What States do not State

From Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau, we read about Social Contracts of various hues. They had a point. In fact, a few brilliant points. Upon reading their impressive theses, we jumped to the conclusion that States can do everything because you have surrendered your power to govern yourself to the leviathan.

But can they do everything? To illustrate, we can take the case of the South Indian State of Kerala. Its social development indices are impressive on almost all counts. Yet it has the highest rate of mental illness, suicide, alcoholism in India.

The truth is that State of Kerala has not been able to make good changes on many critical areas of human conditions even to the extent one social reformer Narayana Guru could do, single handedly. Narayana Guru effected massive changes in the way people live, find meaning in life and associate with each other. He made colossal changes to the social milieu of a region Vivekananda had rightly called the mental asylum of India.

But all are these surprising? One would say, No.

No one, neither Hobbes nor Locke nor Rousseau had imagined states could do everything. State was primarily or perhaps pointedly aimed at securing the lives of human beings(and their properties, if there are any) from the predatory behaviours of fellow human beings. It was not aimed at saving people from the clutches every other problem. Yes, precisely: There are a lot of things outside the problems arising out of the predatory behaviours of human beings.

The inclusion of all of them within the mandate of State activity is a later development and a blind ambition at that. Popular politics has had a heavy role in this. Our incredulity towards understanding what is State from its First Principles had a massive role in it.

This is fundamental problem. If we overload the state, it may not be able to bear that load. And it may now fail in some of the cardinal, useful functions it has been able to perform successfully over the years. If we overload the state, and then it fails, that failure may be wrongly used to argue that state is an evil and anarchy is better.

By the way, what are states doing?

They do a lot of good things. They are the largest human communities till date.

(Cont..)

States are not machines whose only aim is more efficiency.

They succeed primarily when the people are good and then their systems are also efficient.