Chapter 2:
Flies in the Ointment
Understanding Economics and Political Economy--Power, Authority and
Regulation in Production and Reproduction.
Introduction
Almost everyone has read Lord of the Flies. William Golding’s well-known 1953 fable
of a group of English public schoolboys stranded on an island in the South Pacific during
a global nuclear war is required reading for most American high school students, many of
who do not seem very enamored with either the book or its “lessons.” The standard
interpretation offered by English teachers has something to do with the absence of
authority, the evil in men’s souls, and the descent into bloodshed and war when adults are
not present. Perhaps some instructors acknowledge the irony of the boys’ “rescue” by the
Royal Navy who, just recently, was engaged in a similar “warre of all against all,” only
with atomic bombs instead of fire. For the most part, however, this is where the story
ends.
Except that it doesn’t. That Golding applied Thomas Hobbes’s notion of the
“state of nature” to his South Pacific gedankenexperiment is hardly a surprise; that there
is more to Lord of the Flies than Leviathan is. For, what Golding did, intentionally or
not, is to interrogate the foundations of English society and, especially, its political
economy. No one would call Golding a political theorist, yet there is a great deal of
social theory to be found in the novel. No one would call Thomas Hobbes a political
economist, yet Leviathan ought to be seen as a work of and about political economy. In
both cases, we can glean a considerable amount of insight into the basics of both
neoclassical economics and critical political economy from the two.
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In this chapter, I establish a conversation of sorts between Lord of the Flies and
Leviathan as a means of interrogating neoclassical economics and critical political
economy. I use Golding’s story of the “origins of society” to illustrate how, on the one
hand, fairly straightforward notions of supply and demand can be found even under
relatively primitive conditions, those posited by Hobbes prior to society and state. At the
same time, however, I also use the same stories to show how political economy, in the
form of production and reproduction, are already present even before a notional society is
established. Indeed, that both Hobbes and Golding were commenting on English society
only reinforces this often-ignored point.
To complicate matters, I also draw on a third work in this chapter, a non-fiction
book published in 1954, only a year after Golding’s, that addresses some of the very
same issues and concerns. Kenneth N. Waltz’s Man, the State and War, a 20th century
classic of international relations, is rarely examined as either a work of economics or
political economy. Waltz’s primary concern is to explain why wars happen but, in doing
so, he falls into some of the foundational fallacies that economists, in particular, hold
about society. This foreshadowing of what later emerged full-blown as “neorealism,” in
his Theory of International Politics (1979) deals with the formation, or lack thereof, of
“international society” and, although Waltz tends to abjure Hobbes’s “state of nature,” he
is impressed by the extreme individualism of the state under conditions of international
“anarchy.”
Synopsis
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Lord of the Flies takes place on a small deserted island somewhere in the Pacific
Ocean. In a recapitulation of the evacuation of British children from London during
World War Two, a planeload of public schools boys—that is, private schools in the
English rubric—is attacked and crashes. Some number of boys survive—we know that
some do not, but never how many—and we first glimpse them when two encounter each
other near the edge of the jungle. One of them—Ralph emerges onto the beach and
immediately strips off his clothing—the only sign of “civilization”—and plunges into the
water. The other—whose real name we never learn but who wants dearly not to be called
“Piggy”—carefully takes off his shoes and wades in the water, warning that he can’t
swim and that his auntie worries about his “asthmar.” This is truly Hobbes’s state of
nature: the boys “spring like mushrooms” from the forest, shed the trappings of society,
and are reborn from the ocean into a new world waiting to be built. Or is it? Hobbes
admitted that a true “state of nature” never existed—it was purely a thought
experiment—but he had to find some way to explain society’s existence. We can deduce
from this opening scene that Golding had certainly absorbed the gross features of
Hobbes’s reasoning, although we cannot tell what more he might have gained from it.
As they are walking along the beach, Ralph and Piggy find a conch shell in the
water. Here is the instrument through which society will be created. Piggy tells Ralph
how to blow into the shell—certainly something asocial beings would not have known—
and the summons brings other boys out of the forest onto the beach, where they wait
expectantly for something to happen. In what follows, it is Piggy’s counsel that lays the
foundation for the new society of boys (men): the conch shell is the skeptron, the symbol
of authority. The right to speak in the public sphere rests on momentary possession of
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the skeptron. Piggy takes a census to determine who will participate in the creation of the
new social contract. And Ralph, it seems, as finder of the conch and an idealized young
man, is to be the new sovereign, albeit the leader of a democratic society with little
hierarchy (we can imagine that working-class Piggy plays a role in this).
