Luke Ford

Stein Ringen (b. July 5, 1945) is a Norwegian sociologist and political scientist whose work on democracy, governance, welfare states, and political legitimacy has placed him among Europe’s leading contemporary social scientists. He spent more than two decades at the University of Oxford, where he holds the title Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Policy and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College. Across four decades he has pursued a single line of inquiry: what makes a government work well. His answer holds that successful societies rest not on prosperity or constitutional form alone but on capable institutions, legitimate authority, civic trust, and leaders who can turn power into public benefit.

Ringen was born in Oslo and spent part of his childhood in Washington, D.C., where his father served at the Norwegian embassy. Early exposure to two political cultures shaped the comparative habit of mind that runs through his later scholarship. He studied political science at the University of Oslo, earning a magister degree in 1972 and a doctorate, the dr. philos., in 1987. As a student he worked as a news and feature reporter for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, and that work trained the clear prose that marks both his academic writing and his public commentary.

His early career joined research, public service, and policy analysis. He began at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo before taking part in major Norwegian studies of living standards and social conditions. He served as Assistant Director General in the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and consulted for the United Nations, and he contributed to some of Scandinavia’s most influential research on poverty and welfare. This work gave him a practical grasp of administration that set him apart from more purely theoretical political scientists. Before he moved to Britain he held a chair as Professor of Welfare Studies at the University of Stockholm, a post that deepened his engagement with the Nordic social-democratic model and with comparative welfare-state research.

At Oxford he taught and conducted research in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and became a prominent voice on democracy and government. He was a Fellow of Green College and then of Green Templeton College after the two colleges merged. On retirement from his Oxford chair he took the emeritus titles he carries now. He later joined Richmond, the American International University in London, as a visiting professor, and he served as Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London. He holds an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University in Brno and has held visiting posts and fellowships in Paris, Berlin, Prague, Barbados, Jerusalem, Sydney, and at Harvard.

Ringen moves across sociology, political science, economics, history, and political philosophy. His project rests on judging governments by performance rather than by ideological claim. He argues that democratic institutions deserve assessment not only on whether elections run free and fair but on whether governments improve the lives of citizens, protect freedom, hold legitimacy, and govern with competence.

His early major work, The Possibility of Politics (1987), challenged theories that treated welfare-state growth as the inevitable product of economic forces. Ringen argued that political choices shape outcomes and that democratic governments hold real capacity to direct social life. The emphasis on human agency and institutional design recurs across his career.

In What Democracy Is For (2007), he advanced a broader claim about democratic government. He treated democracy as an instrument through which a society can pursue effective and morally legitimate rule, and he held that political systems earn judgment by their capacity to deliver freedom, security, and well-being rather than by procedure alone.

His concern with governance drew him into British debate. In The Economic Consequences of Mr Brown (2009), he examined the record of Prime Minister Gordon Brown (b. 1951) and New Labour. Ringen argued that large rises in public spending often failed to yield matching gains in social outcomes. He criticized what he saw as bureaucratic centralization and managerialism, and he held that good government asks for more than the allocation of greater resources.

His most philosophically ambitious book, Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience (2013), returned to a question that reaches back to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): how can free citizens accept government without heavy coercion. Ringen argued that durable democracies depend on legitimacy and on willing compliance rather than on force, and that government works best when citizens see public authority as deserving of obedience. The book joined empirical political science to older questions of political morality.

He reached a wider international audience with The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century (2016), a study of China under Xi Jinping (b. 1953). Ringen questioned common assumptions about China’s long-run stability and offered the term ‘controlocracy’ for a sophisticated form of authoritarian rule. A controlocracy governs less through terror than through surveillance, censorship, bureaucratic oversight, self-censorship, and performance-based legitimacy. Ringen argued that such a system might appear strong while it remains open to rigidity, information failure, and declining trust. The book became a widely cited critique of the political course of Xi-era China.

