Most people, and even many serious analysts, seem to assume that the concept of “national interest” or “the interests of the United States” has a clearly verifiable meaning. (“The United States” can be replaced by the name of any country.) This concept is central to the arguments of foreign policy “realists” – for example, political scientist William Ruger in his article “Ideals or interests?” in Law and freedom (July 26, 2024). Dr. Ruger argues for the importance of the national interest as a realistic guide, as opposed to philosophical ideals, in foreign policy and matters of war and peace.
The meaning of ‘national interest’ may seem obvious. There is public interest when the public consists of the citizens of a nation. It is in the interest of all citizens. If these interests do not coincide exactly, the national interest is assumed to be somehow their sum. The concept is similar to the interests of two individual partners in a company or association: it is the sum of their respective interests – in making a profit or (say) furthering a good cause. If the national interest is not a simple sum, addition and subtraction, of all individual interests, it consists of some other form of aggregation.
On closer inspection, the problems quickly become apparent. How is it possible to add and subtract, or otherwise merge, even just conceptually, the interests of two non-identical individuals? In a private partnership, the partners jointly pursue some common interests. This is indeed the reason they work together. If we exclude tribes and ‘organizations’ (in the Hakekian sense), society is the framework within which private individuals and organizations act. Because every individual (or voluntary partnership) has its own interests, talking about social, public or national interests is problematic and confusing.
Suppose an Appalachian redneck has “three interests” in national security, and a cosmopolitan New Yorker has “two interests,” or vice versa. If these are the only two citizens, is the national interest 2+3=5? Multiply the problem in a country with 300 million inhabitants. And of course that is not the national interest when the interests of each member of the nation do not count equally.
There is a lot of theory behind the impossibility of bringing together the interests of multiple individuals. Let us define an individual’s interests as his utility, that is, how high he rates his condition on the scale of his subjective preferences. Economists have known for more than a century that an outside observer cannot simply add and subtract subjective preferences, which are known or experienced only by the individual possessor. There is no way to say that “social utility” increases if the individual utility of some decreases while the utility of others increases. Any observer or philosopher-king à la Plato Anyone who claims that he can achieve this balance is merely expressing his personal opinion or his personal strength. Mainstream welfare economists have already proven this (see for example Francis M. Bator, ‘The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization’, American economics magazine [1957]).
A democratic majority does not solve the problem. It cannot determine what the national interest is, even under the refined form of what welfare economists called a “social welfare function.” Moreover, minority individuals are also part of the nation. Who is the majority anyway, given that different voting systems can produce different election results (see Gordon Tullock, Government Failure: An Introduction to Public Choice])?
Discovered by Nicolas de Condorcet in the 18th century and mathematician Charles Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll) in the 19th century, the difficulty of collecting preferences through voting was recognized and formalized by economists in the mid-20th century. Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem has mathematically shown that, under realistic conditions, there exists no voting procedure that can both reproduce the voters’ rationality (particularly the transitivity or coherence of preferences) and be non-dictatorial (see Arrow’s 1951 book ). Social choice and individual values). Arrow received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972 for his work in this area, launching the whole school of ‘social choice’.
In his 1982 book Liberalism versus populismpolitical scientist William Riker brought these discoveries and their implications to the attention of political scientists. In terms of our interrogation here, a majority vote cannot express a national interest that is both logically coherent and non-dictatorial (“non-dictatorial” refers to the situation in which no dictator or dictator group can overrule the preferences of other individuals).
This conclusion seems to lead us to a dead end. If there is no public interest, what is the criterion for public policy? If the national interest does not exist, what is the criterion for deciding how a nation state will interact with other nation states – or compel its citizens to behave, for example by regulating their trade or other voluntary relationships with individuals from other countries ?
There aren’t many escapes from this cul-de-sac. Two are represented by two great economists and political philosophers of our time. One of these is to deny that the state has any economic and moral justification, and to view it as merely a tool for political rulers and their clientele to impose their choices on the rest of society or nation. Anthony de Jasay, who described himself as a classical liberal and an anarchist, chose this way out and defended the ideal of a stateless society without any public policies. However, he expressed some doubts about the possibility that such a society could resist invasion by nation states or other international armed groups.
Another way to escape was formalized by Nobel Prize economist James Buchanan and his colleagues. If there is no such thing as a social organism that has its own utility and its own interests, the only justification and function of the state is to protect a set of rules that represent society. Ordinary interests of all members of society. This common denominator is necessarily thin, because it represents the preferences or values that it entails all that members of a society (such as a nation) unanimously agree on. At this level of abstraction, values can easily be added to preferences in an individual’s utility function. The rules to which all individuals have agreed can only be aimed at maintaining a free society in which each individual has equal freedom to pursue his own interests – his own happiness, so to speak.
This new approach is more revolutionary than it seems. It is quite abstract – as is the rule of law itself – but a coherent abstraction is better than an incoherent and unrealistic prescription such as the ‘national interest’. In my opinion, foreign policy “realists” are quite unrealistic. The idea of one Ordinary Interest offers very different guidance in the areas of foreign policy and defense – for example regarding conscription, denying freedom to protect it, or bullying individuals in the name of the ‘national interest’.
One might object that the phrase “national interest” is merely shorthand for a common interest that all individuals presumably share. But it is a dangerous shortcut that personifies ‘the nation’, that is: a collective. Both history and theory strongly suggest that the “national interest” creates a fictitious “we” that will destroy real interests. individuals. The ‘common interest’ means what it says: it Ordinary preferences – including ideals in the sense of common minimum values à la James Buchanan– of all individual members of a free society. This of course assumes that the individuals live in a free society, or at least one that is becoming one.
******************************
The philosopher-king embodies his people and their interests