The Mission: To Debunk the Theory of the Velveteen Rabbit

If you are not to die of boredom reading about my adventures in timelining, it would probably help to tell you what the paper is about. The question I’m trying to answer is “What makes a state real and not just a bunch of people you could ignore?” Steve Hanson, one of my teachers, defines an institution as a standardized pattern of behavior. Well, how does the pattern of the state become standardized, so much so that institutional practices can appear to be as inevitable a fact of life as gravity? Clearly, people don’t always go along with all attempts to create institutions. I tell my students, “I proclaim the Hattarian Empire! Join me and together we shall rule the world!” and yet no one bats an eyelash. Much to my disappointment, they don’t cry out, “No! I’ll never join you!” They just give me that impossibly jaded and bored look, waiting for my lame attempt at a joke to end so that they can jot the next real point down in their notebooks. Clearly, they have no difficulty separating the real from the imaginary.

We all know institutions are imagined in the sense suggested by Benedict Anderson when defining nationalism. A nation he says, is an imagined community, “an image of communion.” We don’t know most of the people in our community. Yet, the group has a distinct sense of entity. Because this “image of communion” is shared by many individuals and had rules that serve as a reference point for their political discourse, it is real. The same is true for the state.

We know there is no superentity, no artificial deity in the sky. Rather, as Timothy Mitchell suggests, this image is anthropomorphization of the coordinated, disciplined practices of many discrete individuals. The effect of the disciplined coordination of individuals across time and space evokes this sense of an entity. This is especially true as the coordinated pattern of behavior, when successful, can subsist years after all those who originated the pattern have perished. The pattern seems, like Frankenstein’s monster, to be alive. The state, then, is imagined, but it is no means imaginary. This is Hobbes’ description of the state in Leviathan:

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

Here is Hobbes’ original conceptual sketch:

This is always a fun passage to teach in intro political theory classes, because while Hobbes claims that by art he hopes to create an artificial man, Hobbes later admits what I believe any honest reading of the description makes clear—what he really hopes to create is an artificial god—one that comes with no annoying problem of theodicy. Hobbes’ artificial god exists to enjoin good and prevent evil. While Hobbes does not delve into theology, one imagines he sees such a deity as an improvement on the original, from a purely pragmatic and political standpoint.

So the state is imagined as an artificial god. We know the state is real when the impact of the coordinated, disciplined actions of the discrete individuals involved in this pattern of behavior leaves us with this sort of powerful image of god-like action. Yet all imagined but real institutions were once purely imaginary. How is it then that the United States, once imaginary, became a real, imagined entity, with power over millions, whereas my Hattarian Empire is doomed for all eternity to be a comical figment of my imagination? How do states become real?

Huntington’s Definition of Institutionalization

Well, naturally, before I take a shot at answering the question, you will want to know what’s in the existing literature. The last answer is relatively old. A guy named Samuel P. Huntington calls the process of “the state becoming real” by the name institutionalization. Here’s his definition:

Institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability. The level of institutionalization of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and procedures. So also, the level of institutionalization of any particular organizations or procedure can be measured by its adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence. If these criteria can be identified and measured, political systems can be compared in terms of their levels of institutionalization. And it will be possible to measure increases and decreases in the institutionalization of the particular organizations and procedures within a political system (Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 12).

Note that there’s not much “there” there. Institutionalization is a process, however the process is not defined. To the extent it offers any substance, the definition is practically circular. An institutionalized state is valued and stable. Is it stable because it’s valued? Is it valued because it’s stable? Is there a causal relationship between value and stability, or indeed are both caused by one or more other variables? All we know is that we can measure institutionalization by the institution’s adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence. Clearly Huntington knows the effect when we he sees it. And the effect is the state is like a living, breathing person, and a fairly dynamic one at that. Adaptable, complex, autonomous, coherent—would I did so well for myself! He doesn’t quite know how the set of rules crosses the boundary between “imaginary,” on the one hand, and “imagined, but real,” on the other. But he’s sure he knows what the institutionalized state looks like. Huntington definitely sees Hobbes’ Leviathan.

The only thing that Huntington keeps coming back to in the text is legitimacy. The state is institutionalized because it is valued. My advisor, Ellis Goldberg, once wittily called this the theory of the velveteen rabbit. You might recall the touching exchange from your own reading:

“Wasn’t I Real before?” asked the little Rabbit.

“You were Real to the Boy,” the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.”

—Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

So Huntington’s basic dictum, to the extent we can ferret it out, is, “If you love it enough, it will become real.” Well, my basic response echoes the words of a woman with eminently more life’s experience than me:

“What’s love got to do with it?”

—Tina Turner

My basic theory is that the reason the state appears as a god-like autonomous entity in our imaginations is due to the discipline imposed by a hierarchically organized staff of individuals. I can hear your now. “Ah,” you say. “That’s very clever. But haven’t you really just removed the problem to a different level? It’s all well and good to say that we obey because there is a special staff of organized individuals who apply both rewards and sanctions to us. But what about the staff? Why do they maintain the pattern, especially when they have the opportunity of doing things like siphoning off all the state revenues to Swiss bank accounts and leaving their piss-ant country to live in the French Riviera?”—don’t laugh, this happens quite frequently in the states at the bottom of the global per capita GDP pecking order—“Could it be that the state is real because the staff loves the state and work hard to make it real for the rest of us by bribery and whip-cracking?”

Well, my response runs something like this: It undoubtedly helps if the staff love and believe in the state, especially when you are first trying to get the state “off the ground.” But, in any society, politics is deeply attractive to those individuals who seek pre-eminent status. Owing to this less than congenial company, the desire to practice politics very rarely afflicts those individuals who are deeply principled and selfless. If the pattern is to be maintained consistently, it seems quite unlikely to me that it can always be the result of a deeply ethical staff. Even the most committed of us are only human. Corruption is a constant temptation, which is one of the central reasons we need the state in the first place. Self-discipline undoubtedly helps, but I doubt it is the answer.

Our dilemma at theorists, then, is (1) we know the staff isn’t a group of incorruptible true believers and (2) the staff sticks with the narrative as if it were what they really and truly believed it most of the time and (3) we really can’t take recourse to another hierarchy watching our first hierarchy, as this would simply defer the question another level. We know the state works in practice. How do we make it work in theory?

I’m still trying to hammer it out. This is the fuckin' messy part.