Comments on: Justifying the System of States

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:19:07 +0000

mk, Walzer says something similar. He offers as one crucial argument for immigration restructions that they allow for more-mobile, less-restricted societies domestically, whereas if people felt like the only way they could live in a society that had some stable shared understandings and social meanings and so on was to live in one neighborhood and never leave that’s what they’d do. People need that sense of stability and sameness somewhere in their lives, and they’ll have it. If the polity doesn’t give it to them, they’ll recreate it at a more local level, and create a less free and tolerant society as a result.(I imagine some hybrid of earky 20th century big American cities with ethnic neighborhoods well-demarcated, and a Neal Stephenson novel.)

I’ve never been able to make up my mind what to think about that argument.

By: mk

mk — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:11:37 +0000

Interesting post. I think I agree (although it’s quite late– er, early). I’m all for reducing restrictions on immigration.

But let’s say (and I believe this) that xenophobia/racism are a lot of the reason why some people want to restrict immigration. Those people are going to want an exclusive club, whether or not it’s got the fancy “state” or “system of states” nomenclature.

A smart “club” will cater to such clientele by excluding people. This will happen whether the “club” is a representative government, or a profit-seeking corporation.

This may not really contradict anything you’re saying, but basically my point is, the problem is that people are xenophobes. The “system” per se does not cause restrictions– rather it’s the desires of the people that cause restrictions. And xenophobes have ample mechanism to cause these restrictions even in a more “market-like” geopolitical system.

Now, you might be arguing that in fact, the government should step in and mandate nondiscrimination here, like we do for race/gender/etc.

I dunno how I feel about that, but maybe.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:48:59 +0000

Right. And it is a bad metaphor. So we shouldn’t use it. And as Lakoff’s critics point out, mostly we don’t. So we don’t already use it, and we’d understand the world less if we did.

By: talboito

talboito — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:39:08 +0000

A giant chunk of the globe hosting 300,000,000 people is like a family because we use metaphors to conceptualize the world.

Metaphors aren’t a resemblance. They are a mapping from one domain to the other.

Well I agree that “family” is a contested category. But there exists very clear natural relationships between geneticly similar ingroups. We seem to have a concept of such things that we metaphorically map onto the state.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:57:31 +0000

How exactly is a giant chunk of the globe hosting 300,000,000 people like a family? The resemblance completely eludes me, other than the fact that collections of people are involved.

And we don’t simply “acknowledge” the family. We codify a particular cultural construction of the family into law and use that to exclude others from forming families that fail to fit the model.

By: talboito

talboito — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:07:04 +0000

Certainly club membership is no natural right. But there is another metaphor for the state:The State is a Family.

Family membership certainly is natural. We don’t often talk about it in reference to rights, but there is some sense of that floating around there. For instance, we presume that adopted children have the right to seek their biological parents.

The family metaphor, in terms of justification and morality as discussed in your post, bears more resemblance to the current system of nation states than under the club metaphor.

We don’t justify families. We acknowledge them. We don’t sunder our own families in face of immoral outgroups, but we may attempt to influence them. The parallels do fall out nicely I might think.