Limiting Leviathan.

• Author: MUNGER, MICHAEL C.
• Position: Review

* Limiting Leviathan Edited by Donald P. Racheter and Richard Wagner Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1999. Pp. 272. $95.00 cloth.

In his book The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt gives a justly famous description of what may be the most important cost of unlimited government:

We must not overlook here one particular harmful consequence, since it so closely affects human development; and this is that the administration of political affairs itself becomes in time so full of complications that it requires an incredible number of persons to devote their time to its supervision, in order that it may not fall into utter confusion. Now, by far the greater portion of these have to deal with the mere symbols and formulas of things; and thus, not only are men of first-rate capacity withdrawn from anything which gives scope for thinking, and useful hands are diverted from real work, but their intellectual powers themselves suffer from this partly empty, partly narrow employment. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 29-30) The essayists of Limiting Leviathan examine a number of ways of limiting, controlling, and restricting government. In reading the thirteen essays, I was struck by the tension between two quite different notions of government and by the consequent differences in conceptions of the value and nature of limits.

The first view is in keeping with the Hobbesian-neoclassical notion: government is a necessary evil required to solve the problems of defining and enforcing property rights and of correcting market failures when they occur. According to this view, government is like fire--a valuable, even indispensable tool, but one so dangerous that it requires an insulating container lest it escape and burn down the house.

In the second view, government is conceived simply as evil itself. As the young Edmund Burke wrote, "In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the abuse!" (A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756 [1982], 64). This perspective, as well as its implications for the nature of "limits," is obviously quite different. For those who view government with this perspective, it is not like fire at all. It is more like pollution, either simply harmful or, at best, a by-product of some valuable activity. In any case, we would all be better off without it.

These two points of view are incompatible, and I go back and forth on which is closer to the...