Beyond Camelot: Rethinking Politics and Law for the Modern State

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The Thesis
Social Nostalgia
OVER the course of the last two centuries, we have developed a new mode of governance--the administrative state--and it makes us feel miserable. We rail at the bloated bulk and dreary pragmatism of our public institutions. We condemn the uninspired, cumbersome rigidity that, despite such pragmatism, makes those institutions ineffective. We yearn for times that were not only simpler but more joyous and more integrated, when our individual experience was directly connected to the collectivity and we inhabited a political world that was suffused with moral values. This set of attitudes can be described as social nostalgia.
Social nostalgia pervades both our political and our popular culture. Citizens complain that government has become too large, too bureaucratic, too remote. Politicians, even when they are incumbents, regularly campaign against the prevailing administration, promising to restore the virtues of some prior period, to bring the government "closer to the people," or to "return to normalcy."1 In the movies, anyone with an ordinary administrative role--an office supervisor, university dean, or government official--is either an actual villain or, at the very least, an impediment to justice and good sense. How often have we seen our hero, a police officer, for example, slam his badge down on the captain's desk and say, "I've had it with your rules; now I'm going to take care of things myself."2 Indeed, the romance of life outside the administrative state rivals sex and violence as the dominant theme in contemporary cinema. The Wild West, the Middle Ages, the urban ghetto, outer space, and Earth after a nuclear or environmental holocaust all serve as settings where heroism and adventure flourish in the absence of bureaucracy. One might imagine that the planetary and interplanetary regimes in Star Wars would require a good deal more administrative resources than the small segments of our own planet that constitute contemporary nation-states, yet planets are ruled by queens and princesses, the evil intergalactic empire is controlled by Darth Vader's personal commands, and political conflicts are resolved by individual combat between opposing leaders.3
The thesis of this book is that many of the basic concepts that we use to describe our current government are the products of social nostalgia. The three branches of government, power and discretion, democracy, legitimacy, law, legal rights, human rights, and property are all ideas that originated in pre-administrative times and that derive much of their continuing appeal from their outdated origins. Of course, they are sedimented with many centuries of subsequent thought,4 and are so central to our prevailing theories that they themselves have become causal factors, structuring our institutions and our interactions. But in the final analysis, it will be argued, these concepts are simply not the most useful or meaningful ones that we could find to describe contemporary government. Our thoughts fare like Miniver Cheevy, who "grew lean while he assailed the seasons."5 They reveal an abiding distaste for our current situation, a distaste that is sufficiently profound that we have difficulty confronting the reality of the government we actually possess.
any different mode of governance. It must be based instead on a collective memory, in Maurice Halbwachs's terms,8 an image of some prior era that is preserved and yet constructed by the written texts and continuing traditions of society. Such memories are common, but they are not self-activating; history also provides numerous examples of texts discarded, traditions abandoned, and entire epochs or social experiences consigned to oblivion. Our present yearning for the pre-administrative past seems motivated by our collective dissatisfaction with the particular system of governance that we have created, and in which we find ourselves inextricably immersed.9