The Paradox of Government: Explaining the Life and Death of a State

Abstract

According to Searle (2010), the existence of a State brings a paradox with it. On one side, since a State is a social object, its existence seems to imply the existence of a collective acceptance towards it; on the other side, the existence of this collective acceptance seems to be granted only by the existence of a State that is capable to exercise violence – if needed – on its citizens by means of the military and the police. This implies a contradiction for, if the existence of a government should in principle rely on the free and voluntary acceptance of a certain social system, at the same time it seems that this acceptance derives only from the exercise of brute force, and thus it is all but voluntarily. I will argue that this paradox can be solved only if we distinguish two different notions of collective acceptance: one that can be individuated at the level of natural facts, the other at the level of social – and, more precisely, institutional – facts.