It is a strange time when both the Marxist-Leninist Left and corporatist, globalist elites push for an end to national borders, albeit for different reasons. (Recall Hilary Clinton’s 2008 vision to the Argentine bankers of a single country from Canada to South America–“no borders, no countries”.) From the corporatist view of the state as a “holding company” for international factors of production to the Marxist-Leninist “withering away” of the state, the modern state is under attack at a conceptual level. Is it still the best mixture of order and freedom available to us?
In his LSE lectures on the history of Western political thought, Oakeshott argued that the modern state (insofar as its varieties were uniform enough to characterize) was a product of near-constant war preparation, war making and war termination, and then describes a conception of association and authority the most likely to preserve a modicum of individual choice and freedom in such a coercive kind of association. Oakeshott also observed that the border between war and peace was becoming less distinct, for a variety of reasons including aversion to formal declarations of both war and peace. This paper will lay out and pursue the implications of Oakeshott’s concepts of state authority (vs mere power), morality and rule of law.