is maintained by the fragmented nature of society, just like the Paper Leviathan. But there are notable differences too. In India, this situation was forged by the history of caste relations and the cage of norms this created, not by the history of colonial rule. This also implies that it was the society’s peculiar organization that kept the state weak. This makes India closer to a state impaired and constricted by society, more of a weak state than a despotic one. As such, in terms of our figure, India is on the other side of the line demarcating the division between the Absent and Despotic Leviathans. It isn’t the fear of the mobilization effect keeping the state weak and incapable in India; it is the unbearable weight of caste divisions.

Figure 4. Paper Leviathans

The Consequences of Paper Leviathans

The type of state discussed in this chapter, and of many countries of the postcolonial world, is very different from the Despotic, Absent, and Shackled Leviathans we have discussed so far. This Paper Leviathan has some of the worst characteristics of both the Absent and Despotic Leviathans. To the extent that it has any powers, it is despotic, repressive, and arbitrary. It is fundamentally unchecked by society, which it continually tries to keep weak, disorganized, and discombobulated. It provides its citizens little protection from Warre, and doesn’t try to free them from the cage of norms (and may in fact get to use the cage for its own purposes). This is all because the Paper Leviathan doesn’t care about the welfare of its citizens and certainly not about their liberty. But it is also because it lacks the capacity to do much, except perhaps enriching the political elites in charge. We have argued that the roots of the Paper Leviathan are to be found in the political elites’ fear of societal mobilization, which would constrain their ability to benefit from their control of the state and loot society’s resources. We have also pointed out how sharp inequalities, unaccountable state structures, and the history of indirect rule left over from colonial times as well as the abrupt and haphazard transition from colonial rule to independence and the international state system prepared the ground for the Paper Leviathan.

The Paper Leviathan has not only been bad for liberty. It has also been disastrous for economic prosperity. We have seen that economic opportunities and incentives need to be based on the law, security, and effective and equitable public services, and that’s why economic growth is nonexistent under the Absent Leviathan. The Despotic Leviathan can enforce laws, resolve conflicts (even if often to the advantage of the politically powerful), control looting, and, if it wishes, provide public services. On this basis, it can unleash despotic growth, as most recently illustrated by China’s spectacular rise. Not so with the Paper Leviathan. It doesn’t have the capacity to do many of these things, and often doesn’t wish to control the looting anyway. So the toll of the Paper Leviathan in Latin America and Africa has been not only continued fear, violence, and dominance for most of its citizens, but a corruption-ridden, inefficiently organized economy exhibiting little growth. Prosperity as well as liberty will have to wait.

The Paper Leviathan’s incapacity also sets the stage for uncontrolled conflict and civil war, as Liberia illustrates. Between 1989 and 2003 the Liberian state collapsed and the country was ravaged by two civil wars. Estimates of the total number of casualties in the two civil wars go as high as half a million and above. Though there has been some reconstruction and stability since then, the paper-thin nature of the Liberian state persists to this day, with a resulting inability and unwillingness to provide public services, even if the country has become much more popular with the international community since then. In 2013 all 25,000 students who sat the University of Liberia’s entrance exam failed. Not one, apparently, was qualified to attend university, an incredible statement about the low quality of Liberian high schools. In 2018 newly printed currency to the tune of US$104 million, about 5 percent of the country’s national income, simply vanished from containers in the port of Monrovia. The country has about the same living standards as it had in the 1970s.

Chapter 12

WAHHAB’S CHILDREN

The Tactician’s Dream

In the West, the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, has come to epitomize lack of liberty, with personal freedom abridged by custom, religion, and despotism. What explains the perfect storm of unchecked despotism and a stifling cage of norms? Such an outcome is surprising given Muhammad’s successful state-building drive, which originated in part of Saudi Arabia, and the spectacular civilization that Islamic empires built in the following centuries. What happened? Why did the cage of norms become so fervent and suffocating in the Middle East, when we have seen many other state-building drives relax rather than intensify the cage’s restrictions?

As we saw in Chapter 3, Muhammad’s state spread rapidly through much of the Middle East and North Africa. But not everywhere. Arabia is divided into several distinct regions (as can be seen in Map 4 in Chapter 3). Medina and Mecca are in the Hijaz, nestled in the Sarawat Mountains, which run along the western side of the peninsula bordering the Red Sea. On the eastern side the mountains end and the great vastness of the Arabian desert interior, the Najd, begins. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who headed the German Afrika Korps during World War II, called the desert “a tactician’s dream and a quartermaster’s nightmare.” Such was the Najd.

Rather than taking on this logistical nightmare, the Islamic empires after Muhammad spread up toward Damascus and Baghdad, and then west into Egypt and North Africa, where they could conquer already centralized states. Even later, after the various early caliphates collapsed and the seat of Islamic power shifted to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, the Najd resisted integration. The Ottomans controlled the Hijaz and the Muslim holy cities as well as Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, but they left the interior of Arabia more or less alone.

Though the Bedouin of the Najd converted to Islam, they avoided political centralization. All great religions are flexible and open to multiple interpretations and implementations (otherwise how could they spread so successfully?). Though Muhammad was intent on building a powerful state and spelled out the nature of centralized authority in the Constitution of Medina, the Quran was less specific on this issue. In fact there are only two surahs (chapters) that directly address constitutional issues. In one, obedience to authority is emphasized. Another calls for consultation, the norm among the Bedouin tribes of the desert. There was plenty of wiggle room there to assuage the Arabs’ skepticism of centralized authority. Perhaps most important, there would be no elaborate hierarchical church structure with priests, bishops, and popes in Islam. Instead, each Muslim could connect directly to Allah with no intermediaries (not unlike many Protestant denominations). This made it harder for a centralized authority to imprint its wishes on local communities and made the new religion more palatable to the Bedouin tribes. It also implied that the tribal structure in areas such as the Najd was more likely to persist and fuse with the teachings of Islam.

So the Najd remained divided into competing, autonomous tribes ruled by sheikhs or emirs well into the eighteenth century. Competition sometimes turned violent. At the oasis of al-Diriya, just outside Riyadh, the modern capital of Saudi Arabia, a series of assassinations led to the emergence of a new emir, Muhammad ibn Saud, who assumed power either in 1726 or 1727. It was Saud’s descendants who in 1932 were to give their name to the as yet unimagined kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Our earliest existing sources of information about Saud come from early in the nineteenth century and all agree on the centrality of one event to Saud’s and his kingdom’s destiny—his first meeting with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

Al-Wahhab came from Uyaina, an oasis town about twenty miles north of al-Diriya. His family was deeply steeped in Islamic teaching and his father was a qadi, a judge appointed by the local emir to resolve cases using the Islamic law, Sharia. This law had emerged along with Muhammad and the early Islamic empires. Its most basic elements were the holy book, the Quran, and the hadiths, a large collection of sayings and actions attributed to Muhammad and written down by his followers. During the early Middle Ages various schools of thought, most prominently the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and Jafari, had started debating about what constituted Sharia. Though they all agreed on the centrality of the Quran and the hadiths, they disagreed on the extent to which judges could create precedents or make rulings based on analogies. Of these schools, the Hanbalis were the most conservative. They rejected all such evolution of the law, and their interpretation of Sharia dominated the Najd.

