By FRANCISCO PEREIRA DE FARIAS*

Government service exists for its usefulness, for satisfying a human need. The function of service is to serve the governed, not the ruler

The norm

The government program of the social formation in which the generalization of interests is organized by the “capitalist State” (Poulantzas, 1972) appears as a set of services. Therefore, the analysis of the service, a simple element of this program, becomes the starting point of our exposition.

Government service exists for its usefulness, for satisfying a human need. The function of service is to serve the governed, not the ruler; if the ruler makes use of the service, he assumes the role of the governed, becomes the recipient of the service, being at the same time ruler and governed, constituting the self-government of a group.

The ruler provides one thing to the governed, who in return gives him another with a purpose different from that received, as the exchange of similar things is useless. We will see below what this retribution consists of.

The relationship between ruler and ruled requires reciprocity. It is not viable for the governed to receive something from the ruler and not reciprocate, at the risk of having the ruler stop supplying their needs, who will feel authorized to interrupt the service if reciprocity is suspended.

Reciprocity between ruler and ruled therefore establishes a regulator capable of indicating any deviation in function, whether on the part of the ruler or the ruled. Each is guided by the conduct of the other; and this produces a rule that disciplines their roles.

The emergence of this disciplinary norm expresses a quality in the performance of the roles of ruler and ruled. The norm consists of abstracting what is different in the behavior of both and retaining what exists in common, since it, in general terms, is valid for each person. As a result, behaviors will be subject to a spontaneous norm that, through obedience, constitutes a necessary condition for the existence of interaction.

Obedience to this norm is the satisfaction of the interests of rulers and ruled. But interest, a socially constructed purpose, cannot be the true condition of the predisposition to obedience, because the ends represented refer to the particular condition of ruler or governed. To be successful in interaction, each person must take the other's interests into account. Now, it is not just a matter of satisfying the needs of the governed, but of doing so in a fair way, that is, in a way that does not make the ruler inclined to block the continued enjoyment of the desire of the former. Both need to look beyond their specialized, concrete interests and aim at the common, general interest.

Habit also cannot be a determining factor in the continuity of the reciprocal relationship, as it constitutes more the reiteration of the feeling of remaining within a line of conduct than the source of permanence of the reciprocal relationship between ruler and ruled. Deviant conduct, outside the scope of the norm, appears as a counter-example of the path to be followed. The deviation itself can be explained as a failure in the socialization process of the individuals that make up the collective. Therefore, punishment involves the group rather than the individual.

Therefore, the predisposition to obey the norm arises beyond apparent conditions – interest, habit –, which could be taken as a cause. It is necessary to abstract what appears to link obedience to visible conditions, of a concrete nature, and fix the abstract aspect of the norm as such. If we put aside the sense that the predisposition to follow the norm is related to interest and custom, we are left with the implication of the predisposition to obedience linked to the pure norm. It is a spontaneous inclination, the effect of an abstract cause – the norm simply or normativity.

The roles of ruler and ruled thus require submission to normativity – spontaneous, implicit, unconscious –, a reiterative conditioning of the practice (= conduct guided by abstraction) of each person. The first norm will take the form of the functional imperative: each person must obey reciprocity, in view of the usefulness of their function in the type of collective order. It is about indicating the means, the duty of reciprocity, to reach the end, the satisfaction of needs in a given historical period.

But the work of making the norm visible, explicit, conscious – in a word, institutionalized – distinguishes the ruler (leader) from the governed (led). Expressing the norm efficiently and effectively becomes the prerogative of the leader's speech, as it requires specific training. The leader's duty is, then, to accomplish what the leader cannot do, that is, to institutionalize the norm and provide guidance to social practices; It is up to the leader to reciprocate with awareness of the leader's ability to guide and by following the established norm. If direction belongs to the leader, obedience becomes characteristic of the governed.

The governed feels the need for specific norms that guarantee the continuity of their reciprocal relationships (productive, family, etc.). The leader is therefore faced with the task of producing a set of institutional norms, positive laws. Norms are dictated by the ruler in the form of laws and followed by the governed in their practices. Thus, the norm and the law, as well as their practical effects or effectiveness, constitute the scope of law.

The governing function consists, firstly, of formulating the common (general) law, a condition for the existence of specific laws, relating to each type of reciprocity relationship. The general law needs to be particularized in the forms referring to the variety of relationships between individuals. Thus, the directive function involves the movement of law in general with particular laws. Therefore, the government has a legislative function.

However, the law, as a commandment that aims to discipline social relations, is only effective through another government function, the executive function. If there are disagreements in the interpretation of the particular law, it will be up to a government representative, the judge, to resolve the issue. The judge, in turn, will have to rely on another representative, the police officer, to, if necessary, coerce the parties to comply with the judgment.

It becomes evident that it is the government's duty not only to make laws, but also to have the means to enforce them. These means include employees, weapons, taxes – in short, the government is organized within an administrative framework.

The rules for organizing government tasks and resources tend to form a whole, the system of administrative rules. There are norms in common between, on the one hand, the rules for the distribution of governmental functions in legislative and executive apparatuses and, on the other hand, the provisions regarding the influence of the governed in the functioning of governmental apparatuses.

The law

The ruler already has the initial model of the norm: the conditioned or functional imperative. It is now a matter of adapting it, adopting the most convenient form of knowledge to be operated in the primordial context, belief. Those governed need to believe in the laws established so that it is not necessary for the community to reopen research, debates and formulations of basic laws with each new generation, which could make the survival of the initial community, lacking resources, unfeasible, given the level of development of work social (Durkheim, 2003).

