Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality.

• Author: Wagner, Richard E.
• Position: Book review

* Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality

By Vito Tanzi

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 447. $29.99 cloth.

Vito Tanzi's Termites of the State uses the image of termites eating away at the foundations of what was once a liberal republic. For millennia, political theorists have averred that liberal republics are but temporary forms of governance, for sooner or later they morph into something else as people come to learn how they can live at someone else's expense. Benjamin Franklin surely had such a transformation in mind when, in responding after the Constitutional Convention to a woman who asked him what sort of government the delegates had created, declared: "A republic, if you can keep it." To be sure, transformations can occur quickly or slowly, but they would be transformations in any case. A relatively slow transformation, however, can easily be mistaken for stasis. For instance, two people standing a mile apart on a globe but each of them moving due north will eventually be able to shake hands. Recurring to Franklin, a republic founded on individual liberty and a rejection of all things feudal can morph into a new form of feudalism with new forms of status, duty, and obligation without that transformation being much noticed.

Modern thinking holds that cancer emerges through a cellular process that has gone awry. Should a process of transformation entail a once liberal republic losing its liberality, a societal form of cancer will have resulted. Tanzi's title points toward possible recognition of a concept of societal cancer that emerges through the internal working of some governing apparatus. If we pursue that possibility, some of the intuitions held by the ancients might be affirmed with the use of temporary tools and techniques of thinking. But Tanzi doesn't do this. He can't, for he is an equilibrium theorist. Any explanation of societal transformation requires some theory grounded in the internal generation of change, rendering it a variety of spontaneous-order theorizing. This kind of theory is opaque to an equilibrium theory. Tanzi can assert the existence of termites, but their existence is an assumption of his model and mode of thinking. Truly to explain termites requires a theory that can account for their emergence.

Tanzi can't explain how termites come into existence from a position where previously they had not existed. Nor can he explain their patterns of location, their growth, or anything else that entails development through time. These types of explanation are the domain of process-oriented theories that seek to capture the internal dynamics...