Al-Wahhab had memorized the Quran by the age of ten and began traveling in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, returning to the Najd to begin preaching in the early 1730s. In the absence of a religious hierarchy, anyone with knowledge of the Quran and the hadiths could be recognized as an ulama, a religious teacher who could issue fatwas, which were rulings articulating particular interpretations of the Islamic scriptures, usually in the context of some contemporary problem or debate. Sometime during his travels, al-Wahhab formulated a distinct interpretation of Islam and what he decided were its failings in Arabia. Following the Hanbali school, he thought that the people had strayed from the real religion by worshipping idols. Remember that prior to Muhammad’s revelation in Mecca, the Kaaba had been a shrine of different pre-Islamic gods. Worship of these gods persisted, and people sanctified saints and Muhammad’s tomb at Medina. For al-Wahhab this was all idolatry. He preached that holy war, jihad, could be waged against anyone engaged in such idolatry. These interpretations turned out to be very useful for Saud, who was an astute tactician.

But first al-Wahhab had to develop his doctrine and build a following. Two of his ideas turned out to be particularly attractive to rulers: people must obey the authorities and they must pay zakat, the obligatory religious tax stipulated in the Quran. Zakat was not popular among the Bedouins of the Najd and seems to have been seldom paid in this period. It was supposed to be used for charity and religious activities, but presumably sheikhs and emirs might get a cut too. The cornerstone of what became Wahhabism, however, was the idea that anyone who didn’t pay zakat was an infidel.

Al-Wahhab began to put his new doctrine into action in Uyaina. He cut down a sacred tree with his own hands. There was to be no worship of trees. He destroyed the grave of Zaid ibn al-Kattab, a companion of the Prophet, which had turned into a place of pilgrimage. There was to be no worship of tombs, no pilgrimages except the hadj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. When a woman from Uyaina was found guilty of fornication, al-Wahhab applied a strict interpretation of Sharia and ordered her to be stoned to death. This was a step too far, and in the face of opposition from local ulama who disliked his radical new teachings, al-Wahhab was forced to flee from Uyaina to al-Diriya. There he and Saud had a meeting of minds. No firsthand account of the fateful meeting exists, but al-Wahhab wanted military support for the jihad he planned to wage in order to spread his new doctrines. Saud saw the potential for Wahhabism to be a powerful tool of military expansion and social control. Saud asked al-Wahhab to stay in al-Diriya and support his planned military campaign into the Najd. He also demanded that al-Wahhab agree that he could raise regular taxes on local harvests. Al-Wahhab accepted the first, but not the second. He instead granted that Saud could take one-fifth of all the booty from jihad and pointed out that this would be far more money than taxing harvests. The deal was sealed; Saud relied on Wahhabism, and Wahhabism relied on Saud. The marriage was to be fabulously successful. The Sauds expanded out of a little oasis, taking over first the Najd, and by 1803 had captured Mecca and the Hijaz from the Ottoman state. One account records how Saud seized al-Hasa, to the east of the Najd.

When morning came and Saud went on his way after the prayer, when they [the Wahhabis] rode camels and horses and shot their hand-guns at once, the sky darkened, the earth shuddered, puffs of smoke rose in the air and many pregnant women suffered miscarriages. Then all the people of al-Hasa came to Saud, throwing themselves on his mercy.

He ordered all of them to appear before him and so they did. He stayed there for some months, killing, exiling and jailing everybody he wanted to, confiscating property, destroying houses and erecting fortresses. He demanded 100,000 dirhams from them and received that sum … Some people … toured the markets and caught those who had led a dissolute life … Some people were killed in the oasis, others were taken to the camp and their heads chopped off in front of Saud’s tent until they were all destroyed.

For the first time ever the Arabian peninsula was more or less unified under one state, though what is now Yemen and Oman in the south remained independent. None of this would have surprised Ibn Khaldun; the desert people who had asabiyyah were conquering the urban areas under the banner of Islam.

The political system that developed in the Najd after the 1740s and eventually gelled in Saudi Arabia was very different from what existed before. At the time, tribal sheikhs had to consult other notables in councils called majlis. The English writer and explorer Charles Dougherty noted that this was still the case in the 1860s and 1870s. The principle was “Let him speak here who will, the voice of the least is heard among them; he is a tribesmen.”

In fact, sheikhs were elected and potentially any Bedouin could rise to the position, even if it was typically monopolized by notable families. As the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt noted earlier in the century:

The sheikh has no actual authority over the individuals of his tribe.

Just a garden-variety Absent Leviathan. When Muhammad ibn Saud died in 1765, he was succeeded by his son Abd al-Aziz Muhammad ibn Saud, who still needed to gain legitimacy by being elected by the people of al-Diriya. But this balance between state and society was soon toppled. Abd al-Aziz carried on the conquests of his father, using conversion to Wahhabism as a pretext for military expansion and annexing territory in the region. A copy of a letter, which was read out to those about to be conquered, states:

Abd al-Aziz to the Arabs of the tribe of ***. Hail! Your duty is to believe in the book I send you. Do not be like the idolatrous Turks, who give God a human intermediary. If you are true believers, you shall be saved; otherwise, I shall wage war upon you until death.

When an oasis was conquered, Wahhabi ulama were sent to preach. Saud replaced local emirs and sheikhs with people he handpicked. He appointed Wahhabi qadis to implement their strict version of Sharia. He also appointed an official known as a muhtasib. The muhtasib had various administrative roles, such as overseeing commerce and weights and measures, and also ensured that key Islamic practices, such as prayers, were observed. Ibn Saud also built quite an elaborate bureaucracy of tax collectors to raise the zakat, supposedly sending out seventy teams of collectors each year, each consisting of seven collectors. He started to settle tribal disputes too. In 1788 al-Wahhab issued a fatwa declaring that the Sauds were the hereditary emirs and all Wahhabis had to swear allegiance to the ruling Saud. The despotism of the Sauds was fusing with the Wahhabi cage of norms.

