Most people and even many serious analysts seem to assume that the concept of “national interest” or “the interests of the United States” has an obviously ascertainable 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 Liberty (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. It is the public interest where the public is made of the citizens of a nation. It is the interests of all the citizens. If these interests don’t exactly coincide, the national interest is assumed to be, in some way, their sum. The concept is similar to the interests of two individual partners in a business or an association: it is the sum of their respective interests—in making a profit or (say) advancing some charitable purpose. If the national interest is not a straight sum, addition and subtraction, of all individual interests, it consists in some other form of aggregation.
On second thought, problems become rapidly obvious. How is it possible to add and subtract, or otherwise aggregate, even just conceptually, the interests of two non-identical individuals? In a private cooperative venture, the partners pursue together some common interests. Indeed, this is why they cooperate. If we exclude tribes and “organizations” (in the Hayekian sense), society is the framework into which private individuals and organizations act. Since each individual (or voluntary partnership) has his own interests, speaking of 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 nationals, is the national interest 2+3=5? Multiply the problem in a nation of 300 million. And of course, it is not the national interest if the interests of each member of the nation do not count equally.
There is much theory behind the impossibility of aggregating the interests of several individuals. Let’s define the interests of an individual as his utility, meaning how high he judges his condition on the scale of his subjective preferences. Economists have known for more than a century that an external observer cannot simply add and subtract subjective preferences, which are only known to, or experienced by, only their individual possessor. There is no way to say that “social utility” is increased if the individual utility of some goes down while the utility of others is increased. Any observer or philosopher king à la Plato who claims he can do this balancing is just expressing personal opinions or wielding his personal power. Mainstream welfare economists have proven as much (see, for example, Francis M. Bator, “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization,” American Economic Review [1957]).
A democratic majority does not solve the problem. It cannot determine what the national interest is, even under the sophisticated form of what welfare economists called a “social welfare function.” Furthermore, individuals in the minority are also part of the nation. Who is the majority anyway, given that different voting systems can produce different electoral outcomes (see Gordon Tullock, Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice])?
Discovered by Nicolas de Condorcet in the 18th century and mathematician Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the 19th, the difficulty of aggregating preferences through voting was recognized and formalized by economists in the mid-20th century. Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem mathematically demonstrated that, under realistic conditions, there is no voting procedure that can both reproduce voters’ rationality (notably the transitivity or coherence of preferences) and be non-dictatorial (see Arrow’s 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values). Arrow was awarded the 1972 Nobel prize in economics for his work in this field, launching the whole school of “social choice.”
In his 1982 book Liberalism Against Populism, political scientist William Riker brought these discoveries and their implications to the attention of political scientists. In terms of our interrogation here, a majoritarian vote cannot express a national interest that is both logically coherent and non-dictatorial (“non-dictatorial” refers to the situation where no dictator or dictator group can overrule the preferences of other individuals).
This conclusion seems to leave us in a dead end. If the public interest does not exist, what is the criterion for public policy? If the national interest does not exist, what is the criterion for deciding how a national state will deal with other national states—or force its citizens to behave, for example by regulating their trades or other voluntary relations with individuals of other countries?
There are not many escapes from this cul-de-sac. Two are represented by two great economists and political philosophers of our time. One is to deny that the state has any economic and moral justification, to view it as a mere instrument for political rulers and their clientèles to impose their choices on the rest of society or nation. Anthony de Jasay, who defined himself as a classical liberal and an anarchist, took this exit and defended the ideal of a stateless society with no public policy at all. He did however express some doubts on the possibility that such a society could resist invasion by nation-states or other international armed groups.
Another way of escape was formalized by Nobel 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 the common interest of all society members. This common denominator is necessarily thin as it represents the preferences or values that all 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 consented to by all individuals can only aim at the maintenance of a free society where every individual has an equal liberty to pursue his own interests–his own happiness, as it were.
This novel approach is more revolutionary than it appears. It is rather abstract—as indeed the rule of law is itself—but a coherent abstraction is better than an incoherent and unrealistic recipe such as the “national interest.” In my view, the foreign policy “realists” are rather unrealistic. The idea of a common interest offers very different guidance in matters of foreign policy and defense—for example, regarding conscription, negating liberty to protect it, or bullying individuals in the name of the “national interest.” It also provides an analytical discipline against the bullying temptation.
One could object that the expression “national interest” is merely a shortcut for a common interest that all individuals presumably share. But it is a dangerous shortcut that personifies “the nation,” that is, a collective. History as well as theory strongly suggests that the “national interest” creates a fictitious “we” that is bound to bulldoze the interests of real individuals. The “common interest” means what it says: the common preferences—including ideals in the sense of common minimum values à la James Buchanan—of all individual members of a free society. This assumes, of course, that the individuals live in a free society or at least one that is becoming so.
