ABSTRACT
Can it be rational to will the state?—or to will it away? Why societies need states, and if they do, what kind of state meets their need, remains an evergreen quandary that each generation has been pondering anew, often with some passion. That this should have been the case is perhaps odd, considering that societies and states live much like Siamese twins, or so we perceive them. Our current usage of the two words “society” and “state” is revealing: a society would not be fully fledged, complete, and deserving of the name if it lacked a state of its own. It is probably a sound conjecture that if we nevertheless keep questioning the nature and necessity of the link and keep producing justifications for it, it is because of the discomfort we feel in the face of two of its attributes that seem to clash. One is that this link forces us, sometimes with great severity, to do what we would not freely choose to do and to forbear from what we would choose. It is doing so, not at some finely drawn moral margin, but over a major part of our feasible choices. In particular, it takes the lion’s share of individually earned and owned resources and uses them in ways that the individual in question would not have chosen, for otherwise there would be no call for choosing them collectively. The other is that all this seems, in some more or less obscure manner, legitimate: the state’s force weighs on us with our consent, and we could not reasonably want to have it otherwise.