The initial triumph of the Sauds and Wahhabis over the Ottomans did not last long. The Ottoman sultan tasked Muhammad Ali, the general of Albanian origin who had made himself de facto independent ruler of Egypt, to confront the Wahhabi threat. Muhammad Ali and later his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded the Hijaz and destroyed the aspiring Saudi state in 1818. Yet it was difficult to govern the Najd. In 1824 a second Saudi state formed, but with the Ottomans more securely in charge of the Hijaz, it never had the authority or scope of the initial state. It collapsed in 1891, defeated by a rival Najd family, and the Sauds went into exile in Kuwait. But not for long.

Domesticating the Ulama

In 1902 the Sauds were back, led by Abd al-Aziz bin Saud, a great-great-great-grandson of Muhammad ibn Saud. Abd al-Aziz trekked across the desert from Kuwait and captured Riyadh, al-Diriya having been abandoned after being destroyed by Ibrahim Pasha in 1818. Saud had a new version of his ancestor’s religious secret weapon—the Ikhwan. The Ikhwan, meaning literally “brothers,” was a religious organization started by the qadi of Riyadh, a member of the al-Shaikh family, descendants of al-Wahhab. They formed settlements devoted to a strict version of Islam, shunned foreigners, adopted a rigid code of conduct, and developed strong norms of cooperation and mutual support. They also inherited the Wahhabi habit of declaring jihad on those who did not adhere to their rules. Muhammad ibn Saud had seen the potential of Wahhabism in his state-building efforts and used the Wahhabi fighters to attack his rivals. So did Abd al-Aziz with the Ikhwan.

The first Ikhwan settlement dates back to 1913 at al-Artawiya, to the northwest of Riyadh. Soon Abd al-Aziz was giving them money and seed and helping build mosques and schools. This assistance was followed by guns and ammunition, even if the Ikhwan seemed to have preferred traditional weapons like swords. He encouraged and built more settlements, inducing the ulama of Riyadh to issue a fatwa promoting settled life and agriculture. He managed to get the right to appoint qadis to the settlements, typically from the al-Shaikh family, which bolstered the Saud-Wahhab alliance. The Ikhwan were then subjected to a military draft and became Abd al-Aziz’s shock troops. (A surviving photo of the Ikhwan from this period is shown in the photography section.) They fought for jihad, he for a kingdom. It was an uneasy balance, but for a while these goals coalesced around the despotism–cage of norms axis. As early as 1914, however, he had to induce an ulama to issue another fatwa appealing for tolerance to reign the Ikhwan in.

Things came to a head when the Ottoman Empire, still in control of the Hijaz and the holy cities, entered World War I on the side of Germany. The British, Lawrence of Arabia included, encouraged the emir of Mecca, Hussein, to lead the famous Arab revolt of 1916 by promising him that after the Ottomans had been defeated they would guarantee the emergence of an Arab state “in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca,” but excluding “portions of Syria” which lay to the west of “the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” By 1918 the Ottoman army had collapsed, and the British took advantage of the ambiguities of the agreement with Hussein to restrict his state to the Hijaz. Together with the French they carved up the rest of the former Ottoman Empire with the exception of part of Turkey. Hussein was livid at this betrayal and refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. In the meantime, Abd al-Aziz and the Ikhwan consolidated their dominance over the Najd. At first they had no desire to confront the Ottoman troops. Nor did they wish to fight Hussein, ruling over the Hijaz with the backing of the British. But Hussein’s antagonism to Britain’s postwar plans, particularly those involving Palestine, led Britain to switch its support to Abd al-Aziz in 1924. Emboldened, he invaded the Hijaz. Mecca fell in October of that year and Medina was captured in December 1925.

Abd al-Aziz became the king of the Najd and Hijaz thanks to the Ikhwan. He had what he wanted, but the Ikhwan didn’t. They were on a jihad against apostates, and not just those confined to the Arabian peninsula. They started launching attacks on the British protectorate of Transjordan, only to be beaten back by the British air force. Abd al-Aziz decided that the Ikhwan had done their job and were more of a nuisance than an asset. He turned on them, defeated them at the battle of Sabilla, and rounded up and killed their leaders. In 1932 he unified the Hijaz and Najd into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The defeat of the Ikhwan was a powerful message that in the coalition of the Sauds and Wahhabism, the Sauds called the shots. But it took some time for the Saudi kings to institutionalize this in its modern form. A pivotal moment came following the death of Abd al-Aziz in 1953. He was succeeded by his son Saud, but there was intense rivalry with other brothers who wanted the throne, particularly his half brother Faisal. Faisal turned out to be politically far more astute. As Saud was struggling with health problems, Faisal gradually took control of many policy portfolios and built a coalition of supporters within the royal family. Finally, confident of his power, Faisal convened the ulama to consider the issue of excluding Saud from the affairs of state. They dutifully issued a fatwa on March 29, 1964, emphasizing two main points: first, “Saud was the country’s sovereign and must be respected and revered by all”; second, “As prime minister, Prince Faisal could freely manage the kingdom’s internal and external affairs without consulting the king.” It was in effect a coup d’état, sanctioned by religious authority. Except that there was no precedent for this decision in the Quran or any relevant scripture; the ulama just recognized where power lay. But even this wasn’t enough for Faisal and his supporters. They decided they needed to get rid of Saud completely. In October 1964 Faisal convened the ulama again, now to find a way to justify deposing King Saud. One of those who participated in these negotiations recalled how Faisal’s group

on several occasions contacted Shaykh Muhammad ibn Ibrahim … to persuade him to issue a fatwa deposing King Saud … Action was necessary in order to preserve the unity of the community and of the Islamic state. The ulama had to support the decision of the royal house. Shaykh Muhammad therefore decided to gather together the ulama at his home … After a brief discussion of the country’s situation, they concluded that it was necessary to confirm the royal house’s choice.

Sheikh Muhammad was the Grand Mufti, the most important ulama in the country. The language here is striking. Though historically al-Wahhab and his descendants probably had a large amount of autonomy from the Sauds, it is clear here that by 1964 the ulama did what they were told by whatever faction of the Sauds was most powerful, and they agreed to depose the king after only a “brief discussion.” The fatwa deposing Saud was duly issued on November 1.

Faisal became king. Prior to his reign the relationship between the royal family and the ulama was informal. Faisal started to change this and forged an institutional structure he could control more directly. He announced a series of reforms that included creating “an advisory council consisting of twenty-two members who will be chosen amongst leading jurists and scholars.” They were charged to “issue rulings and give advice on questions of interest to members of the Muslim community.”

