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Between Colbert and Adam Smith
By Anthony de Jasay
Introduction
Some writers tell us that they do not really write their novels. Instead, they create characters, dramatis personae, and then sit back and watch. They let the characters meet, interact, like and dislike, love and hate each other, and pretty well write their own story by behaving as such characters would. The novelist, or so he claims, is really just reading the story his characters have written.
There may well be occasions when the political theorist can employ much the same technique without being more misleading than usual. Those occasions typically involve somewhat unstable, changing states of affairs, where the task of the theorist appears to be the writing of a piece of future history. Instead of writing it, however, he might try to leave the task to his characters, see how such actors are likely to act when facing each other, and read the story they play out. Instead of constructing a plausible scenario (and calling it a reasoned forecast), the theorist might confine himself to identifying the characters and trying to understand them. He is no more likely to be right, but at least he might be a little more entertaining.
In the present essay, I propose to let loose five principal dramatis personae and try to read the effect of their interactions on Europe's political history over the next decade or two. Two of the actors are nationalisms, one predominantly found in Britain, the other in France, viscerally opposed to each other; the third character is democracy, made aggressively imperious by an overdose of political correctness. The last two are states of mind, one echoing Adam Smith, the other Jean-Baptiste Colbert, one liberal, the other statist, and of course also viscerally antagonistic. What are they really like, and what drives them on?
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