It is at that moment that the worm crawls out of the apple—or, perhaps, the snake
shows up in Eden. Golding writes:
Within the diamond has of the beach something dark was fumbling along. Ralph
saw it first, and watched till the intentness of his gaze drew all eyes that way.
Then the creature stepped from mirage onto clear sand, and they saw that the
darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing [p. 19]
A column of boys in uniform march up the beach. Unlike the first group, they are
already organized into a society; they do not emerge from the jungle individually. And,
immediately upon their arrival, Jack Merridew, the “leader” of the group—a chorus from
a single school—asks “Where’s the man with the trumpet?” This is, perhaps, too obvious
a metaphor once one has finished the book; at this point, it is simply a query about the
source of authority on the island. When Ralph makes clear that he is the “man with the
trumpet,” Jack is crestfallen, but sees the opportunity to become the new sovereign in a
freely-contested election. In the event, Jack loses to Ralph but is rewarded with
leadership of the “hunters,” that is, the chorus that he leads. This division of labor is
approved and the story proceeds, in a downward spiral, from there.
Later in this chapter, I will return to the story and argue that Golding has,
unwittingly or not, posed the precise problem that Hobbes sought to address in Leviathan:
how can men be brought to acknowledge and obey a source of authority that will
establish and maintain a social order. Golding tries to being the world anew—and fails,
by the way, as we shall see. Hobbes, by contrast, looked at the world—or, rather,
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England of the mid-17th century—and tried to offer a means to re-establish social
authority after it had been destroyed, with the regicide of Charles I in 1649. When he
wrote his most famous work, Thomas Hobbes was in exile in Paris, having fled the
Puritan Commonwealth headed by Oliver Cromwell in 1640 fear of his safety. In 1649,
there was no lack of authority in England, but from the perspective of High Anglican
Church clerics such as Hobbes, it was the wrong kind of authority. And it did not
originate from a legitimate source which, until then, had been God.
Throughout major parts of the 16th century, England had been a country in which
traditional sources of authority were under challenge and contestation. In breaking from
the Catholic Church, Henry VIII had no intention of destroying the sovereign’s Divine
Rights but, the near-simultaneous rise of Protestantism, capitalism and science all
brought into question rights to rule, to own property and men, and to participate in
political society. In particular, the old rules that regulated social relations across English
society were breaking down, and the new form was not yet in place. In the turmoil of the
English Civil War, from 1642 to 1651, various groups, sects and movements, including
lower class ones, all tried to assert their “natural rights,” in contravention of custom.
Hobbes was, we might say, a practical man. He did not see the need to legitimate the
sovereign through the approval of God; it was enough that the propertied men in society
agreed who was to be sovereign or, as he put it, “the mortall god.” For making this
argument, Hobbes was tried for heresy when he returned to England in 1651. That he
was not far from being right became apparent in 1688, when William of Orange was, in
essence, invited to replace James II as King of England.
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Although Leviathan is regarded as a landmark in political philosophy, and Hobbes
as one of the founders of liberal theory, it is equally useful to seem him as a political
economist, for the problem he sought to answer—supplying order to meet the demand for
it—is a quintessential one. The collapse of social order in 17th century England was, in
part, a result of the new capitalist political economy of the country. For as long as
anyone could remember, English society had been based on a feudal order. This was
already changing even in the 15th century, but the rules and beliefs that legitimated that
order, deeply encoded in the organization and practices of the Catholic Church, did not.
The result was what might be called a growing “contradiction” between the material base
of society and the ideological superstructure: men who lacked the privilege to own large
tracts of land were, nonetheless, acquiring them, while landowners were falling into
poverty and losing theirs. There were rules to determine who stood where in the social
and political hierarchy; there were no rules to deal with unauthorized changes in that
order.