It took until 1971 to finally create this Committee of the Grand Ulama, apparently because of the opposition from the Grand Mufti Sheikh Muhammad. After he died in 1969, Faisal abolished the post of Grand Mufti (it was later reintroduced). The Committee of the Grand Ulama has various subcommittees to consider different types of problems and issue fatwas relating to different areas of Islamic law. But they are only able to hear questions that are authorized by the royal cabinet, which can modify their agendas at will. The committee thus became a tool for the domestication of the ulama.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of this comes in 1990. After Saddam Hussein’s army overran Kuwait, the Saudis were terrified that they were next, and invited the U.S. to send troops to protect them. King Fahd, Faisal’s brother who acceded to the throne in 1982, was worried that this might be interpreted to be in contradiction with the Sauds’ self-proclaimed role as defenders of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But the Grand Ulama quickly issued a fatwa to reassure the Saudis. It noted that to defend the nation

by all possible means … the Supreme Council of Ulama supports what was undertaken by the ruler, may God grant him success: the bringing of forces equipped with instruments capable of frightening and terrorizing the one who wanted to commit an aggression against this country. This duty is dictated by necessity in the current circumstances, and made inevitable by the painful reality, and its legal basis and evidence dictates that the man in charge of the affairs of Muslims should seek the assistance of one who has the ability to attain the intended aim. The Quran and the Prophet’s Sunna (activities and statements) have indicated the need to be ready and take precautions before it is too late.

The Sunna refers to the set of practices, norms, and beliefs of the Islamic community drawn from the Quran and the hadiths. No doubt it came as a relief to Saudi citizens to learn that the presence of “crusaders,” as Osama bin Laden would later call them, on Saudi soil was all perfectly consistent with the Sunna. Phew!

Intensifying the Cage of Norms

The story of Saudi Arabia exemplifies the cage of norms, and its intensification. Norms of societies without centralized authority often evolve to constrain behavior in a multitude of ways, both to regulate conflicts and prevent the destabilization of the status quo. These norms take root in the customs, beliefs, and practices of the people, and they become ingrained in religion and religious practice. So they did with Islam, despite Muhammad’s strong drive to build centralized authority in Medina and beyond. With the efforts of the Hanbali legal school and Wahhabism, and their emphasis on tradition and opposition to innovation, these norms powerfully reproduced themselves. Then came the deal with ibn Saud, who exploited the Wahhabis’ zeal for military expansion, and he and his successors bought into the mainstream Wahhabi norms and restrictions as part of this quid pro quo. A small price to pay for a kingdom.

But in the hands of ibn Saud and Abd al-Aziz, the Wahhabi ideas and restrictions started having an impact well beyond the oasis of al-Diriya. Other would-be despots in the Middle East began using the same ideas and strategies, similarly stiffening the cage of norms to support despotic power. Three interrelated factors explain the popularity of this strategy in the region. One follows from Islam’s institutional structure. As we have noted, in Islam, especially Sunni Islam, there is no church hierarchy, no priests intermediating between an individual and the deity. The ulama, who are learned in religion, can give people guidance on the interpretation of the scriptures and issue fatwas. On the one hand, this means that anybody with sufficient knowledge of the Quran and the hadiths can play this role and interpret Islam and its teachings (a dynamic whose implications we’ll discuss in a little bit). On the other hand, this organizational structure opened the door for the takeover of the ulama and the supply of fatwas to shore up the Saudi regime. There was nothing like the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to act as a counterweight to Saudi machinations. Other despotic regimes in the Middle East have done the same.

A second factor is related to the fact that, as noted above, the Quran is not a constitutional document, and is open to interpretation on the degree of power vested in rulers. For example, because the Quran and the Constitution of Medina are silent on who should take part in councils and consult with a ruler, there was a lot of leeway for the Sauds to sideline existing councils, the majlis of Bedouin tribes, and to limit their role to local affairs and completely control who gets to sit in the larger Majlis Ash-Shura, or Shura Council.

A third factor is a Hobbesian view of state-society relations that developed and became ingrained during the reign of the despotic Islamic empires. For example, as the famous tenth-century philosopher al-Ghazali noted:

The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against another … Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against a command of God or His prophet.

Thus Warre was much worse than despotism, and as long as a despot stuck to Sharia, he was to be tolerated.

So this interpretation of Islam provided an alluring set of principles for a potential despot (and as we’ll see, the history of the Middle East meant that there were plenty of those around). It seemed easy to manipulate, it held no strong inclination toward democracy or any other type of political accountability, and it preached submission, as long as Sharia was followed. But of course Islam was much more than this, it was a whole system of beliefs about how one should live one’s life in accord with God’s laws. Many of these principles were encoded in the 620s in Arabia and reflected the norms of the region and the period. Groups like the Hanbalis or Wahhabis emphasized a strict traditionalist interpretation of Sharia and reified a very restrictive cage of norms, quite anomalous in the modern world.

This cage of norms was not simply a powerful tool in the hands of the Sauds. It was also the price they had to pay for their coalition with the Wahhabis. For instance, Abd al-Aziz had founded a commercial court in 1926 with seven magistrates, only one of whom was a religious figure. He was trying to minimally modernize economic relations. In 1955 the ulama persuaded King Saud to abolish the court completely. In 1967 Faisal resuscitated it, creating three commercial courts, one in Riyadh, and one each in the major port cities of Jeddah and Damman. But now one-half of the magistrates had to be ulama. By 1969, two-thirds had to be ulama. Sharia trumped any attempt to introduce modern civil commercial codes.

One might have thought that after the defeat of the Ikhwan and the domestication of the ulama, the Saudi royal family would have the upper hand and start relaxing parts of the cage of norms that did not suit their political or economic interests. However, as King Fahd’s fatwa on the defense of the nation illustrates, in a nakedly despotic system without any consultation with society there is often demand for religious authorities to reaffirm Saudi policies and practices. This dynamic got much worse after two events in 1978 and ’79. First came the Iranian Islamic Revolution, which threatened the Saudi claim to be the standard-bearer of Islam in the region. Second, more ominously for the Saud family, hundreds of insurgents (nobody knows the exact number) led by a man called Juhayman al-Otaybi stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Al-Otaybi came from a settlement established by King Abd al-Aziz to house the Ikhwan, and his father and many of his relatives were active members of the brotherhood and had been part of the conflict with the king. His and the insurgents’ grievances had Wahhabi roots. They argued that the House of Saud had deviated from Muhammad’s teachings by becoming westernized, and called for a return to a more traditional interpretation of Islam. They (rightly) noted that the ulama had been captured by the Sauds and had lost their legitimacy. The reaction by the Saudi ruling family, after the long siege was defeated with the help of Pakistani and French special forces and al-Otaybi and his captured followers were beheaded, was to double down on Wahhabism. The interpretation and the teaching of the religion became more strict, especially as a way of indoctrinating Saudi youth in schools. The cage of norms tightened yet again.

The Untouchables of Saudi Arabia

In 1955 King Saud announced that there would be public education for girls. But four years later, in the face of resistance from the ulama, Saudi policy changed and put this education under the supervision of the ulama. The Grand Mufti and ulama maintained this control until 2002. It is not only women’s education; every aspect of women’s treatment in Saudi society is constricted by the cage of norms forged by the Saud-Wahhab pact.

