“As government expands, liberty contracts,” explained President Ronald Reagan in his farewell address, calling the principle “as neat and predictable as a law of physics.” Indeed, the belief that the scope of individual freedom in any society stands in inverse relation to the power of its government is a central creed of modern conservative thought. Nor is this view limited to the right: Democrats as much as Republicans often cast their differences as a choice between using government to advance equality and limiting government to maximize liberty. The New York Times recently called this divide “the oldest philosophic battle of the American party system.”
In this respect, right and left converge on a common misunderstanding. Buttressed by readings of thinkers ranging from Friedrich Hayek to theorists of the welfare state, each side contributes to a fallacious assumption: that robust and assertive government restricts individual freedom (for good or ill). This view is not simply false but also dangerous. It obscures the real challenges of maintaining individual freedom at home. It conceals the nature of the geopolitical world in which liberal democratic societies operate. And most important, by conflating a minimal or absent state with individual liberty, the view masks the threat of the truly anti-individualist society it could help bring about.
The “opposite” of government isn’t the market, a world of maximal individual choice. It is what I call the rule of the clan, a world in which in-group loyalties trump individual rights.
In other words, liberal individualism is based on a paradox. It rightly views personal autonomy as among the highest human goods—and justified by natural law. But in practice such autonomy is possible only through the unnatural institution of the state. Government can be more or less effective in pursuit of its goals, and it can be used for illiberal, totalitarian ends. But it is a healthy state, dedicated to the public interest, that makes the kind of freedom justified by universal reason and human dignity possible.
At the most basic level, the state maintains a system of courts to ensure that people play by the rules, rather than resorting to trickery or force to advance their interests. It also provides professionally trained police officers to safeguard people from crime; fire protection to prevent collective disaster; and military power to defend against threats from abroad. It constructs roads and bridges, builds or subsidizes utilities, and supports mass education to encourage economic growth and foster human capital. But more fundamentally, the state offers these benefits to people not because they are members of an inescapable group but rather because they are individual members of a common public. Your ability to obtain redress for injury, to enter into contracts on your own terms, to use land and other property, and to access a range of goods and services all depend on the state treating you—the individual—as a member of a community of equals.
By contrast, in the absence of the state, or when states are weak, the individual becomes engulfed within the collective groups on which people must rely to advance their goals and vindicate their interests. Legal history and comparative law reveal that without the authority of the state, a host of discrete communal associations rush to fill the vacuum of power. And for most of human history, the primary such group has been the extended family, the clan.
The clan is a natural form of social and legal organization—it is far more explicable in human terms than modern liberal government—and people quickly, reflexively turn to it in the want of an alternative. Left to our own devices, humans tend to live under its rule.
When I refer to the rule of the clan, I mean three related contemporary phenomena. First, and most prominently, I mean the legal structures and cultural values of societies organized primarily on the basis of kinship—societies in which extended family membership is vital for social and legal action and in which individuals have little choice but to maintain a strong clan identity. Today these societies include Afghanistan and Yemen, but they have existed across history and throughout the world.
Second, by the rule of the clan I mean the political arrangements of societies governed by what the U.N.'s 2004 Arab Human Development Report calls “clannism.” These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks, especially those of kinship, and traditional ideals of patriarchal family authority—under which the state treats citizens not as autonomous actors but rather as troublesome dependents to be managed. Clannism often characterizes rentier societies struggling under the continuing legacy of colonial subordination.
Third, and most broadly, by the rule of the clan I mean the antiliberal social and legal organizations that tend to grow in the absence of state authority or when the state is weak. These groups include some dedicated to unlawful activity, such as petty criminal gangs, the Mafia, and international crime syndicates, which in their feuding patterns and cultural markers of solidarity look a great deal like clans and in many respects act like them.
These three forms of the rule of the clan are united in an important respect. In comparison with modern liberal societies, communities governed by the rule of the clan are far more limited when it comes to personal freedom. This is because under their legal principles the rights and obligations of persons are deeply influenced by their places within the kin groups to which they belong.
In the presence of a weak state, persons lack what the late Palestinian intellectual Hisham Sharabi called “the individual’s claim to autonomous right.” The individual is submerged in the more muscular corporate associations that maintain the society’s legal and political order.