The English Civil War was, in fact, not only about who would rule, but who
would make the rules and what they would be. Without such regulation—without a
legitimate source of rules—everything seemed to be fair game. No one was safe and no
one knew their place. To Hobbes, this must have seemed a “state of nature,” for there
was no time to engage in useful and productive activities if one could never be sure of
keeping them. Freedom was good for some, but not for everyone. Moreover, the problem
was not only that one might be killed; it was also that, as Parliament had done, one might
be legally dispossessed. So why even try to maintain practices and appearances? Hobbes
saw, moreover, that men would no longer accept the authority of the old system; he set
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out to propose a new source of authority in order to meet the demand for it. Thus,
Leviathan. But, in offering his solution, Hobbes found it expedient to assume away many
of the features of English society that might complicate the story. To him, all of the
trappings of life and society were so much decoration and, so, he could argue that
reasonable men could use their powers of reason, whatever their particular position and
interests, to restore authority and order.
Let us now return to our group of English schoolboys, stranded on an island in the
middle of nowhere, constructing their new society after having agreed to a symbol of
authority and chosen their new sovereign. Of course, in the standard analysis, Ralph is
no Leviathan (he is insufficiently Machiavellian, it would seem). He is too good, too
golden, and too dependent on Piggy. Jack Merridew, by contrast, knows how to
command. His group of hunters quickly becomes the “military force” of the society and,
in a sudden coup d’etat, Jack becomes the leader of his own, “independent” and
autocratic state which, as we shall see, goes to war with Ralph’s democracy. But we are
getting ahead of ourselves here, and into Waltz. Before doing that, we have to consider
the conditions of economic possibility in this new society.
Supply and demand; production and reproduction
This new society cannot survive without organizing production, and it cannot
produce without a division of labor. There are copious amounts of fruit available on the
island and, for the first day or two after the crash, the boys avail themselves of this
bounty, some of them suffering for their greediness. Indeed, they could probably survive
indefinitely by foraging, with no need to create a social order. Even Ralph, emblematic
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of English class society, or Jack, member of the warrior class, cannot imagine this or how
it might be done. Ironically, it is left to Piggy, working class bursary boy at some
nameless and, no doubt, little respected public school to insist on the need for society.
From where does he get this idea? And why is Ralph so devoid of imagination? We
might guess that Piggy takes politics and society with the utmost seriousness; he has been
taught, in school, of its importance, and his place in English society has probably been
deeply impressed upon him. The working class works, the ruling class rules but, in postwar Great Britain, everyone gets to vote! And, of course, it is the working class that
makes things, while the ruling class lives on profits and investments, and sometimes goes
to war, with no idea how to make society run. Piggy recognizes that organization is key,
but he has no authority to organize, relying instead on Ralph and the conch shell to get
the other boys to produce. If they produce, they can also “reproduce” and survive.
Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the Labour Party in power in
England, British class society was pretty rigid. It had acquired all the trappings of a
“natural” system, much like feudalism in the 1500s, dying but not yet dead. The
educational system was, moreover, divided into at least two tracks: vocational and
academic. Today, the residue of this dual system remains in the distinction between “O
levels” (ordinary or, maybe, occupational) and “A levels” (advanced, in the 12th and 13th
grades, leading to college). Unless they were exceptionally bright, working class
students were generally tracked into the former; middle and upper class students into the
latter. The public school system feeding into the universities did offer scholarships to
promising working class students (usually men), but never at the cost of forgetting class
distinctions. The public schools tried hard to maintain British patriotism and class order;
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prior to World War One, and to a significant degree between the wars, most upper class
boys were fit only for military service—at least until they could be eased into a proper
adult role in society. These schools were thus the training ground for loyalty to “King
and Country” and preparation for the officer corps. Unbridled enthusiasm for war led to
the unprecedented slaughter of many of England’s upper class young men in the trenches
between 1914 and 1918, the first signs of class suicide.
In Lord of the Flies, Jack Merridew is a caricature of an upper class toff whose
only real advantage is class brutality. That he orders his choristers to march down the
beach dressed in their heavy uniforms, and proudly announces that he is “head boy,” only
serves to underline his thirst for power and a complete absence of understanding of how
to rule boys. Indeed, it is men like Jack who have egged England into war, and it is
probably men like Jack who have now exposed England to atomic annihilation—a truth
later revealed when he sets fire to the island in order to capture and kill Ralph. For now,
however, it is Jack who notes that there are pigs on the island and that he and his band of
hunters can provide meat, a welcome addition to the monotony of fruit three or more
times a day. So, a bargain is struck, and it is a gendered one, at that.
For the neoclassical economist, there is nothing mysterious about this outcome.