A key enforcer of the cage in Saudi Arabia is the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, members of whom are known as the mutaween, typically translated to English as the religious police. The mutaween are charged with compelling people to adhere to Sharia and Islamic norms, such as the strict dress code for women. They take this seriously, very seriously—so seriously that in March 2002 when a fire broke out in a girls’ school in Mecca, they tried to stop girls who were inappropriately dressed—without headscarves and abayas (the black robes required by the Kingdom’s traditional interpretation of Islam)—from leaving the burning building. Fifteen girls died. A rescue worker was quoted as saying:

Whenever the girls got out through the main gate, these people forced them to return via another. Instead of extending a helping hand for the rescue work, they were using their hands to beat us.

You might think that the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was an ancient Islamic institution, but it isn’t. It’s true, as we saw, that as the Saudi state expanded, it appointed muhtasibs to capture oases, whose duties included enforcing religious norms and laws, and the roots of this office extend back to the Abbasid Caliphate in the early Middle Ages. But “the Committee” was a new institution, whose progenitor, “the Company” for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, was created by Abd al-Aziz in 1926 after he had completed his conquest of the Hijaz. The company turned into the committee in 1928. As the Saudi state consolidated its power, the cage of norms tightened. This was partly because of the concessions to the Wahhabi ulama. But it was also because it was quite useful for shoring up despotism. The cage helped keep people under control even as the economy and life modernized; hence the creation of the committee.

The brunt of the cage of norms in Saudi Arabia is borne by women. In 2014 a female student at King Saud University in Riyadh died because male paramedics were not permitted to treat her. Men who are not close relatives are not allowed to touch women, not even to politely shake hands, let alone give essential medical care. In Saudi Arabia, women are the untouchables.

The dress code, the no-touching stipulation, and the web of regulations placing women under the control of men come from particular interpretations of the Quran. Surah 4, verse 34 says that “men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because God has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” This is interpreted in Saudi Arabia to mean that women are under the control of men, like children, and this reading is thought to be consistent with the one clause, number 41, of Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina, formulated in 622, that mentions women and says, “A woman shall only be given protection with the consent of her family.”

So women are under the control of their family (read “men”). In Saudi Arabia the dominance of men over women is institutionalized via the guardianship system. Every woman must have a male guardian from whom she needs to get permission to do many things, like travel. The guardian can be her father, her husband, or even her son. If a woman travels without a guardian, she must carry a yellow card that documents the number of trips and for how many days her guardian has approved travel for. Permission is also needed to open a bank account, rent an apartment, start a business, or apply for a passport. The government’s electronic portal stipulates that a male guardian has to fill out the application for a woman’s passport. A woman even needs a man’s permission to get out of prison when her sentence is over!

Until recently, permission was required to get a job too. Though this has changed, Saudi law requires segregated workplaces with separate areas for men and women which significantly disincentivizes hiring women. If a woman wants to study abroad, she must be accompanied by a male relative. Women cannot eat at a restaurant that doesn’t have a separate walled off “family” section and a separate entrance for women. A fatwa from the Grand Council states that “a woman should not leave her house, except with her husband’s permission.”

Of course, there is no equality before the law. In legal cases the testimony of women is worth one half of men’s. Similarly, under Sharia, women inherit half the amount that men inherit. Women have trouble filing a case or being heard in court without a legal guardian intervening. Courts, presided over by male judges, generally refuse to accept the testimony of a woman as a witness in criminal cases. Two women told Human Rights Watch researchers that judges had refused to allow them to speak in the courtroom because they deemed their voices to be “shameful.” Judges allowed their guardian to speak on their behalf. But what happens when women are abused by their guardians or husbands?

One ranking of gender parity by the World Economic Forum puts Saudi Arabia 141 out of 149 countries (the United Arab Emirates, despite its gender equality awards we saw in the Preface, ranks only a little above Saudi Arabia, 121). This ranking combines many things; one is labor force participation, which stands at just 22 percent in Saudi Arabia compared to 56 percent in the United States.

The guardianship system and systematic discrimination against women have been consistently upheld by religious authorities. In the 1990s when the Grand Ulama was asked to make a ruling about the appropriateness of a woman’s delaying marriage to finish her university education, it issued a fatwa decreeing that

for a woman to progress through university education, which is something we have no need for, is an issue that needs examination. What I see [to be correct] is that if a woman finishes elementary school and is able to read and write, and so she is able to benefit by reading the Book of God, its commentaries, and Prophetic hadith, that is sufficient for her.

When asked about women’s employment, it ruled:

God Almighty … commended women to remain in their homes. Their presence in the public is the main contributing factor to the spread of fitna [strife]. Yes, the Shari’ah permits women to leave their home only when necessary, provided that they wear hijab and avoid all suspicious situations. However, the general rule is that they should remain at home.

And definitely no touching. No leading either. Another fatwa by the same body stated that women could not fill positions of leadership over men due to their “deficient reasoning and rationality, in addition to their passion that prevails over their thinking.” The typical defense of these rules by officials of the Saudi government is that Saudi Arabia is a conservative society and the rules reflect the way the people think.

But this claim receives no support from the available evidence. A recent study by Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra González, and David Yanagizawa-Drott asked men in Riyadh whether or not they agreed with the simple statement “In my opinion, women should be allowed to work outside of the home.” Eighty-seven percent agreed with this statement. But reaffirming the cage of norms, many men still were not comfortable for their wives to be working outside the home because of how they thought others would react. In particular, they reasoned that others would be less favorable toward outside work by women and only 63 percent of them thought that other men from their neighborhood would agree with the same statement. So in the cage of norms, everybody is afraid of what others would say about the most basic empowerment of women. Women’s work becomes stigmatized and the cage of norms is reinforced.

Though scholars can cite the Quran and hadiths in support of the control of women by men, everything is subject to political imperatives. As recently as 1996 the Grand Ulama issued a fatwa that categorically stated that women were not allowed to drive according to Sharia law.

There is no doubt that such [driving] is not allowed. Women driving lead to many evils and negative consequences. Included among these is her mixing with men without her being on her guard. It also leads to the evil sins due to which such an action is forbidden.

There were obviously no cars during Muhammad’s lifetime. A fatwa like this is no more than a speculative interpretation of what basic Islamic principles would imply for women driving, had there been cars in the 620s. But the fact that women were not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia became a more and more embarrassing facet of the regime, remorselessly referred to in international media. In 2017 it was announced that this would be changed under the reform agenda of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. But hang on, in 1996 the Grand Council had announced that it was definitely against Sharia to allow women to drive. No problem; the Sauds just got them to issue a new fatwa declaring that it was perfectly Islamic after all.

