The people's romance: why people love government (as much as they do).

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.

In 1995, the annual meeting of the American Economic Association included a plenary session about domestic policy issues. One of the panelists was the Nobel laureate MIT economist Robert Solow. In the course of his remarks, Solow said that he did not find school choice appealing. During the question-and-answer period, I asked him why he did not find school vouchers appealing. He replied: "It isn't for any economic reason; all the economic reasons favor school vouchers. It is because what made me an American is the United States Army and the public school system."

Admirable in its candor and lucidity, Solow's reply suggests a solution to a broader conundrum. If government intervention creates an official and common frame of reference, a set of cultural focal points, a sense of togetherness and common experience, then almost any form of government intervention can help to "make us Americans." If people see government activism as a singular way of binding society together, then they may favor any particular government intervention virtually for its own sake--whether it be government intervention in schooling, urban transit, postal services, Social Security, or anything else--because they love the way in which it makes them American.

Of course, love of government as a binding and collectivizing force does not exist in anyone's sensibilities as an absolute. Everyone seeks other goals as well and understands that some government interventions are more costly than voluntary solutions, and people make their judgments according to their understanding.

People may favor government for other reasons: they fancy themselves part of the governing set; they yearn for an official system of validation; they want to avoid the burden of justifying a dissenting view; they fear, revere, or worship power. All such factors work in conjunction with self-serving tendencies of less existential nature--privilege seeking, subsidy seeking, and so on--and with the rationalizations of these tendencies. Furthermore, people may be biased toward government because cultural institutions indoctrinate and cow them.

All such tendencies may be part of a general account of "collectivism" in the sense of statism. In this article, I seek to expand our understanding of just one factor of collectivism that never operates in isolation from the others and is not necessarily the most significant: people's tendency to see and love government as a binding communitarian force. I take notice of that tendency in realms that range from the texts of Hegel and Marx to recent political philosophy to mundane policy discourse. I am an errant economist with no claim to mastery of the materials dealt with here. I can only say that the constellation outlined in this article is one that I discern as clearly as I see the Big Dipper, but the points of light themselves wax and wane depending on how one gazes.

Beating Time Together

When we think of the action of the primitive band, the family, or the organization, we think of the whole acting as an integrated entity. We may fail to consider that the posited entity consists of constitutive elements or members. We may neglect to think about how each member experiences his membership in the entity and achieves with the other members the consonance in action that permits us to say that the entity acts in this or that way.

Georg Simmel comments on perhaps the most manifest exhibition of the human social organism:

It is interesting to observe how the prevalence of the socializing impulse in primitive peoples affects various institutions, such as the dance. It has been noted quite generally that the dances of primitive races exhibit a remarkable uniformity in arrangement and rhythm. The dancing group feels and acts like a uniform organism; the dance forces and accustoms a number of individuals, who are usually driven to and fro without rime or reason by vacillating conditions and needs of life, to be guided by a common impulse and a single common motive. ([1904] 1957, 546) In the social organism, instances of mutual coordination, such as the dancers' moving to the beat of drums, provide the atomic structure of the extensive coordination of the various parts that permits us to say that the entity exists and acts as a whole.

Unlike a spontaneous order, an organization such as a dance group proceeds, at least in its skeletal structure, under an authoritative leadership or direction. A structure of central leadership and direction implies an authoritative understanding of the organization's nature, goals, situation, and potential. The authoritative understanding can be imparted, at least in rough and summary terms, to all members of the organization, constituting a common understanding and enabling all members to share an experience of the organization's movement and the realization of its goals. In at least broad, skeletal terms, the members of an organization share a common understanding of the extensive coordination achieved in the whole and of how their instances of mutual coordination contribute to--or cooperate in--that extensive coordination. (1)

Consonance in the dance, march, chant, song, or ensemble performance is mutual coordination of bodily motions made sensate in sight, sound, and vibration. No wonder so many of the terms used to describe mutual coordination originate in music. We speak of people as acting or being in unison, in consonance, in concert, in concord, in accord, in harmony, in sync, in tune with each other.

Smithian Sympathy as Sentiment Coordination

When a marching band performs on a field, spectators view the extensive coordination of the spectacle in common. Watching from the stands, they also enjoy a mutual coordination--not of their bodily motions or actions but rather of their sensations, perceptions, understandings, and sentiments. Even if they watch from their homes on television, they may imagine that all viewers dance together in spirit. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith notes that "nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast" ([1759] 1976, 13). Man yearns for coordinated sentiment as he yearns for food in his belly.

Smith makes use of a certain metaphor repeatedly to describe an individual's elemental joy at being in sentimental consonance with his fellows:

The man whose sympathy keeps time to my grief, cannot but admit the reasonableness of my sorrow. (16) [A person suffering misfortune] longs for ... the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own. To see the emotions of their hearts, in every respect, beat time to his own ... constitutes his sole consolation. (22) The great pleasure of conversation and society ... arises from a certain correspondence of sentiments and opinions, from a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments coincide and keep time with one another. (337) Eight times Smith uses the metaphor of people's beating (or keeping) time together. A metaphor he uses even more frequently, about thirty times, is that of "entering into" the sentiments of another, which again connotes a common experience and togetherness, as when one joins the spirit of the household when one enters into a home.

Thomas Schelling helps us understand the nature of mutual coordination by setting out a problem of togetherness disrupted:

When a man loses his wife in a department store without any prior understanding on where to meet if they get separated, the chances are good that they will find each other. It is likely that each will think of some obvious place to meet, so obvious that each will be sure that the other is sure it is "obvious" to both of them. One does not simply predict where the other will go, since the other will go where he predicts the first to go, which is wherever the first predicts the second to predict the first to go, and so ad infinitum. Not "What would I do if I were she?" but "What would I do if I were she wondering what she would do if she were I wondering what I would do if I were she ...?" What is necessary is to coordinate predictions, to read the same message in the common situation, to identify the one course of action that their expectations of each other can converge on. They must "mutually recognize" some unique signal that coordinates their expectations of each other. (1960, 54, ellipses in original) Schelling's parable captures the sense of mutuality: Each person thinks about how the other understands the situation, and both understand that their understandings interrelate. This mutuality resides in organizational life in general, in cooperation, even in the organization's larger, long-in-coming achievements.

This sense of mutuality, or shared understanding, is precisely what is not present in the extensivity of a spontaneous order: if we eat out, we know nothing about the people and efforts that contributed to the provision of our lunch, except for those who helped to serve it. We can hardly guess what the rest of the chain of provision is like, and we have no particular reason to do so. No mutuality-in-the-whole exists in a spontaneous extensive coordination.

In Schelling's exposition of mutual coordination, he explains that when people face a coordination problem, they seek a solution by identifying a focal point:

Most situations ... provide some clue for coordinating behavior, some focal point for each person's expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do. Finding the key, or rather finding a key--any key that is mutually recognized as the key becomes the key--may depend on imagination more than logic; it may depend on analogy, precedent, accidental arrangement, symmetry, aesthetic or geometric configuration, casuistic reasoning, and who the parties are and what they know about each other. (1960, 57) Precedence, symmetry, and so on make focal points focal. A prime characteristic of focal points, says...