Ultima ratio regum: "The Last Argument of Kings"

Deirdre N. McCloskey

Roughly speaking, there are only two ways of changing someone’s behavior. Either you persuade him, with words or money, or you put a gun to his head. There’s no third way.

Think about it the next time you want to pass another law coercing people, backed by the guns of the state.

The trouble is that putting guns to heads is easier. Louis XIV didn’t need to persuade his subjects, or anyone else. He cast into all his cannons Ultima ratio regum, “The last argument of kings.” It’s easier.

Yet the ease corrupts the holder of the gun. In 1887 Lord Acton (1834–1902), a British Catholic and notably liberal historian, wrote a letter to a US bishop arguing against papal infallibility. He wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

It shows daily. In both of our countries the disgraceful history of slavery makes the point. Enslavers such as our US Thomas Jefferson thought of themselves as good masters. But physical mastery over anyone does corrupt. The labor of Tom’s 200 slaves, some of them his own children, supplied his French wines and his fine books on liberal philosophy. Tom was able to set aside “All men are created equal.”

And even the notable liberal Lord Acton, like many British Catholics at the time, such as another hero of mine, John Henry Cardinal Newman, approved of the slaveholding South in the Civil War and thought slavery, like imperialism, not so very bad.

Wow. These sad facts illustrate Acton’s next sentence in his letter, that “All great men are bad.” They are tempted by their very greatness to abuse their hold on others. Even one of my all-time heroes, John Stuart Mill, who wrote eloquently in 1859 On Liberty, for 35 years, down to 1858, earned his daily bread in his job devising coercive laws for the rule over the blacks of the Subcontinent by the East India Company. Shades of Jefferson.

At the least, then, physical power corrupts people to shocking hypocrisy. That’s the least of it. The husband who beats his wife thinks of himself as a fine fellow. My colleague at Cato, Marian Tupy, has written a brilliant account of how the Communist Party of South Africa treated the liberals also trying to end apartheid. The Party was perfectly willing to do armed violence while pretending to honor the sweet persuasion advocated by the liberals. Some liberals believed the Party’s lie. Lenin is said to have called such people, who abounded from 1917 to 1989, “useful idiots.”

The same cynical corruption occurred in the Spanish Civil War. The Communist Party claimed to support, against Franco, the Loyalist socialists and anarchists, while in fact murdering them to gain power itself. The experience of narrowly missing becoming a victim of the Party’s lies gave George Orwell material for Animal Farm.

Conversation is the heart of a liberal society, what the great economist and philosopher Frank Knight called “government by discussion.”

Coercion ends the conversation and therefore destroys a liberal society. An authoritarian father, or an infallible pope, says, “Because I say so.”

With guns, it is so.