Nebuchadnezzar Rides Again

Even if Saudi Arabia is the poster child for the intensification of the cage of norms, other despotic regimes in the region have followed the same playbook. Take the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Iraq emerged as a British mandate out of the same shady plan that Emir Hussein of Mecca felt had cheated the Arabs of their true rewards for fighting the Ottoman Empire. To sweeten the pill, the British made one of Hussein’s sons, Faisal, king of Iraq. Iraq was a colonial creation, an amalgamation of three Ottoman provinces, Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Putting Faisal in charge of it was a bizarre piece of colonial politics; when he was crowned, the band played the British national anthem, “God Save the King,” because Iraq didn’t have its own yet. The monarchy didn’t last. Iraq became independent in 1931 and the first coup happened in 1936, followed by two decades of intense political instability until members of the Free Officers, a group led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, finally overthrew the monarchy in 1958. In the first hours of the coup, Qasim’s men summarily executed the king and his family.

Qasim imposed state control over the ulama and tried to secularize the state. But his attempts were short lived. He was himself murdered in 1963 by the military putschists who sympathized with the Baath Party. Founded in 1947 in Syria, the Baath Party had an ideology rooted in pan-Arabism, anticolonialism, and socialism. Even though the Baathists were secular, they had no problem using Islam to subjugate society and intensify the cage of norms. This process started in 1968, when the Baathists definitively took control in another coup, and escalated after 1979 when Saddam Hussein grabbed personal power. Saddam was not a military man, but had ruthlessly worked his way up through the party. He took his chance when it came. To consolidate his hold on power, Saddam held family members of one-third of the members of the Revolutionary Command Council hostage. Then he really got going. He orchestrated and filmed a confession from Muhyi Abdel-Hussein, the secretary of the Revolutionary Command Council (Saddam was vice chairman), which was shown to party members from all over the country. According to a version recorded by a historian:

A grief-stricken Saddam addressed the meeting with tears running down his cheeks. He filled in the gaps in [Abdel-Hussein’s] testimony and dramatically fingered his former colleagues. Guards dragged people out of the proceedings and then Saddam called upon the country’s top ministers and party leaders to themselves form the actual firing squads.

It seems that some five hundred high-ranking Baathists were executed by August 1, 1979.

Saddam was now in full control. He made the ulama salaried employees of the state and subservient to him. He constructed an elaborate ideology to legitimize his rule, claiming a line of descent from the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar from the fifth century BCE. Nebuchadnezzar was not a Muslim, of course, but as the rule of Saddam became more and more precarious and less and less legitimate, he tried to shore up his power not just by extensive appeals to Islam but by any means he could think of. The year after taking power Saddam invaded Iran, launching the disastrous Iran-Iraq War. He had hoped to exploit the weakness of the Iranian regime after the overthrow of the shah in 1979 and grab their oilfields. Instead, there was a bloody stalemate that lasted eight years.

By 1982 Saddam had completely cast aside his secularist roots. He was talking of jihad and finishing his speeches with religious phrases such as “God will defend and protect you and lead you on the road to victory.” In a 1984 celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, Saddam was lauded along with “our historical, ingenious, Jihad-launching leadership, fighting for the future of our Iraqi people and elevating our monotheistic Islamic religion, guided by the Message of Eternal Islam.” By the time he invaded Kuwait six years later, Saddam was claiming “it was God that showed us [read: me] the path … God has blessed us.” His picture kneeling down for prayer began adorning public spaces, as shown in our photography section. After the complete defeat at the hands of the (mostly) U.S. military in Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, Saddam intensified his appeals to Islam. He initiated a massive program of Islamic education, doubling or even tripling the amount of time spent studying the Quran and the hadiths in school. Adults, even cabinet ministers, were forced to take classes on the Quran, and he started the Saddam Center for the Reading of the Quran and the Saddam University for Islamic Studies. Teachers’ knowledge of the scriptures was tested and prisoners could have their sentences reduced if they managed to successfully memorize key passages of religious texts. In 1992 Saddam insisted that the words Allahu Akbar (God is Great) be added to the Iraqi flag and he announced in public that the flag had become

the banner of jihad and faith … against the infidel horde.

Saddam was now styling himself “the Commander of the Congregation of the Believers” and burnishing his religious bona fides by doubling down on the cage of norms. In 1994, Decree No. 59 brought the first of a host of Sharia-inspired laws that would transform the Iraqi legal code. For robbery and car theft, punishment would be amputation of the hand at the wrist. For a second offense, the left foot would be amputated at the ankle. Soon unauthorized money changers got the same punishments, as did “profiteering bankers.” These measures had been preceded in 1990 by laws that introduced “tribal customs” into the penal codes, for instance making it legal for relatives of an adulterous woman to kill her.

Saddam continued to intensify the cage of norms, decreeing measures similar to Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system. Women were not allowed to travel abroad unless they were in the company of a male relative. He announced that women should give up employment and stay at home, but did not enforce this decree, apparently deeming that it would be too unpopular. It was left to the new U.S.-installed government in 2003 to fire all women judges in Iraq on the basis that their employment was un-Islamic.

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The Saudi strategy of marrying unchecked despotism with an intense (and intensifying) cage of norms was attractive not just for Saddam but for many other regimes in the Middle East. The region was fertile ground for this unholy alliance for several reasons. The first enticement was the history of despotic rule. The Islamic empires evolved into a rigidly despotic direction for the reasons Ibn Khaldun identified. This despotic evolution was continued and if anything aggravated by Ottoman rule. There were few pathways for society to have a say in political decision making or any type of accountability for rulers save for rebellion. After World War I, European colonial powers replaced the Ottomans. Aspirations for self-governance and independence that had built up over the last several decades were quashed and a patchwork of artificial client states was soon created. They had little in common with existing political structures and boundaries, except for their penchant for despotism. Then came oil, which would be the biggest export for the region, even if quite unequally distributed across the countries of the region. Natural resources that create great rewards for those who control political power tend to give a boost to despotism, and the Middle East’s recent history hasn’t been an exception. Then came the founding of the state of Israel and the incessant Arab-Israeli conflicts that followed. The scene was set for the exploitation of religion and the cage of norms to create and re-create despotism throughout the region.

The Seeds of 9/11

We’ve seen that it is not a coincidence that despotic states in the Middle East are associated with an intensified cages of norms. There’s no doubt that Saudi Arabia is the most extreme case; there is no other Muslim country that features such aggressive separation of men and women in the workplace, for example. But all of these states have played the same game of exploiting the decentralized structure of Islam to bolster their political authority. In Egypt a fatwa was issued in 1962 by Al-Azhar University, the most authoritative voice of Sunni Islam, declaring peace with Israel to be anti-Islamic. Yet when President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin in 1979, the sheikh of Al-Azhar issued a fatwa citing the Quran and the treaties that Muhammad had made to show that peace with Israel was indeed consistent with Islamic principles. When the Egyptian military wanted to make peace with Israel, they could count on the ulama to come to the rescue.

