The Divine Right of Founders

Is bureaucracy inevitable? Do all states become incompetent? Can state capacity come back like a phoenix rising from the ashes? All of these are important questions. We are not the first to ask these questions.

Carl Schmitt is a famous scholar of sovereignty. He asks who ultimately holds power. However, The legacy of Schmitt I most admire takes a different form. In my view, his understanding of the machinery of the state gets to something that should be completely uncontroversial – whether the state can function at all.

“Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This is arguably Schmitt’s most famous quote from his most famous work, Political Theology. Political Theology delves into the legitimating process of the State. Analysts have sinced focused on the legitimacy in times of crisis and regime change. However, this quote explains much of why the regular function of government agencies is so dysfunctional.

To get things done, you must be decisive. That’s what every startup founder learns. And what CEOs of even very large bureaucracies in Fortune 500 companies constantly try to reinforce. Sovereign is he who decides the exception. But it’s not just the CEO who has to decide. Executives, managers, and even individual engineers must make consequential decisions in their product and in their domain of expertise. An effective founder understands this. He understands how to delegate. He understands how to hire people to make the right decisions, which are not simply a machinic rule-following from his superiors but an open-ended exploration of local knowledge that his superiors could not personally evaluate.

In her book Recording America, Jennifer Pahlka, Obama’s deputy CTO of America, describes a process of top-down delegation for government software projects. She calls it a’“waterfall’ hierarchy. If you go to any software company, this is not how software is developed. They use what’s called an “agile” process, which is much more sensitive to user feedback and iterative improvement.

Reshaping this hierarchy is necessarily a political problem, as I write for the American Mind:

There is a misconception that fundamental reforms such as Schedule F are synonymous with grand ideological change. In reality, fundamental reforms are necessary for a goal as simple as increasing government competence with software. Prematurely taking them off the table will make even a moderate good governance agenda impossible.

A waterfall hierarchy is a natural occurrence in a social or political order that is neurotic about defending legitimacy.

One of the philosophers who best established the puzzle of the state as a machine is the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He’s most famous for the concept of the Leviathan, an all-powerful state that is necessary in order to prevent violence or the war of all against all. And per Schmitt, in part responsible for the machinic conception of the state that inevitably creeps towards totalitarianism.

If protection ceases, every obligation to obey also ceases, and the individual once more regains his natural freedom.’ The “relation between protection and obedience” is the cardinal point of Hobbes’ construction of the state. All one- sided conceptions of totality are incompatible with this construct.

As Schmitt observes, under the leviathan is a mechanical process that takes a desired belief to its natural ends. By conceptualizing the democratic state as a purely delegatory process, the legitimating narrative of the state becomes the fact that it does not take input while implementing the emotive and underspecified goals of the public.

The decisive step occurred when the state was conceived as a product of human calculation. Everything else for example, the development from the clock mechanism to the steam engine, to the electric motor, to chemical or biological processes are the results of the evolution of technology and scientific thinking and do not require any new metaphysical resolution.

In other words, the conception of an “agile” development process which iterates according to user feedback becomes impossible, because the legitimacy of the state comes from its ability to execute without additional feedback. Inability to take feedback is the point. Inability to take feedback is what sells.

As I will later discuss, this comes from a deterministic, near-Calvinist philosophy. Only God is the people, the people are omniscient, the people have specified all you need to know so the machinery of the State must not be able to decide exceptions.

The eminent English authority of this epoch of religious wars and conceptualizations of the state, John Neville Figgis, said that the God of Calvinism is the leviathan of Hobbes, an omnipotence that is unchecked by law, justice, or conscience?

Can a Hobbesian be Classically Liberal?

Core to Schmitt’s analysis of Hobbes is the tension between the inner freedom of conscience and the outer political order set by the leviathan. I recently met a respected national conservative who took issue with my claim that the classical liberal character of the United States drew from Thomas Hobbes. He correctly pointed out that Hobbes was situated as a conservative, above all focused on defending the existing political order.

My characterization is borrowed from John Gray, who characterized Hobbes as a classical liberal based on his belief in freedom of conscience. In Gray’s view, Hobbes represents a type of classical liberalism that is pessimistic about human nature and believes in politics as a mechanism to avoid the physical violence resulting from irreconcilable beliefs, which would ultimately end in the war of all against all. Gray contrasts this to the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill, who views classical liberalism as a mechanism to determine objective truths through debate.

However, it is true that while Hobbes’ arguments certainly influence American classical liberals, his philosophy does not fit within pure classical liberalism. In this work, Schmitt explains exactly why:

The leviathan, in the sense of a myth of the state as the “huge machine,” collapsed when a distinction was drawn between the state and individual freedom. That happened when the organizations of individual freedom were used like knives by anti-individualistic forces to cut up the leviathan and divide his flesh among themselves. Thus did the mortal god die for the second time.

If there are collective political interests which supersede any individualistic interest, then it is impossible to reconcile Hobbes’ leviathan with freedom of conscience. The ruler must decide an exception, or risk losing the entire order. That’s a powerful if. Schmitt argues that such a collective political interest must exist, and the de-sacrilization of the state proves it.

