Why Not A World-State?
Leo Strauss Against Universalism
One of Leo Strauss’s arguments against Alexander Kojeve is that large societies fall apart because they lack the trust needed for citizens to feel obligated to one another. Not that this is an argument for nationalism; but it does seem to be an argument for nationalism’s superiority to a scaled-up version of the EU.
But if you agree with Strauss’s critique of a world-state you might reason that nations are similarly doomed to fail by virtue of size. What, then, should the right size be for a country, assuming you want to maximize for a sense of shared fate between citizens?
Even if we could answer the question of optimal population size on the axis of trust and mutual obligation, however, we still would have to contend with the possibility that there are other values we might want to optimize for besides these. For example, closed, tight-knit societies may miss out on the benefits that accrue from more open borders, such as gains from trade. Trade need not refer to goods; it can also refer to exposure to people and ideas different than oneself. In a sense, every encounter we have is an “energy trade.” So we should expect that while trust may run high in closed societies it comes at the expense of novelty and growth.
I imagine that someone in favor of a cosmopolitan, global order would rejoin that one over-arching government may have inefficiencies and corrupt qualities but that a large hegemony is preferable to a local tyranny.
Some techno-utopians imagine a future in which people mostly live on the internet, and nations take a back-seat to the web. Yet if you agree with Strauss that trust and obligation necessarily decrease with scale, then you should assume a world that is web-first would likely have the same problems as Communism. This is ironic, because the web pitches itself as a place of decentralization. Yet, as we know, the more people participate, the more intractable becomes the issue of “content moderation.” We simply cannot escape the human condition, even in cyborg form.
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