The economist Jean-Philippe Platteau has pointed out one more implication of this symbiotic relationship between the ulama, or at least part of it, and Middle Eastern despotic states. Recall that when al-Wahhab became an ulama nobody appointed him, he just started teaching and became recognized by the people as a religious authority and learned man. He made rulings, and people started to listen. So while the Saudi state can have their Great Council of Ulama and tell them what fatwas to issue, they can’t really prevent someone else from setting himself up as an ulama and issuing contradictory fatwas. That’s exactly what Osama bin Laden did. In 1996 he issued his first fatwa bemoaning the terrible state of the Middle East, and particularly Saudi Arabia, where the people

believe that this situation is a curse put on them by Allah for not objecting to the oppressive and illegitimate behavior and measures of the ruling regime: Ignoring the divine Sharia law; depriving people of their legitimate rights; allowing the American to occupy the land of the two Holy Places; imprisonment, unjustly, of the sincere scholars. The honorable Ulama and scholars as well as merchants, economists and eminent people of the country were all alerted by this disastrous situation.

Much of bin Laden’s fatwa is an anti-American tirade, but he was also highlighting his view of the real problem in Saudi Arabia, “the ruling regime,” and was calling for a jihad against it.

The political strategy of Middle Eastern states not only extinguishes liberty by tightening the cage of norms. It also sows the seeds of violence, instability, and terrorism. Every society’s cage restricts freedoms by regulating both behavior and discourse—what people talk about and how they talk about it. The Middle Eastern cage of norms makes it very difficult to develop a discourse that criticizes the despot, because the despot claims to represent religion. Criticize him and you are criticizing Islam. This generates a natural tendency to couch and develop criticisms by pointing out that the despot is not sufficiently religious and you are more devoted to the faith. In Platteau’s words:

When despots use religion to legitimize themselves in a highly contested environment they may provoke a counter-move in the form of religious backlash in which the ruler and his opponents compete to demonstrate their superior fidelity to the faith.

This is exactly what bin Laden was doing. His fatwa went on to note the “Suspension of the Islamic Sharia law and exchanging it with statutory laws and embarking upon bloody confrontation with devoted scholars and righteous youths.” The Sauds may have captured most of the ulama, but there remained the “devoted scholars,” like bin Laden. Indeed, though the Sauds tried, bin Laden couldn’t be captured. He forged a social movement and a radical, violent agenda, not just around his hatred of the West and the United States, but also around his hatred and contempt for the Sauds and “the oppressive and illegitimate behavior and measures of the ruling regime.”

The fact that the strategy of manipulating the ulama for the goals of the Despotic Leviathan has been used most intensively and successfully in Saudi Arabia helps explain how Osama bin Laden was forged in the Saudi crucible and why fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who crashed planes into buildings in the United States on September 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens. The concoction of Despotic Leviathans and the institutional structure of Islam doesn’t just intensify the cage of norms, it creates terrorism, violence, and instability.

Chapter 13

RED QUEEN OUT OF CONTROL

A Revolution of Destruction

On March 23, 1933, the German parliament convened in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. The unusual location was necessary because the parliament building, the Reichstag, had been burned down the previous month. It was the turn of Otto Wels, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, to address parliament. Wels was the only person who spoke that day, except for the recently appointed chancellor and leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler. Wels forcefully argued against Hitler’s Enabling Act. The act, the next step in what the German politician Hermann Rauschning called “the revolution of destruction,” effectively abolished parliament and gave all power to Hitler for a period of four years. Wels didn’t think his speech was going to change anything, and fully expected to be beaten up, arrested, or worse, and had come prepared with a cyanide capsule in his pocket. From what he’d seen so far, he had decided it was better to kill himself than fall into the hands of the Nazis and their paramilitary units such as the Storm Detachment (also known as Brownshirts or the SA) and the Protection Squadron (the SS). Wels knew that the first concentration camp, at Dachau, had been opened just the day before and two hundred political prisoners had already been moved there. He knew because the Nazis had been only too happy to publicize what was going to happen to their enemies. Hitler had talked about such camps as early as 1921, and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had given a press conference on March 20 to announce the opening of Dachau. Wels spoke in an environment of intense intimidation and latent violence. The opera house was hung with Nazi flags and swastikas, and members of the SA and the SS thronged the corridors and exits.

Wels acknowledged that the act was going to pass, but argued forcefully against it, stating:

In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly profess our allegiance to the basic principles of humanity and justice, freedom and socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible … From new persecutions Social Democracy can once again gather new strength. We salute the persecuted and oppressed … our friends throughout the country. Their constancy and loyalty … the courage of their convictions, their unbroken confidence, promise a brighter future.

Alas, the passing of the act was a foregone conclusion. The Nazis had, by hook or crook, secured the support of all delegates that could attend except the Social Democrats.

What was so unexpected was that things had come to such a critical point for Weimar democracy, with Hitler as chancellor and parliament about to disband itself. The National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party was a fringe movement that had received only 2.6 percent of the vote in the 1928 election. The Great Depression, which destroyed as much as half of the German economy’s output; mounting discontent; and a string of ineffective governments had caused a huge shift of votes toward the Nazis in the first election after the beginning of the Depression in 1930, followed by a further increase in the Nazi vote share in the elections of 1932. In the last free election Germany held, in November 1932, the Nazis received about 33 percent of the vote. The next election, in March 1933, following Hitler’s accession to chancellorship two months earlier, took place under a reign of terror and repression by Brownshirts and the police controlled by the Nazis. The Nazis now had almost 44 percent of the vote. Under Weimar’s proportional representation system, this translated into 288 out of the 647 deputies. To pass the Enabling Act the Nazis needed a quorum of at least two-thirds of elected members to be present and a two-thirds majority of those present to support it. They were far short, particularly if everyone showed up. First they barred the 81 elected Communist members of parliament from attending, and by not counting them at all, they managed to reduce the quorum from 432 to 378. Of the 120 Social Democratic members, only 94 were present; the others were in prison, ill, or simply too terrified to show up. All 94 voted against the act, but this wasn’t enough, since every other party supported it. A democratically elected legislature had voted itself out of existence.

That this was going to happen wasn’t a secret, even if the Nazis were certainly at times ambiguous about their aims. Their 1930 election manifesto had stated:

Through its victory the National Socialist Movement will overcome the old class and estate mentality. It will allow the reconstitution of a people out of the estate madness and class nonsense. It will educate the people to iron decisiveness. It will overcome democracy and enhance the authority of the personality.

