The Tools of Government

One of the four basic resources of government discussed in the last chapter was ‘nodality’, that is, the property of being in the middle of a social network. One of the important things that government gets from its central position is a store of information or a panoramic picture. This gives it a reason to be listened to, quite apart from any of its other government-like properties, unless it forfeits all credibility. Governments can therefore use information (or ‘disinformation’) as an ‘effecting’ tool, and have done so since ancient times.

After ‘nodality’, government’s second basic resource is ‘treasure’. As was explained in Chapter 1, this denotes government’s stock of ‘fungible chattels’, in the sense of anything that can be freely exchanged.

One of the four basic resources of government that were discussed in Chapter 1 was legal authority. This is the ability to command and prohibit, commend and permit, through recognised procedures and identifying symbols, for example the Great Seal, the Privy Seal, the ‘sign manual’ and the many other devices employed by governments to lend ‘officiality’ to their pronouncements.

Government uses nodality, treasure and authority as the mainstay of many of its activities. But these are not, of course, the only resources available to it for effecting purposes. There is another shot in the locker. The final resource of government that was considered in Chapter 1 is ‘organisation’ — a label for a stock of land, buildings and equipment, and a collection of individuals with whatever skills they may have, in government’s direct possession. ‘Organisation’ betokens capacity and capability — armies in government’s own service instead of mercenaries.

Up to now, we have been looking at ‘effecting’. But much of ‘what government does’ consists of obtaining information in one way or another. Thus government needs a set of tools for examination, inspection, monitoring, watching and detecting, tools which must be applicable to a wide range of objects.

Thinking of government as a tool-kit helps us to do at least three things. First, it can help us to make sense of the apparent complexity of government activity as some combination of a relatively limited basic range of instruments, we have what cyberneticians call a ‘variety reducer’, or, in plain language, a mode of simplification. The ‘table of elements’ that is referred to in the epigraph above is precisely such a variety reducer, enabling us to make sense of a chemical world that would otherwise be intelligible only by laborious verbal description.

In this brief final chapter we switch from thinking about how to appraise government’s use of its instruments to looking at those instruments in a wider perspective. The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section explores ways in which the overall mix of government’s instruments can change. Looking mainly at writing about developed Western countries and at pieces of British evidence, it considers whether there has been any discernable direction of change in the broad mix of government tools in the recent past. One of the themes of earlier chapters was the way government can ring the changes, using different instruments to address this or that subject over time. But we have not so far considered changes in the tools used by government as a whole.