His later work turned to the challenges facing liberal democracies. In How Democracies Live: Power, Statecraft, and Freedom in Modern Societies (2022), he argued that democratic decline springs less from ideological conflict than from failures of statecraft. He drew a sharp line between power and the use of power, and he held that influence in the world follows from how power gets used. Effective democracy, on his account, asks for capable institutions, responsible leadership, and a culture of conversation between citizens and their rulers. He organized the book around five problems, taking up each in the company of an earlier thinker: power with Max Weber, statecraft with Niccolò Machiavelli, freedom with Aristotle, poverty with Alfred Marshall, and democracy with Tocqueville and Robert Dahl. Reviewers placed the book against the wider death-of-democracy literature and read it as a hard-headed defense of representative government.

His historical interests came together in The Story of Scandinavia: From the Vikings to Social Democracy (2023), an account of the political, cultural, and institutional growth of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark across more than a thousand years. He rejected simple explanations that credit Nordic success to geography or culture and pressed instead the long evolution of state institutions, social trust, political compromise, and civic responsibility. The book gathered many threads from his career into a single narrative.

Ringen has stayed active in academic and public life since retirement. In 2024 he delivered a lecture for the Learned Society of the Czech Republic and Charles University on the place of religion in European modernization, with Scandinavia as his case. The lecture reflected his growing attention to the cultural and historical roots of successful societies and to the deeper sources of trust and institutional capacity.

He has written or co-written roughly twenty-five books in English and Norwegian, among them The Korean State and Social Policy (co-authored, 2011) and The Liberal Vision and Other Essays on Democracy and Progress (2007), and he has contributed to public debate through essays, reviews, and commentary. He has resisted both market fundamentalism and authoritarian statism. A pragmatic liberalism runs through the work, one that prizes freedom while it recognizes the need for capable institutions. Where many scholars treat justice or efficiency alone, Ringen has sought to understand how a government can be both morally legitimate and practically effective.

He is married to the British novelist and historian Mary Chamberlain and lives in London. His career stands as a rare case of a scholar who bridges empirical social science, political philosophy, public policy, and public intellectual life. In a period of concern about democratic decline and institutional failure, his work remains among the most sustained attempts to explain how a modern society can govern itself well while it preserves both freedom and legitimacy.

Outputs Without Inputs: Turner on Ringen’s Democracy

In the 2023 book, Making Democratic Theory Democratic, Stephen Turner wrote::

Stein Ringen’s book is very much in the mainstream of these writings. Where he is different is in his recognition of some sociological realities―families, for example―that are rarely mentioned in the usual approaches. He also attempts to engage, using data, the key issues that are commonly discussed in the abstract, such as the possibility of changing the opportunities for upward mobility through state intervention. And, in place of the motivating theory, he provides a shrewd discussion of the politics of reform: he recognizes that the “working class” has been replaced by the class of government workers and that the political possibility of reform rests on the involvement of the middle classes, who are pushed to the side of the rich by some reform strategies. He is also explicit, in a way that is rare in this literature, about the organizational and bureaucratic realities of the welfare state, the anti-democratic consequences of centralizing authority, and other topics that go beyond the considerations of justice and economics.

