Gotham Diary:
Fair Share
7 October 2014
In Power and Civility, Norbert Elias tells the story of Louis VI (the Fat), who “ruled” what is now France from 1108 to 1137. In the manner of a bedtime tale, Elias simplifies his material. Louis has only one problem: clearing the road between his two urban centers, Paris and Orléans. In the middle, more or less, stands the fortress of Montlhéry. Louis’s father, Philip I, devoted his life to subduing this castle, enfeoffed by Robert I to a loyal servant whose descendents had their own ideas, but it is Louis who completes the task. Also, Louis has to overcome the nuisance of rival claims to power made by other families in the Orléans area. It’s a pretty modest story. The extent of Louis’s domain is pretty much limited to the Ile-de-France. But from his consolidated territory, modern France would grow, and the Capetian “kings” of Francia would indeed become the powerful kings of France, among which Louis figures as one of the first.
The story is quickly read. It is followed by a generalizing section on the “sociogenesis of monopoly formation.” This, I did not recall reading before, but my jaw dropped as I took it in, glancing through the book yesterday. True to his title, Elias really was setting forth a theory of power. Assuming a condition of free competition among many small, roughly equal parties, competition itself along with the vagaries of good and bad fortune affecting the individual competitors will naturally conduce to a trend in which stronger competitors vanquish weaker ones, and on and on until a top competitor emerges: the monopolist. For a while, this victor may do as he pleases, but he will soon discover that, in order to maintain his monopoly, he must do a few things to keep his new dependents happy. Eventually, the monopolist will become as fettered by obligations are the people who work for him — his loyal soldiers in the medieval example, his castellans, his cooks and bottle-washers, and even the womenfolk. In The Court Society, Elias shows how the interdependence of various “ruling classes,” monolithic when seen from a distance but highly differentiated upon close inspection, eventually brings about an immovable arrangement in which no one’s power, not even the king’s, can be extended so much as an inch. All privilege has been claimed and solemnized. Such stasis quickly turns brittle, largely because political reality is never still, and privileged social structures with origins in defunct power structures cease to make political sense.
Thus we fly from Louis VI, trying to cobble a unified state out of a core province of France, to Louis XVI, who had no idea at all of how to adapt his throne to the bourgeois insurrection that erupted in 1789. He was powerless to move it this way or that, and he himself rebelled in pious frustration when the Revolution went after the Church.
But Elias is way ahead of us. Having shown how the bourgeois Revolution preserved the royal monopoly on death and taxation and bestowed it on a series of more or less “democratic” governments in the name of the people, Elias reminds us, in case we’d forgotten our recent history, how, no sooner had the field been cleared of violence and extortion than the entire monopoly game started up again, only this time in commercial terms. In the course of a century, a field of small-time entrepreneurs was consolidated into the massive trusts forged by Rockefeller and Morgan. The “sociogenesis of monopoly strutures” persists in today’s business mantra: grow or die.
Since Elias wrote, however (Power and Civility, originally entitled State Formation and Civilization, appeared in German in 1939), the “monopolists” — the people who run big businesses — have developed a few new tricks that challenge Elias’s model. They have learned to avoid the direct employment of many of the workers who make their products or perform their services. They have learned to farm the actual work out to independent contractors, often in other countries. Keeping dependents happy is no longer, or not at the moment, a matter of much concern to these tycoons. There is a long-term problem here, however, because large corporations still hold the monopoly on jobs: that’s why so many Americans can’t find one. Let’s remember the role of “sociogenesis” here: these monopoly structures arise in a social setting. It is human beings who compete, not robots or “forces.” The structure works well only if every human being has a place in it. What happened in France was that power structures remained rooted in feudal concepts of warlike service, while the economic power of modern times was overlooked. The holders of economic power (as distinct from holders of wealth derived from economic power who were willing to trade their money for titles) had no place in the French power structure. The power structure itself, locked and immobile as we have seen it to be, could not make room for the economically powerful. The smash was inevitable.
Today’s unemployed are hardly possessed of economic power. But they retain enormous political power, should they wish to make use of it (and to learn how to do so). They also possess a terrifying mob power, should they come together in opposition to the massive inequalities in property holdings that inevitably flow from income inequality. We desperately need leaders who can shepherd the relatively disadvantaged away from anarchy and toward political reform. Even more, we need business leaders who can see beyond the next quarter. Above all, we need a revolution in our “business schools.”
Meanwhile, I’m fascinated — somewhere between fascinated and stunned — by the thought that the very social mechanisms that produced the modern nation state, with its core monopolies over violence and taxation, have also produced the array of large business organizations. No wonder the modern executive suite so closely resembles (in power distribution, not style) the old princely courts!
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Elias’s work seems to stand for the proposition that competition is self-destructive, tending inevitably to create monopolies. We see the same pattern in tournaments. Wherever there is “a winner,” there is a monopoly, a single-handed control of something, even if it is only a trophy. This seems to be human nature. But a lot of undesirable outcomes can be described as “human nature.” Take crime passionnel, for example. The private settling of marital vendettas is no longer tolerated, and has become uncommon. The notion that men somehow own the bodies of their wives has been challenged to death. Human nature is not to be thought of us as bony hard tissue. There is a lot soft tissue in human nature as well.
Couldn’t it be that our inordinate interest in athletic playoffs betrays a longing to shunt winning and losing out of the everyday world, in order to make it easier for everyone to have a fair share?