The norm in its institutional form, present in government services, is the visible manifestation of the meaning of the norm, since the institutional norm concerns the index (denotative form) of the norm, and not the norm as such (connotative form). The connotative form of the norm, called the structural norm, assumes a specific, metonymic cause relationship with its denotative form, the institutional norm. The validity of the institutional norm (manifest, concrete) therefore becomes the sign of the reality of the structural norm (latent, abstract).

There is the transformation, by the legislator, of the functional (conditioned) imperative into a categorical (unconditioned) imperative, as the unconditioned representation or principle is characteristic of the belief system. The formula of the principle in the initial collective will be based on tradition (ancestry) as its statement. Initially, the formula for the principle of reason, the postulate, is excluded; as this would require training new generations in the knowledge of rational mathematics and logic, which is only viable through the organization of the school system.

Likewise, the formula for the principle of charisma, revelation, is excluded; since the preservation of the testimony of individuals with exceptional qualities (charisma) would require a written form of report, and not just its oral form, which is more likely to be distorted or lost. In both cases, high public funding contributions would be required for the education of new generations. Therefore, tradition says: “you must respect reciprocity!”.

Ultimately, knowledge of the laws in a community not yet divided between the powerful (rich) on one side and the weak (poor) on the other - in which the ruler does not have to have the professionalization of violence, as the tribal chief does not even need the sophistication of laws, to discourage the subversion of oppressed and poor groups, nor the arms monopoly, since the degree of internal conflicts is low given socioeconomic equality – it will be of a mythical type. Since the objective of government leadership is not to oppress, but rather to ensure that laws serve the aspirations of all, preventing the legal order from privileging the interests of any social minority, it is sufficient that the enunciation of the norm or the authorship of the law is linked to social memory, to the oral tradition of past generations, translated into allegorical or poetic language.

Conversely, in a collectivity divided into social classes – powerful (rich) on one side and weak (poor) on the other, in which professionalization and the monopoly of legitimized violence (State) must be available, as class subordination needs rules sophisticated and regular weapons that discourage the subversion of the poor and face the high degree of conflicts – the prevailing knowledge will be of a post-traditional type: charismatic (religious doctrine) or rational (legal philosophy).

Given that the desire of the powerful is to oppress, that is, to make it appear that the laws serve the aspirations of everyone, and not the order that privileges the interests of the rich, the authority of the legal norm will be based less on mythical tradition than on more elaborated knowledge considered unconditioned – the religious dogma and the philosophical axiom (Machiavelli, 1987).

Differently from discourses of belief – myth, religion, philosophy – there is another type of legal-administrative knowledge (the law and the implementation of the law) or political knowledge. And what knowledge would that be? Research, a product of scientific practice, has, like any commodity, an exchange value and a use value. As exchange value, that is, the work socially necessary in its production, the result of the investigation charges a price to the consumer; and as a use value, that is, the satisfaction of knowledge, this product is subject to the norm that stabilizes the relationship between the scientist and the layman. But who are the consumers of science discourse? Firstly, the government leader.

In origin, this leader formulates a law aimed at the needs of those governed, whose condition for validity is belief in the norm. But the ruler, in order to formulate and apply the law, needs to know it in its structural reality, and not just in its institutional appearance. Then, the ruler will seek advice from the critic of the laws, the political scientist. It is true that a tribal chief can simultaneously fulfill the roles of formulator, executor and critic of collective norms. The tribal leader then transforms the norm, the functional imperative, into law, the rule established and supported by ancestral authority.

But from the moment the ruler becomes a statesman, as in ancient Egypt or modern England, he will need the political scientist to transform himself not only into a religious prophet or political philosopher, the respective diffusers of charismatic belief and rational belief, but, above all, in a social engineer, the opposite of a political scientist. The social engineer advises the state ruler, before being efficient (= governing according to a fair law), to be effective (= governing according to a false law), indicating to the state leader the means to succeed in the task of domination.

In the contemporary State, under the hegemony of financial-banking capital, Friedrich Hayek and the proposition that the employment relationship is an exchange of equivalents reign – the individual salary for the work expended! This relationship, according to this discourse, needs to occur by “chance”, that is, the meeting between the company owner and the salaried worker without predetermination of any kind, preserving the “freedom” of the labor market.

The fetishism of the law

Laws are things that circulate, since everyone is informed or should be informed about them, but they keep their enigmas. The enigmatic character or fetish of the law occurs, to this day, because this thing tends to hide its functional character and appear as having a supramundane origin – mythical narrative, religious doctrine, rational philosophy.

The science of law in Immanuel Kant (1986) contains the result argued by us about the true character of the legal norm, as the German philosopher states that the imperatives of law are only “in accordance with duty”, and not “out of duty” ( unconditional). In other words, under the form (appearance) of the categorical imperative, what is actually in the law is the content (reality) of the functional imperative.

Thus, in its essence, the legal norm is not constituted as supra-historical, as it is conditioned to worldly ends, and in its historical origin it does not necessarily appear in the individual-person form, as it is initially linked to the mythical narrative, the ancestral collective authority , and not to religious or rational precepts, whose representations of divinity (religion) or unconditionality (reason) occur in the person-form (Balandier, 2013). If the person-form of law is not found primarily, this does not imply that there are no legal relations of property (collective), family (polygamous), sanctions (tribe or kin).

* Francisco Pereira de Farias He is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of Piauí. Author, among other books, of Reflections on the political theory of the young Poulantzas (1968-1974) (anti-capital fights).

References

BALANDIER, Georges. Anthropologie polique. Paris: PUF, 2013.

DURKHEIM, Émile. Sociology lectures. Paris: PUF, 2010.

KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Lisbon: Editions 70, 1986.

MACHIAVELLI, Niccolò. The prince. Brasilia: UNB, 1987.

POULANTZAS, Nicos. Pouvoir politique et social classes. Paris: Maspero, 1972.

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