In this respect, the paradox of individualism and the rule of the clan offer a warning.
As modern nations across the world have grappled with the recent financial crisis, there has been a widespread call not merely to streamline the public sector and make it more efficient, but to engage in the wholesale dismantling of public institutions. Indeed, the very concepts of the public and the public interest have been attacked. The canard of Margaret Thatcher that “there is no such thing as society,” that there are only individuals and families, threatens to gain new traction in hard economic times.
If these criticisms are successful—if they sap the collective political will and lead liberals of all political stripes to turn away from the promise of the state—it will be a catastrophe for individual freedom. Giving up on the promise of liberal modernity, we will find ourselves living under a new, postmodern form of the rule of the clan.
It is worth contemplating what such a future would look like.
Imagine that 50 years from now a confluence of antigovernment ideology and tight economic times has rendered the liberal state a mere shadow of its former self. Public institutions no longer provide the services that modern citizens expect. Education, public health and welfare, market regulation, the police—most of the responsibility and authority that today vests in democratic government has been formally devolved to or seized by a host of institutions that lay claim to the state’s past power.
These institutions include, first, traditional lineage groups. The history of post-Soviet Central Asia reveals that lineage politics, moderated during Soviet times, can swiftly re-emerge once the lid of the state is lifted. And so in this postmodern what-if world, extended families have wrested power back from the state institutions that, in the Anglo-American tradition, displaced them centuries ago. The families ensure that their members have their material needs met, and they guarantee their safety.
More strikingly, the postmodern rule of the clan is composed of a wide variety of other new corporatist associations that vie with lineage groups to fill the vacuum created by the decline of state power.
Religious organizations overlap with major families to provide social security in exchange for the agreement of members to live by their internal codes of law, enforced in their own courts. They not only perform marriages but also oversee divorces, arrange adoptions, structure inheritance, and regulate contract and property disputes among their adherents.
Militant trade unions and guilds have taken on similar functions, regulating themselves according to their own standards and promoting their institutional interests rather than those of the people they serve.
In core urban areas and isolated rural communities, racial gangs and crime syndicates provide services in exchange for loyalty. In the absence of a police force, injuries are avenged by group vigilantism, including physical violence and the expropriation of property. Individuals are required to condition the extent of their freedom on the needs and will of the organization that provides them with jobs and economic security.
Finally, transnational corporations serve many traditional state functions. Whereas primary education is the province of family and religious groups, universities are being used by international businesses and enterprises to train their professional work force. Transnational corporations monitor international borders, control immigration, enforce treaties, and manage natural resources. The only courts that arbitrate between competing clan and clanlike groups are administered by large companies.
All these new clans—families and gangs, churches and corporations—offer the goods and services previously furnished by the state or dispersed under its watchful guidance. The various functions of the state continue to be discharged.
But there is a difference. Whereas the state once provided its many goods to individuals as individuals, these groups afford them to their members only. And they are guided not by the abstract ideals of the public good and the inherent rights of the individual but rather by the practical needs of their organizations and by the internal hierarchies within them.
No longer predominantly citizens in the eyes of the law, people base their varied legal claims on their roles within the social groups to which they belong. People relate to the legal order only through corporate or other postmodern clan proxies.
The most probable outcome of a radically diminished state is thus neither a collection of empowered individuals liberated from the constraints of government nor a grand community of equality and solidarity. Rather, it is a riven, fractured, unequal world in which both individuals and the larger public are sacrificed to the needs of clans of all sorts.
In contemporary political discourse, one frequently encounters the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America, that in the United States each person is thrown “back forever upon himself alone” and that democracy may ultimately isolate the individual “entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” Many people fear that modern liberal society, not simply in the United States but wherever it is found, is threatened most by selfish individualism.
But from a legal and political perspective, rather than a cultural and moral one, the major threat to liberal societies is precisely the opposite. It is that with the erosion of the state’s capacities, the individual will be submerged within corporatist groups. It is that the individualism we cherish will be lost as a result of a deterioration of the state.
For while the rule of the clan has ancient origins, it can be born anew in every age.