Every man comes to the table with particular skills: some hunt, others cook. It makes no
sense for each individual to do everything; not only is that inefficient, it results in a
suboptimal supply of goods. Supply fails to meet demand. By applying comparative
advantage and a division of labor, however, goods can be provided at an adequate level,
thereby allowing the members of society to engage in other activities, such as writing,
reading and arithmetic, all required for social reproduction. Moreover, those who cannot
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produce usefully, such as teachers, mothers and leaders, can nonetheless teach and
provide and lead for the benefit of those who work.
There are, therefore, three things that this new society requires to survive and
even thrive: resources, household and rescue. For the first, the little’uns can gather fruit
and bring it to the group, while Jack’s hunters will trap pigs and provide meat. For the
second, Ralph will oversee construction of shelters, with the help of other, older boys,
while Piggy will tell the little’uns stories about the England some of them are already
beginning to forget. For the third, Piggy will supply the technology—his glasses—to
build a signal fire, while the hunters will be responsible to see that it does not go out.
This bargain breaks down rather quickly, but that is another story. What is more
important here are two points. First, this new society is closely patterned on English
class society, with all of its brutality and sexism. Second, this new society is deeply
gendered, and while Golding leaves sex entirely out of the book—something we know
was never characteristic of English public schools—it seems fair to say that the hunters
thoroughly fuck over the rest of the group.
Ralph, as I have noted above, is depicted by Golding as a boy of considerable
beauty (Jack, by contrast, is dark—we know what that is about). We can imagine him
standing on a high peak, looking into the distance, one of the fair-haired boys who evokes
homoerotic desires in others. It would not be too much to observe that the
sadomasochism exhibited by Jack’s hunters, and especially Maurice, represent a non-toorepressed desire for Ralph. Piggy, of course, is thoroughly feminized. He cannot see
without his “specs.” His health is poor, he is fat and non-athletic, and he has no father.
Moreover, he is charged with oversight of the little’uns, the small children. His
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intellectualism is regarded with disdain, as the mark of a weakling. Golding seems to
make gendered violence almost inevitable—the “masculine” hunters against the nonmasculine housekeepers.
All of this is to suggest that it is not the absence of authority that is at the heart of
Lord of the Flies. Rather, it is the presence of social order that generates violence. In
contrast to Hobbes’s men in the state of nature, Golding’s boys do have a history. They
have been socialized into English class society, in which the division of labor runs in two
directions: between men and women, on the one hand, and the upper and lower classes,
on the other. In the latter case, the upper class loses no opportunity to brutalize its
inferiors; in the former case, the men always have it over the women. On their
seemingly-Edenic island, the boys create Hell not because there is no one to keep them
from doing so but because this is what they have been taught by their elders.
What all of this suggests is that the modest terms of neoclassical economics—
markets, supply, demand, division of labor, etc.—mask deeply-rooted, structural forms of
social violence, into which each new generation of children is socialized. We are not
born good or evil, even though our individual neuro-psychology may, under certain
circumstances, push us in one direction or another. We learn from our parents and peers,
preachers and teachers, from media and rituals and language, whom to love, who to hate,
and how to act on those emotions. Most of the time, propensities to actual violence are
repressed by rules, by law, by conventions of civil behavior, while social violence is
structured into the everyday relations of our political economies. The apparently-neutral
language of “division of labor” masks power relations that only emerge at those times
when we are not compelled to behave. And, then, it means war!
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Boys, the State and War
We can be fairly certain that William Golding never heard of Kenneth Waltz. It is a sure
bet that Golding never read Man, the State and War, which remains Waltz’s best book
and, quite possibly, one of the few 20th century books on international relations that
might still be read 100 years from now. In the 50-odd years since it was published, Man,
the State and War has been assigned to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of college
students, who might not have always understood it but surely have not forgotten it.
Whether this qualifies Waltz’s book as a work of “popular culture” is debatable; that its
themes are reflected in popular culture is undeniable.
Waltz, writing his dissertation in the late 1940s and revising it for publication in
the early 1950s, was clearly concerned about the possibility of atomic war—just as was
Golding. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 had convinced many that World War
Three was just around the corner and, while those in positions of power and authority
were quick to assure an anxious public that thermonuclear war would not mean the end of
humanity, no one was entirely certain what it would mean. Waltz, we might infer from
his book, believed that, if he could clarify the sources of war, he could then recommend
what might be done to prevent it. In the event, he instead arrived at a rather gloomy
conclusion: wars happen because there is nothing to prevent them. This is a result of the
abiding condition of anarchy—aka, the Hobbesian “state of nature”—in which only the
state can protect itself from other states. In so doing, war was one possible result.