The incompatibility also works in the opposite direction. By delegitimizing individual judgment, the state makes a non-totalitarian state unworkable. The dysfunction caused by the “waterfall” hierarchy of government both cannot sustain its function and requires expanding its domain.

The topic of the second half of this review is how the American Presidency lost the divine right of founders, and what Schmitt believes the consequences will be. Let me end with the opening quote of the second half.

In the eighteenth century the leviathan as magnus homo, as the godlike sovereign person of the state, was destroyed from within. The distinction of inner and outer became for the mortal god a sickness unto death. But his work, the state, survived him in the form of a well-organized executive, army, and police as wel as administrative and judicial apparatuses and a well-working, professionally trained bureaucracy.

The Divine Right of Founders

The Silicon Valley founder has a divine right. Some Silicon Valley founders are atheists. They have as much divine right to their startup as the believers do. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless others cultivate a reputation akin to local gods. Legitimacy in the company derives from them. They have a special revelatory insight to the nature of their company that cannot be matched by anyone, based on the legitimacy of ruling over the startup from its origins. Per Thiel: “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.” Thiel derives part of his philosophy from Rene Girard, who ascribes to the idea that nations contain a founding crime. There is much more to elaborate on Girard’s philosophy and the founding crime, but that is out of scope for this essay.

Schmitt’s most famous work, Political Theology, beings chapter three with a stunning quote: “The central concepts of modern state theory are all secularized theological concepts.” It is difficult to understate the significance of this statement not just to states but to large software companies, which are larger, more generative, and more powerful than many nations. Due to the influence of Thiel and Jobs, among others, most of Silicon Valley believes that companies inevitably stray when they lose their founders and the legitimacy that comes with them. In the modern day, few have extended the same concept to nations.

Of course, one cannot expect nations to continually be ruled by their founders. However, the divine right to govern that is now exclusively seen in founder-led companies was once shared by monarchs. Divine right is not a trait that is by nature exclusive to founders. We know this because forms of the Divine Right have been held by monarchs and elected leaders throughout history, from Ancient Rome to the Victorian ‘Great Chain of Being’ to the Chinese ‘Mandate of Heaven’ which endures today.

The latter half of “The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes” focuses on the loss of this symbolism and the corresponding loss of legitimacy. In Schmitt’s view, Hobbes changed the symbolism of the leviathan and the state in his work, departing from the traditional Christian and Jewish views.

the name “leviathan” could evoke the recollection of dreadful Asiatic myths of an all-demanding Moloch or an all-trampling Golem. According to cabbalistic views, the leviathan is thought of as a huge animal with which the Jewish God plays daily for a few hours; however, at the beginning of the thousand-year kingdom, he is slaughtered and the blessed inhabitants of this kingdom divide and devour his flesh. All this is very interesting and could well be the mythical prototype of some communist theory of state and of the stateless and classless condition that are supposed to emerge after the abolition of the state. But this was not the case with Hobbes. He used the image without horror and without reverence.

Strauss identified a phase transition between the unity of politics and religion. First, politics dominates over religion. The endogenous hierarchical struggles of the tribe shaped its sacred concepts. Only in the Jewish and early Christian traditions were religious and politics truly separate entities – but this was a naturally unstable equilibrium.

In the first half of this review, I raised the tension between Hobbes’ belief in individual freedom of conscience and the Leviathan of the state. In Schmitt’s interpretation of Strauss, these two beliefs depended on an inversion of the primal relation between politics and religion: the religion precepts of the sacred could and inevitably would overrule the legitimacy of the state.

The struggle to overcome the Roman papal church’s division between a “Kingdom of Light” and a “Kingdom of Darkness” - that is, the restoration of the original unity—is, as Leo Strauss ascertained, the actual meaning of Hobbes’ political theory. This is correct.

Now we circle back to our original question. Why does the founder have exclusive access to the divine right? The answer is because a startup is the closest thing that exists to a voluntary nation (though not for long, if advocates of the Network State get their way). A startup has the legitimacy of freedom of conscience for its founder’s leadership, its continuity to the present, and the voluntary involvement of all its employees. No currently existing country pretends to have such a conception.

So legitimacy now rests in startups, but not states. What are the consequences of this? Schmitt identifies one: arbitrary expansionism.

Instead of cabinet- and combat-determined notions of land warfare waged by absolute states on the continent, [Britain] developed a concept of enemy that had been derived from sea and trade wars, namely, the concept of a nonstate enemy that does not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants and hence is truly “total.”

According to Schmitt, the loss of divine right results in the ‘total state’, a term which originates with Schmitt. While discussions of Schmitt’s contemporaries typically lowers the standard of conversation, this time may be an exception. George Schwab’s foreward emphasizes Schmitt’s attempts to urge the Nazi party to focus on a religious nationalism rather than an ethnic nationalism. In my reading of Schmitt, not just “The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes” but his broader work, a consistent theme is that religious concepts act as a restraining force on the total state during times of exception. This is antithetical to modern conceptions of the state, but should at least be a consideration after comparing the dysfunction of the modern state to the advanced function of the founder-led startup, which for most of its early life is definitively an integralist state.