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The philosopher king embodies his people and their interests
READER COMMENTS
Ahmed Fares
Sep 14 2024 at 4:33pm
re: the rise of a multipolar world
The Houthis have become a dangerous rogue nation. The US Navy could crush them —by Tom Sharpe (10 November 2023)
Marines, SEALs and hundreds of thousands of tons of haze gray steel are in the Red Sea
Well, that didn’t age well.
The Houthis have defeated the US Navy —by Tom Sharpe (24 August 2024)
But the EU and France haven’t given up. They’re still fighting for freedom
Mactoul
Sep 15 2024 at 12:41am
These questions have been answered by Pareto, Sorel and others of the Machiavellian school. All citizens are not equal and political participation requires energy and talent that the mass of commoners don’t possess. So they don’t count.
It is the elite that decides and it is the conversation within elite that matters.
Perhaps this approach is not amenable to economic analysis you prefer and thus this approach doesn’t exist for the economists of Buchanan school.
Daniel Klein
Sep 15 2024 at 7:28am
To pretend that your ‘subjectivism’ hammer spares everything but ‘anarchism’ is a non sequitur. Hitler had subjective preferences too, and we wouldn’t want to commit the philosophical sin of saying that everyone else’s well-being somehow outweighed his. That would be to commit an ‘arbitrary’ ‘social aggregation’! Who am I — or you — to say that their well-being outweighed Adolph’s!
As for your Buchanan option, it concludes that “the only justification and function of the state is to protect a set of rules that represent the common interest of all society members… The rules consented to by all individuals can only aim at the maintenance of a free society where every individual has an equal liberty to pursue his own interests…”
What are, in the Buchanan option, “the rules consented to by all individuals”?
David Henderson
Sep 15 2024 at 12:01pm
Like Dan Klein, I can’t think of a rule that all people would agree to. Can you name even one?
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 12:44pm
David: “Thou shall not steal.” “Though shall not kill except in self-defense or to punish a killer [and a power usurper?].” “Everyone shall contribute to the expenses necessary to maintain peace and prosperity.” “Elections of representatives will be held every four years or so.” Etc. (De Jasay doesn’t agree that the last two rules are necessary and desirable.)
Don’t forget that, like in any contractarian theory of the state, there is some “veil of ignorance” (Rawls) or “veil of uncertainty” (Buchanan, Tullock, Brennan…) that prevents an individual from vetoing any rule that is not in his interest. (If somebody knows that he will be more efficient at stealing and killing, he will veto rules forbidding theft and murder, although he could perhaps be bribed into accepting them.) If you don’t accept the veil-of-something procedural restriction, you get one of the main critiques of de Jasay’s (in Against Politics): the choice of a decision rule is logically equivalent to the choice of its probable outcomes.
Dylan
Sep 16 2024 at 8:24am
Pierre: Notwithstanding Scott’s recent post where he beseeches us to not be contrarians, I’m struck by the observation that there appear to be a not insignificant portion of humanity that will disagree with whatever the majority agrees to. Looking outside on this gorgeous and cloudless New York morning, I don’t think we could get unanimity even in my neighborhood that the sky is blue. Which leads me to be fairly skeptical of the prospects for unanimous acceptance of anything, let alone the rules you propose.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 16 2024 at 12:01pm
Dylan: My answer to David above might answer your question. Think of a rule that says, “Everybody may have his own opinion.” It is not necessary to add “including as to the color of the sky.” This illustrates why the ideal of a free society follows from individual veto.
Dylan
Sep 16 2024 at 6:43pm
Pierre: You’re right, everyone may have their own opinion is likely a statement that we can have near universal disapproval of. If there’s one thing that brings liberals and conservatives of all stripes together, it’s that people who disagree with me are not entitled to their opinions.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 12:18pm
Dan: On your first point, I suggest that the “sin” is to want to do something logically impossible, like adding and subtracting utility across different individuals. In my view, the error is to think in terms of the unicorn of “social utility,” that is, which individual’s or group’s utility outweighs which other group’s. Going back to The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan and Tullock persuasively argued against this approach. Remember de Jasay’s memorable formulation:
On your second point, Buchanan refused to guess what the rules unanimously consented to might be—contrary to Rawls. What matters more is The reason of rules, title of a book of his with Geoffrey Brennan. This short book is a good shortcut to Buchanan’s thought and to the whole school of constitutional political economy. A shortcut to the shortcut can perhaps be found in my Econlib review of the book.