Waltz was witheringly dismissive of political philosophers, policymakers and
textbook writers who thought the sources of war might be found in human nature—the
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evil in men’s minds leading them to aggression against others—or in the structure and
practices of the state—that dictatorships were evil and used war to generate domestic
support and obedience. Without a world authority—a parent or super-ego writ large—
there was nothing to prevent individual states from acting out their natural tendencies.
War was, thus, inevitable in the absence of regulation. The causes of specific wars might
be found in the irrational beliefs and practices of certain individuals, and in the
tendencies of some forms of government to fall back on organized violence, but those
explanations were best left to historians, who had the time to pursue what was now, in
any case, history.
And history, as Henry Ford once said, is bunk. Although Man, the State and War
is rich with historical examples and figures, Waltz seems to regard history as bunk, too.
His states exist in an eternal condition of diffidence and fear, unable (not just unwilling)
to select a global Leviathan and always opposed to any efforts to impose such a sovereign
on the world. To agree to such a solution to the problem of war would, it seems, turn
states into something else and, because states value their sovereignty above all else, they
could never agree to such a transformation. This argument sits uncomfortably next to
Hobbes’s, who saw no problem in individuals giving up much of their sovereignty in
return for the elimination of war. For Waltz, at any rate, any transformation in states was
not only impossible, it was unnatural. Hence, it could not happen.
In the decades since its publication, Man, the State and War has been the object of
countless analyses and critiques and the subject of an equal number of scholarly papers
and books based on its structural argument. My goal in this section of the chapter is not,
however, to criticize Waltz’s argument but rather, to illustrate its appearance in Lord of
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the Flies and its connection to both neoclassical economics and critical political
economy. I will present this in two steps. First, I will show how certain of Waltz’s
assumptions appear in Lord of the Flies as the common principles of neoclassical
economics. Second, I will show how Waltz’s political economy is deeply flawed because
he, like Golding and unlike Hobbes, was so disdainful of the importance of history.
Rational Man, Rational Acts?
In the free market, the rational consumer is king. Everyone encounters the market with
certain desires and a specific quantity of resources that can be used to meet those desires.
In the language of economics, an individual’s desires are called “preferences.” I would
like to acquire more butter than guns; you would prefer more guns than butter. I can go
to a butter fair; you can go to a gun fair. Once we see the cost of our desires, we can
calculate how much we want to satiate them and decide whether or not to buy the
necessary goods. This act of “rationality” is expressed purely in monetary terms: it
makes no sense for me to offer, say, undying loyalty to a seller of either guns or butter,
for what is that person to do with such a commitment? And to use a gun to steal butter is
not a rational act, either, at least not in terms of the market. It is simply theft, which
hearkens back to the state of nature.
Although economists continually seek to bring more and more aspects of human
behavior into the ambit of market relations, it is fairly easy to see that not everything we
do falls under the rule of the market. More importantly, perhaps, such economic models
of behavior are very difficult to apply to groups of people. Even when we join a group—
be it a church, a political party, a social movement or a mob—our individual desires and
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goals are likely to be quite different. To be sure, every member of the group probably
shares at least one desire or goal—to pray, to vote, to demonstrate, to riot—but that does
not mean that everyone will act in precisely the same way, even under identical
circumstances. We cannot speak of the desires or preferences of a group as though they
were individuals and, so, it is necessary to make a gross simplification if we want to
apply rationality to the group: we must pretend the group is a single (or corporate)
individual.
This is precisely what Waltz does in Man, the State and War, which foreshadows
his later work in which this assumption become hardened to the point of crystallization.
The state makes choices and acts as though it were a rational individual; its desires—
sometimes called the “national interest”—apply to the entire body politic, and a failure to
pursue these interests in a rational fashion is both illogical and dangerous. Because the
state exists in a pre-social condition, however, it must behave like an individual in
Hobbes’s state of nature. Economists assume that rules and rule protect the individual
against depredatory violence by others; Waltz assumes no such thing. His is a world in
which states “wake up” every morning to face the exact same world as the day before,
one in which nothing can be assumed and past experience is worth nothing. In Waltz’s
economy of violence, therefore, the state must stockpile sufficient resources so that,
should an opportunity for “exchange” present itself, it can outbid the other and, it is
hoped, acquire prestige rather than humiliation. The shorthand for this type of exchange
is “power,” which can be accumulated, like money, and used in bargaining with others.