Ringen’s Democracy

What do, or rather should, we want out of democracy? For Ringen, governments, or governance, should assure the possibility of a good life, or as he puts it “the freedom to find and live a good life.” Mere liberty or “liberty as license” as he sometimes calls it is not enough. The good life involves self-mastery, reason, and meaningful choices. This not only depends on governance but also is potentially endangered by governance. So, governance should be both constrained, so as to avoid endangering the necessary freedom, and effective, so as to assure the conditions for it.
On the surface, this language sounds congenial to a more traditional liberal idea of freedom. But Ringen is not an enthusiast for liberal democracy as practiced, for example (and especially!), in the United States. He is an admirer of, and is well informed about, Scandinavian democracy, and much of the book reflects his attempts to work out what makes it work so well, and what threats there are to it. He approaches this problem in a more or less empirical way. He spends a considerable amount of effort trying to quantify or at least construct a kind of scale that reflects his preferences. He is critical of minimalist accounts of democracy, such as Guillermo O’Donnell’s (2001), that provide criteria that distinguish advanced, established democracies from near democracies in the developing world. These accounts, Ringen argues, fail to differentiate between good and bad examples of advanced democracies and thus provide little in the way of guidance for the task of making existing democracies better.
In place of these criteria, he introduces a simple metric, based on data that he modifies a bit, to come up with eight basic differentiators (2007: 42–7). He gives these differentiators names to indicate what they are supposed to measure, but the basis is more interesting, because it sometimes produces odd results. The first is whether universal suffrage was introduced before 1940. Here the oddities are Australia and the United States, which fall in post-1940, presumably because the Aborigines in Australia and the Blacks in the American south were denied rights to vote, albeit never in a way that was
sustained by the courts. The second is strength of the free press, measured by a Freedom House index number, in which France fails, and then a World Bank indicator of governmental effectiveness, which he corrects in the case of Korea, on the basis of his own work on the Korean welfare state. The next is “protection against the political use of economic power,” which is made up of considerations involving financial scandals in politics, the use of “private” money for political campaigns, and corruption. A large political role for unions is, mysteriously, not an instance of the application of “economic
power.” After this, are two measures of “security”: a UNICEF index involving child poverty (in which both post-unification Germany and the United States fail) and “public” health care expenditure relative to GDP. The final two are subjective: trust in government, measured by survey and allocated not on absolute values, but both on being above average and on increasing between 1990 and 2000, and then a combined measure: subjectively reported “experienced freedom” and a positive response to the question of whether most people can be trusted. The last two are combined to produce an index number. Only five of the 25 countries get points for this item. Overall, Norway and Sweden get perfect scores of eight, with Iceland next at seven, and New Zealand and the Netherlands close behind at six. The United States,
southern Europe, and the third world bring up the distant rear with near-zero scores all across the list.
The indices are more interesting as a reflection of Ringen’s way of thinking about democracy, which is strikingly weighted toward outputs―good governance understood in a particular way―and against inputs, such as democratic process, contestation, and public rather than bureaucratic power. When he does discuss inputs, he de-emphasizes actual electoral processes and praises other kinds of participation―demonstrations, union pressures, and so forth―that are outside the realm of public liberal discussion, to which he is strikingly averse. A traditional measure of democracy is whether power changes hands.
Scandinavian democracy, tellingly, does poorly on this. Not surprisingly, it is not on Ringen’s list. Most of the measures seem arbitrary: why choose the only measures for suffrage that make Scandinavia, a latecomer to universal male suffrage, seem like a leader? The trust measure is bizarre: the vast number of converging measures of trust that are normally used make the United States a high-trust country (Fukuyama, 1995: 255–66, 269–81, 335–42). The number that Ringen uses (in addition to above average reported trust), change in trust from 1990–2000, reflects the Clinton scandals in the United States, and doubtless similar events elsewhere. Why select a measure of trust that depends on transitory events? Nor does there seem to be any rationale for pairing subjective freedom and trust, other than that it helps make the rankings come out the way Ringen wants them to. Nor do they hold up very well as predictors: one suspects Ringen would like to take back his ratings of Iceland in the wake of its scandalous financial collapse.
The indices, however, are not simply arbitrary: they reflect some real and important preferences consistent with those he articulates in the book. But the preferences are decidedly odd in some respects, though they are consistent with the disdain for traditional views of democracy characteristic of the social democratic academic consensus. The traditional standard view of democracy is that the “purpose” of democracy is to enable people to resolve the problem of what the state should do. Democracy is a procedure for reconciling divergent opinions on this subject. Majority rule is a way of making these choices less oppressive: at least the majority agrees with them. The point of democracy is that the inputs of people’s opinions, preferences, and desires are turned into the outputs of state action. State action that does not reflect these desires, opinions, and preferences, however worthy, is not democratic, and states that routinely ignore the formal processes by which preferences are expressed, namely, voting
and public discussion, are not democratic.

Stephen Turner reads What Democracy Is For (2007) as a strong case of a single academic project. The project wants to vindicate social democracy on philosophical or social-science grounds, and after the ideological wars of the twentieth century it has become the resting position of most academic thinkers in the field. It rejects freedom as non-interference. It treats great wealth, and the power that money buys, as a species of injustice. It drops the old worry about coercion and substitutes a worry about domination, then stretches domination to cover the failure to recognize an identity along with the lack of money. Each writer in the line carries an analog of false consciousness. Present arrangements fall short of real democracy, and the blame lands on electoral machinery, the media, an inherited culture stained by racism or religion, or a failed public sphere. Ringen belongs to this line.