But what did “overcome democracy” mean, exactly? Hitler had also talked about needing only four years, hence the initial duration of the Enambling Act (it was renewed in 1937 and then again in 1939 and eventually made permanent in 1943). In a speech on February 10, 1933, in the Berlin Sports Palace, he asserted: “Give us four years, and I swear to you, just as we, just as I have taken this office, so I shall leave it. I have done it neither for salary nor for wages; I have done it for your sake.” Yet the day after this speech, when Hitler secretly met with industrialists to raise money for the Nazis’ election campaign, Hermann Göring stated that the forthcoming election would be the last not just for four years but for one hundred. In a public address the previous year, on October 17, 1932, Hitler had already declared, “If we do one day achieve power we will hold onto it, so help us God. We will not allow them to take it away from us again.” On the day Hitler became chancellor, his future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced, “Prepare the election campaign. The last.”

How did it ever come to this? Germany’s Weimar Republic had built a vibrant democracy and had a highly educated, politically active population. Why was it succumbing to the revolution of destruction by a band of thugs?

To answer these questions, we have to retrace the steps of the Weimar Republic. As Germany surrendered in October 1918, its naval admirals planned a reckless last-ditch attack on Britain and the Dutch coast. In response, their sailors mutinied. These events escalated into a full-scale revolution by November, leading to the flourishing of Soldiers and Workers Councils all over Germany and the creation of the Council of the People’s Deputies. On November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and went into exile, and the Weimar Republic was founded with the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert as its first chancellor. Ebert tried to contain the revolutionary mobilization by creating, among other things, a parallel structure called the Executive Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. By December Ebert was moving loyal troops into Berlin and disbanding the Council of the People’s Deputies. He armed nationalistic paramilitaries recruited from the ranks of former soldiers, known as the Free Corps, and when the Communist revolt broke out in January 1919 in Berlin, he went along with the murder of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Declarations of socialist republics in Bavaria and Bremen were also met with swift repression by loyal military units and the Free Corps.

All of this violence and instability notwithstanding, Germany appeared to be moving in the corridor and the Red Queen was in full force. Germany had a legislative house with adult male suffrage after 1848, but on the whole it was still dominated by the Prussian elite, both because of the presence of an elite-controlled upper house, and because of Prussian control of state institutions and the bureaucracy. Despite these obstacles, the Social Democratic Party had already become a major player before the war. After the kaiser’s abdication, the Weimar Constitution introduced universal adult suffrage and removed the upper house’s control over politics. But this was only one step in the Red Queen dynamics that would play out in the aftermath of the war. The collapse of German armies intensified the discontent that many Germans felt with the country’s institutions and brought about a surge in societal mobilization. Citizens demanded more power, greater rights, and effective political representation. Unions flourished and managed to get employers to acquiesce to the eight-hour day, the subject of long and fruitless negotiation before the war.

A major part of this social mobilization was what some called the Vereinsmeierei (“associational mania”). Associations, clubs, and civil society organizations were flourishing in record numbers. It appeared that if three or more Germans got together, they were likely to start a club. Or write a constitution. As the historian Peter Fritzsche put it:

More voluntary associations attracted more members and did so in a more active fashion … than ever before. Just as retailers, bakers, and commercial employees had organized into economic-interest groups, so also did gymnasts, folklorists, singers, and churchgoers gather into clubs, rally new members, schedule meetings, and plan a full assortment of conferences and tournaments.

This was not only an era of social mobilization. The cage of norms was crumbling, too, particularly for women, who had won the right to vote under Weimar in 1919. Elsa Herrmann’s 1929 book This Is the New Woman celebrated women’s new freedom and identity. She decried traditional stereotypes of the role of women in society, noting that “the woman of yesterday lived exclusively for and geared her actions toward the future. Already as a half-grown child, she toiled and stocked her hope chest for her future dowry. In the first years of marriage she did as much of the household work as possible herself to save on expenses … she helped her husband in his business or professional activities.” But things were changing:

The new woman has set herself the goal of proving in her work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are not second-class persons existing only in dependence and obedience.

Women’s suffrage was not the only innovation in German political institutions after the country’s defeat in the First World War. The constitution, written in the city of Weimar following elections in January 1919, made Germany a republic with an elected president rather than a hereditary monarchy. It granted equality before the law and all sorts of individual rights as well. You were now free to express your opinions, to assemble, and to participate in politics. Article 124 read:

All Germans have the right to form societies or associations for purposes not prohibited by the criminal code. This right may not be limited by preventive regulations. The same provision applies to religious societies and associations.

Every association has the right to incorporate according to the provisions of the civil code. Such right may not be denied to an association on the ground that its purpose is political, social, or religious.

Together with unparalleled social mobilization during the Weimar era came a great deal of cultural change and creativity. The Bauhaus art school, founded in 1919 under the visionary directorship of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, forged a new synthesis of art and design. The Blue Four group of painters, including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, emerged out of the earlier Blue Rider group. Both Kandinsky and Klee taught at the Bauhaus. Modernist composers like Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith revolutionized orchestral music. Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene created Expressionist cinema.

But as is typical of the unruly dynamics of the Red Queen, as society became stronger, the elite reacted. Even though the Social Democratic Party remained in power for much of the period, the elite were still heavily represented in the bureaucracy and could count on the loyalty of much of the army. When they couldn’t, they turned to the Free Corps. They repressed social mobilization and the Council of the People’s Deputies. This elite reaction deepened the polarization in interwar Germany.

The flourishing of German civil society also set in motion other responses, with important institutional consequences. Ebert had used the army to repress more radical forces in late 1918 and early 1919. But this strategy could unleash other forces at his, and Weimar’s, expense. There were also institutional peculiarities that would have important implications in the years to follow. Right from the start, the Weimar Republic was hamstrung by the fact that as many as half of the elected representatives did not believe in its institutions. Roughly a fifth on the left were Communists who favored a Russian-style revolution. To them the Weimar democratic state was “bourgeois” or even “fascist.” About 30 percent of the representatives on the right, just like the majority of the traditional elites allied with them, wanted to return to the pre-1914 conservative-dominated status quo and restore the monarchy, and some, like the Nazis, completely rejected the legitimacy of the republic’s institutions. Nothing is perhaps more telling than the scenes in parliament after the 1930 elections when the Nazis first became a significant presence. One hundred and seven Nazis, uniformed in their brown shirts, colluded with the seventy-seven Communist members to disrupt the proceedings. Both right and left shouted and obstructed parliamentary business, and abused the rules, endlessly raising points of order. Right and left had no respect for the institution to which they had been elected.