We can see, just barely, this type of reasoning in Lord of the Flies. Once Jack has
been appointed to lead the hunters, he has already acquired the resources that will give
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him leverage in negotiations with Ralph: violence. Technically speaking, this violence is
the monopoly of the one “state” on the island, the boy’s democracy. It is to be used in
hunting for meat which, in the internal division of labor, can be exchanged for fruit,
shelter, fire, and socialization. But Jack is not happy with this arrangement: he desires
glory and, as subordinate to Ralph, is denied it in full. And, bound as he and his hunters
are to the household and state, they cannot pursue their desires in full. The answer is
secession.
Jack takes his hunters and forms an independent, second state, which he rules
according to his fantasies and writ, and whose members do his bidding. Now, however,
the pattern of rational exchange within society has been broken. Jack’s state can offer
meat, but Ralph’s state has little or nothing that he wants—except, of course, Piggy’s
glasses. Jack’s state also has a supply of violence, which Ralph’s lacks. Like the Mafiosi
he is, Jack offers Ralph’s boys “protection” if they agree to join and be loyal to him—but
not everyone is willing to accept the exchange, particularly Ralph and Piggy, who hew to
the old ideals. Unable to buy what he desires, Jack falls back on theft, stealing fire and
leaving Ralph’s state bereft of its last bargaining chip. At this point, it is only the idea of
Ralph’s state that remains, which Jack seeks to wipe out by declaring war.
According to Waltz, in a “world” of two states without a sovereign (adult), there
is nothing to prevent war between them. When power and prestige are at stake, it is
humiliating to truck and barter. The economy of violence, moreover, requires that
exchange take not the form of goods and money but, rather, injury and surrender. To be
sure, the victor may realize material gains—land, weapons, people—but these are
secondary to status. Jack’s state has little or nothing to gain through destruction of
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Ralph’s, but the outcome is domination and glory. This is a theme oft-repeated in both
popular culture and a pattern repeated in international politics: glory is its own reward.
History Matters
After the Franco-Prussian War, Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine; after World
War One, France reclaimed Alsace-Lorraine; in World War Two, Germany reoccupied
Alsace-Lorraine; following World War Two, the territory was returned to France. It is
not as if anyone consulted the preferences of the areas inhabitants, who were, in any case,
somewhere between being French and German. Nor, can it be said, were either France or
Germany substantially better or worse off for the possession or dispossession of AlsaceLorraine. Why, then, were France and Germany so intent on owning it?* That France
and Germany might have fought so many wars for two provinces of relatively little
material significance in the great scheme of things—apologies to any Alsatians or
Lorrainers(?) who might be reading this—can hardly be attributed only to anarchy,
proximity and threat. There was nothing to prevent France and Germany from going to
war, but the memory of lands gained and lost were, no doubt, powerful motivators for
those wars to which they went. More to the point, possession was important in terms of
whose regulatory regime would govern the contested territory and what that might mean
for social production and reproduction. When Germany ruled, the people were taught
one set of “truths” about themselves and others; when France ruled, the people were
taught another. Although the specific divisions of labor operative in Alsace-Lorraine
might not have changed greatly from one regime to the next, regulation and socialization
*
In fact, the longer-term history of the region shows that it was transferred back and forth between
Germanic and French states a number of times prior to 1871.
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almost certainly did. Inasmuch as these were the basis for the legitimacy of the
occupying power—pardon me, return to the mother/father land—the repeated rewriting
of rules and rule made a difference.
History matters. It matters not only because of individual and collective memory
and the desire for revenge and remuneration; it also matters because it is in the course of
everyday “history” that societies produce and reproduce themselves and in which
socialization into collective beliefs and practices occurs. This is a form of “regulation”
or, in a Foucauldian sense, social discipline. In Waltz’s world, no such thing matters, if it
even exists. A state has interests, these are threatened by other states, and what might
have happened yesterday, or last week, or even last century says nothing about what
could happen tomorrow. The Romans warned “Si vis pacem, para bellum”; for the
moderns, there is no peace, and one would be a greater fool to imagine it possible.
Lord of the Flies appears to subscribe to the modernist tenet: The Beast dreamt of
by a little’un, seen by the older boys, and materialized by Jack’s minions is not merely
representative of the darkest corners of the id, as a psychological reading might suggest.
