Over the last century governments have shown an unprecedented capacity for doing both good and evil. This is what makes them so fascinating. It is why so many people want to understand how they behave, how they think, how they change us and how they can be changed.
The playwright Samuel Beckett once wrote that ‘the tears of the world are a constant quantity’. The implication is that there is little that governments, or indeed anyone else, can do to reduce human suffering. Yet seen through any historical lens this view, which seems so full of world-weary wisdom, turns out to be untenable. There have been times when most people could expect a reasonably happy life, and times when most could expect a vale of tears.
What makes the difference? For any one of us the prospects of happiness will depend on such things as our genetic endowment, our character and relationships and where and in what circumstances we were born, as well as sheer luck. But for the larger populations of cities or nations what seems to matter most to human happiness is not the climate or the landscape, genes or national characters but rather the quality of government in its widest sense, and the extent to which people can govern their own actions. People blessed with peace, order, equity, and rights, and governed by benign rulers, stand a far better chance of living a good life, whatever their personal qualities. People living under dictators, without rights, laws or honest officials risk misery and suffering.
That states matter to human happiness has been apparent ever since the first ones learned how to protect their cities and tax their people. But it has become ever more obvious as states’ capacity for both good and evil has grown; from Kyrgyzstan to Canada and Korea their qualities do more to determine people’s well-being than oil, gold and diamonds (which have more often cursed their possessors than helped them) and more than culture or religion (which turn out to be disappointingly unreliable explanations for anything to do with politics and governance). History has shown definitively that states which fear the people are far more conducive to well-being than ones that are feared by them. According to the fullest analysis yet done of the many factors that explain widely varying levels of happiness in some fifty countries, ‘the effects of the quality of government on well-being were above and beyond the effects flowing through better education, higher incomes and better health all of which were themselves dependent on the quality of government.’
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I argue that the best way to understand government both within nations and globally is through the lens of service. Most western political theory starts from individuals, and then derives conclusions about how constitutions or governments should be organised either to promote individuals’ rights or to protect them from each other. I am concerned with government as a relationship that we are born into, an imperfect and messy relationship which at best is one of service and at worst is one of domination and oppression. It is from this relationship that the state’s powers derive, and it is the mutual dependence of rulers and ruled that gives all politic its distinctive hues. To ascribe laws and constitutions to God, or natural laws, or human nature, inevitably leads to confusion. Individual rights are not prior to government; instead they are comprehensible only as an aspect of the relationship that people have with governments, and like so many of our freedoms, they rest on the ability and willingness of governments to use force to defend them.
The idea that governments have a responsibility to serve the people can be traced far back through time, to Chinese notions of a ‘mandate of heaven’, Indian ideas of rajadharma (the moral duties of kings) and western arguments that power rests on the consent of the governed. But it is only in the last century that states have had the tools and techniques to act as genuine servants. One French historian wrote that ‘nobody was governed before the later nineteenth century’, and it was only after states acquired the means to survey, monitor, direct and shape millions of people’s daily lives that they could contemplate pensions systems and health services, police forces to keep order or regulators to keep air and water safe.
There is much to celebrate in these changes. But governments’ role as servants is fraught with ambiguities that have become more acute as governments’ powers have grown. Good governments are servants to the people who are their masters, but when they pass laws and collect taxes governments also act as masters to the people they serve. All governments use methods that are necessarily impersonal, abstract and cold, almost the opposite qualities to those that we expect from a true servant; and all governments can, in extremis, suspend the rules that govern them. Exploring and understanding these ambiguities is the precondition for intelligent politics, whether one’s goal is radical reform or conservative caution.
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As I will show, good government is one of the very best things that can happen to any society. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that the business of government is becoming more moral, not less; that many governments are stumbling closer to an ideal or service that has been imagined for as long as states have existed but was rarely realized; and that, just as new knowledge has given governments vastly greater power, it has also made them more dependent, more accountable, and more embedded in their societies. But good government is also always fragile, always vulnerable to capture by special interests and self-serving elites, and always at risk of becoming detached from the people it is meant to serve and from ideals. Perhaps this uncertainty, which sits just behind the blithe confidence of official pronouncements and the bold facades of public buildings, is what makes government so fascinating. Perhaps, too, this is why so many commit their lives to bringing the reality closer to the ideal.