Jon Murphy
Sep 15 2024 at 10:36am
I think another way that “common interest” is more coherent than “national interest” is that “common interest” doesn’t need to define who is in the commons. “National interest,” especially recently as the world has become globalized, gets bogged down in who is in “the nation” and thus whose interests matter. Indeed, we often see the “nation’s” interests as defined as the interest of some arbitrary group of insiders who then declare anyone whose interests are different are in opposition and thus not “true” members of the nation.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 11:36am
That’s a good point, Jon.
steve
Sep 15 2024 at 1:21pm
Hmmm. How common is common? Is there a magic percentage? Does it need to be a majority, an overwhelming majority?
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 1:58pm
Steve: Common means common. A common interest is an interest that everybody shares. For example, all individuals have an interest in a rule that says something like “Thou shall not kill, except in self-defense [and perhaps against somebody who tries to seize power].” Not everybody has an interest in a rule that says “Everybody has the right to import Stilton”; or in a rule saying “Everybody has the right to import Saint-Nectaire.” Similarly, a rational individual would probably not agree that “everybody has the right to the job he wants,” if only because he does not want to be stuck with somebody’s claims that he has a right to be in his employ. But everybody has a common interest in a rule that says, “Everybody has a right to purchase the cheese he wants.” (See my answer to David above for some other caveat.) It’s not a matter of majority but of unanimity. The founding (and technical) analysis of this economics-of-politics approach can be found in James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent (1962). A good, mid-technical introduction is Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty (1975).
Jim Glass
Sep 16 2024 at 12:59am
“Common” does not mean universal without exception in my part of town.
Blue eyes are common among Swedes … As a favorite ice cream flavor, chocolate is more common than pistachio … human beings commonly enjoy delicious dairy products — except for the lactose intolerant.
The members of my community certainly have a common interest in minimizing violent, predatory crime. It protects our children, increases property values and fosters economic activity, while reducing the stress of life, improving the welfare of all. Except the violent predatory criminals heading to jail, of course.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 16 2024 at 11:58am
Jim: As I explain in my post, I use “common” as in “common denominator.” This corresponds to definition #2 in Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common. Many words have different meanings, more or less closely derived, so it is important indeed to be clear in which sense one uses a word, as I think I did at many points in my post.
Andrea Mays
Sep 15 2024 at 3:58pm
Your philosopher king artwork reminds me of the cover art for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan— in both cases their bodies are made of the people!
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 5:14pm
Andrea: I must confess I plagiarized Hobbes’s idea. I think I did that once before (also with DALL-E’s complicity) on EconLog. If my memory serves, I then acknowledge Hobbes’s inspiration. I was a bit sloppy this time. But my imitations are very poor compared with Leviathian‘s front cover. It’s DALL-E’s fault!
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 15 2024 at 5:19pm
Andrea: Moreover, what a stupid “idea” of DALL-E to make the king’s beard with giant homunculi! That’s the sort of subtle things one can never persuade our silicon friend to understand and change. Perhaps I could have persuaded him to remove the king’s beard altogether, but it is not sure.
Craig
Sep 16 2024 at 10:35pm
“Suppose an Appalachian redneck has “three interests” in national security, and a cosmopolitan New Yorker has “two interests,” or vice versa. ”
I feel like I am straddling this one, indeed what you write here makes much sense to me though I would suggest you are setting up an argument for anarchism. Indeed Mr. Klein chastises you with: ‘To pretend that your ‘subjectivism’ hammer spares everything but ‘anarchism’ is a non sequitur.” Though honestly I might shoehorn your thoughts into my desire for smaller polities post national divorce though? Or perhaps in your opinion would I be wrong to do that?
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 17 2024 at 11:56am
Craig: My argument (indeed a central argument in contemporary welfare, public choice, and social choice theory) is that you cannot count and add “interests” or construct a “social utility” through some aggregation of individual utilities. Saying that I and my sister have less utility than you and your brother is simply meaningless. If that is true, one cannot use these unicornesque concepts to prove that the “nation” of rednecks would be happier under a world government, or a US government, or a Tennessee government, or a Nashville government, or a real and literal self-government. To prove your “national divorce” thesis, you would have to make an argument that their common interest (counting the non-rednecks or the more-or-less rednecks among them) would be served in one case but not in another.
Jim Glass
Sep 17 2024 at 1:50am
Nothing is obvious there. Definitions matter. We know “the State” exists, as an emergent legal and structural social entity. We know “the Public” exists as the population, citizenry, within the geographic and legal bounds of the State.