The Beast is the super-ego, the authority that appears, at first look, to be absent from the
island. Indeed, it is against The Beast that all England struggles, not only during war but
all the time. Ironically, and paradoxically, The Beast is both order and disorder. It
threatens to emerge as violence within society; it brutalizes society in order to stanch
violence. Fear becomes the means of control, and would control be necessary were there
nothing to fear? This is an old story, one with which we are today only too familiar.
Back in Great Britain, it is this fear of The Beast that is foundational to the
violence of class society. Leviathan—the sovereign—has been defanged and denatured
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by constitutionalism. S/he no longer holds absolute power over her/his subjects, and
cannot induce order through subjects’ fears of sovereign violence. The constitutional
state holds the power of life and death, but this is a rationalized and bureaucratic power
of which few are really fearful. Thus, to induce fear, one must be imagined: The Beast.
Indeed, the Beast is ontological: without fear there can be no order, without order there
can be no state and, without the state, life is “nasty, brutish and short.” Or, so it is widely
believed.
The Beast is a figment of the collective imagination and, in this respect, it is not
amenable to a neoclassical model. Fear of The Beast is irrational, evoked by collective
emotions and hysteria.* If fear of The Beast is not to disappear, it must be constantly
renewed, it must be structured into everyday social relations, it must become the very
foundation on which state and society operate.† The members of society must act as
though The Beast is real, impose on others the reality of The Beast, and suppress all
challenges to the claim that The Beast really exists. And, when The Beast inside seems
to lose some of its teeth, for whatever reason, there remains The Beast outside which
allows those in power to proclaim “There is no alternative!”
In Lord of the Flies, it is Ralph’s state that invokes the (re)creation of The Beast.
At home, British class society and its rigidities ensure that upper and middle class fears of
the lower classes—witnessed during the English Civil War of the 17th century—would
not upset the regulation of society that mandated its social relations and divisions of
labor. Every so often, the ruling class found it expedient to offer a few bones to the lower
classes, but never so much as to disorder society as a whole. On the boy’s island,
*
To be sure, the market is often driven by fear of loss, which may also be irrational, but that is a calculated
irrationality (if such a thing can be said to exist).
†
See “The Two Minutes Hate” episode in George Orwell’s 1984 for an illustration of this point.
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however, the democratic society under the skeptron promises freedom from The Beast as
well as a mass disruption of class society, in which orderly regulation could collapse.
“The world turned upside down,” as it was said of 17th century England.
Jack, then, becomes the agent of restoration of this order although, in doing so, he
also destroys the island and any hope of maintaining the old order (Golding provides a
convenient dues ex machine in the arrival of the Royal Navy, who save the boys from
themselves and their own Beast; such rescue would not be available to an England
annihilated by atomic weapons). It is not enough, however, to control the instruments of
violence, as Jack discovers; he must also control minds and thoughts. He and his
associated have been taught well in England’s public schools: terror is the best means of
exercising control over those who might dream of other ways of life. Drawing on
education, socialization, and his naturalized beliefs, he recapitulates English history on
the island, destroying the Diggers and Levellers who, in their time, dreamt that things
could be otherwise.
And where is Waltz in all of this? The Beast is present in his world, although
there is little indication that, when he wrote Man, the State and War, he recognized this.
Realism bids us imagine the worst of all worlds and to act as though it were real. Such
“worst case analysis” is a projection of our imaginations, it is The Beast against which
we are to prepare. Failure to do so could expose us to our worst fears and, so, we prepare
for that in order to avoid it. Wars happen, says Waltz, but prudence might prevent them.
Nuclear weapons are unfortunate but, as he writes in his later works, our fear of them
instills in us a healthy prudence, one that might yet avoid the vengeance of The Beast. Or
not.
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It’s not yet over, is it?
Ever since the end of the Cold War, we have been engaged in imagining new Beasts.
Having lost one with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we tried to imagine, with all our
might and creativity, the next one. The attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and
Washington, DC gave impetus to collective fear and imagination, and a flood of film and
fiction have served to give form to The New Beast. Space precludes mention of these
works, but The New Beast it is not really new at all; it is the old one in a different guise.
The Terrorist threatens, we imagine, a disordering of states and societies that must be
avoided at all costs. Today, we trade in fear and loyalty, and rejection of the deal is
almost impossible. “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists,” warned President
George W. Bush in Congress on September 20, 2001. Once again, we might try to
destroy the world in order to save it. Jack Merridew lives!
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