What’s “the Nation”? Some use that word for the State alone, apart from the public, notably foreign policy mavens like Mearsheimer, Ruger and the like, and they have sound analytic reasons for doing so. Some say “the nation” means “the people”, just the public. Some colloquially conflate state and public together in “nation”. Some say their “nation” includes both the state and the racial spirit of their people from deep history pushing them to a special destiny — not just in the 1930s, also Russia today, other places. “Nation” is very ambiguous, messy and unnecessary, let’s not use it. All we need is State and Public, so lets stick to them.
When you wrote “the national interest is … the public interest” above, I think in “national” you conflated state & public together. Not using “national” and substituting public, “the public interest is … the public interest” doesn’t say anything, so I’m left with: “the meaning of the state’s interest is … the public interest”. That’s certainly an idea to aspire to, but you of all people know the state and public are different critters and can have conflicting interests, Leviathan versus noble free individuals and dishonest greedy tax evaders. Putin and Kim are hard-pushing their state interests (strongly insisting they are advancing their “national interests”!) but sure aren’t doing much for their publics’ interests.
Wow, you’re setting up some high bars to jump: It’s not possible for anything to affect the public interest unless (1) we can quantitatively count exactly by how much it does so; *and* (2) personal welfare (utility) must increase/decrease not merely for most of the public but *every individual* together — “social utility” can’t increase for some and decrease for others! Tough, but I’ll take the challenge:
I bravely assert that “social utility” with the nation state, the general welfare of the American public, plunged during the Great Depression. It operated totally against the common good and public interest. I can count indicators of it, 25% unemployment, 29% decline in real GDP, 7,000 bank failures … I admit these are all indirect measures and I can’t count the actual total aggregate fall in “utiles per person”. Nonetheless my eyes see that loss in aggregate utility just as, when I pull the plug in the tub after my bubble bath, although I can’t count the number of ounces flowing down the drain, I can see the aggregate water level falling.
And I assert this blow against the common good reduced total social utility and general welfare in spite of the fact that some people profited from it, so their utility went up! My own grandfather was an officer in the Navy with secure job. Thanks to the 25% deflation, the real value of his salary increased by 33%. Good for him! There were a fair number of other Navy officers like him. Nevertheless, I still contend the Great Depression hammered down the public welfare and total social utility.
You can impose definitions to conclude the opposite, and be analytically correct, but what’s the point? “There is no way to say that ‘social utility’ decreased during the Great Depression because the utility of some increased. QED.” Okay.
In 2008 we couldn’t determine that it was is in the interests of both the state and public for the state to act to avert another Great Depression?
Craig
Sep 17 2024 at 12:04pm
“In 2008 we couldn’t determine that it was is in the interests of both the state and public for the state to act to avert another Great Depression?”
Difficult times for many for sure. Indeed at that time my now late mom got laid off from GAF, a roofing company. Interestingly that was actually the second time she got laid off during a recession, the first time happened in the early 80s. At that time I specifically recall the government providing bailouts to certain auto companies (some of which most recently were charging us over sticker price for their cars). If my memory serves me correct GM and Chrysler took money with Ford apparently not needing it. Chrysler would then become FCA Chrysler before the more recent change to Stellantis. My mom did get unemployment, but GAF didn’t get any bailout on the order of that seen by GM. Yet at the time being a resident of NJ I was forced to pay taxes, obviously much of the money was borrowed against my children’s future, to support GM, which the last I had checked was an auto manufacturer who had by that time long abandoned NJ (GM’s last facility was GM Linden and they had also closed GM Tarrytown by that time as well I believe).
Oh, and then when times got tough and people were dropping dead from viruses and inflation raged, they wanted 100k+ / over sticker for their shiny trucks because, after all, when times were tough for them, they had no trouble imposing on the American taxpayers, but when times were tough for the American taxpayers, they saw a extraordinary profit opportunity and took it.
Favoritism breeds resentment.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 18 2024 at 12:28pm
Craig: If I understand well what you are saying and as summarized by your last sentence, I agree.
However, I disagree with any sticker-price idolatry. The sticker price of cars is a requirement of federal regulation. And the MSRP recommendation is the just price recommended by the manufacturer as they may not contractually set one because of, again, federal regulation. Within the confines of all these regulatory prohibitions and mandates, dealers are free to sell at the price they can get, either lower or higher than the “sticker price.” Not being bound by the price they hope to get is a universal producer constraint–just as consumers cannot get a price as low as they want. If none of these regulations, including some at the state level, were on the (heavy) books, we would expect to see the usual diversity of the market: some dealers would set the “sticker price,” others (probably selling different brands) would have contractually agreed to thate the manufacturer’s sticker prices, some manufacturers or some dealers would sell online, etc.–the usual diversity of the market. Only Tesla (and perhaps some other EV manufacturers) have obtained the privilege to escape some of the existing regulations.
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