Turner grants Ringen what the line rarely offers. Ringen notices families and other sociological facts the abstract accounts pass over. He reaches for data on questions the others leave in the air, among them whether the state can widen upward mobility. He drops the motivating sermon and gives a shrewd account of the politics of reform. He sees that the old working class has given way to a class of government workers, and that reform now depends on drawing the middle classes in rather than driving them toward the rich. He says aloud what the literature tends to bury, that the centralizing of authority carries anti-democratic costs.

Then Turner turns to the core of the book and finds a definition of democracy weighted toward outputs and set against inputs. Ringen asks what people should want from government. His answer runs to “the freedom to find and live a good life.” Mere liberty, what he calls liberty as license, falls short. The good life asks for self-mastery and reason, and government can both secure it and endanger it, so government should be at once constrained and effective.

The metric carries the weight here. Ringen rejects the minimalist accounts, such as Guillermo O’Donnell’s (1936-2011), that sort advanced democracies from near-democracies in the developing world, because they cannot tell a good advanced democracy from a bad one. In their place he builds eight differentiators. The first asks whether universal suffrage arrived before 1940, a cut that drops Australia and the United States into the late column over the disenfranchisement of Aborigines and of Blacks in the American south. Then a Freedom House figure for the free press, on which France fails. Then a World Bank reading of government effectiveness, which he corrects for Korea out of his own welfare-state research. Then protection against the political use of economic power, built from campaign money and corruption, with the large political role of unions left out. Then two readings of security, a UNICEF index of child poverty on which Germany and the United States fail, and public health spending against GDP. Then two subjective readings, trust in government scored on standing above average and on rising between 1990 and 2000, and a combined figure of experienced freedom and general trust. Norway and Sweden take perfect eights. Iceland follows at seven. New Zealand and the Netherlands sit at six. The United States, southern Europe, and the third world trail near zero.

Turner reads the indices as a portrait of how Ringen thinks, and the portrait shows a hand on the scale. The suffrage measure picks the one cut that flatters a region late to universal male suffrage. The trust number runs against the converging measures that mark the United States as a high-trust country, and the chosen reading, change in trust across the 1990s, rides transient events such as the Clinton scandals. The pairing of experienced freedom with trust has no ground beyond delivering the ranking Ringen wants. The ratings do not predict: Iceland’s financial collapse leaves its high mark stranded.

The deeper split sits between two pictures of democracy. The older picture treats democracy as a procedure. People hold divergent views about what the state should do, voting turns those views into state action, and majority rule makes the choices less oppressive because at least the majority owns them. State action that ignores the votes and the public argument, however worthy, drops out of the democratic. Consensus democracy reverses the order. The consensus lets the bureaucracies do their good work on behalf of the people, and the regime counts as democratic because the action runs “for” the people rather than for a private interest. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) noted that European constitutions came mixed, the legislature and the executive and the bureaucracies and the courts each drawing legitimacy from a different source and a different history. Turner reads Ringen’s ideal as a descendant of the monarchical administration, ruled through administrative law and regulation rather than legislation, obeyed because it presents itself as custodian of the nation. He gives it a name borrowed from Weber: plebiscitary bureaucracy.

Ringen shows no interest in what people want, except in what they want as clients of the state. He presses for more choice and more voice for the client, which concedes that even in the kind governments he admires the client holds little power. He also knows what people should want. The standing problem is to hand it to them and then bring them to accept it. He embraces paternalism without apology. Disagreement reads as a sign that something has gone wrong, and an opposition reads as a sign of democratic failure. When voters in the states he ranks low reject the outputs he prefers, the rejection only shows, on his account, that those states fall short. The public arrives as a legitimating chorus for a state that already knows the ends.

The talk of consensus and the hostility to economic power hide a large thing. Ringen counts economic power as business money in campaigns and lobbying. He does not count the Swedish union confederation that holds a controlling stake in the leading newspaper, drives the party that has governed with few breaks for decades, and sits across the government’s panels. Scaled to the population of the United States, that confederation runs to sixty-six million, against the record 63.25 million votes that carried Barack Obama (b. 1961). Power on that scale manufactures consensus, and Turner asks why it earns no entry in the ledger.

The good life supplies the goal once mere equality drops out. Ringen works through Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) on positive and negative freedom and lands on the positive side. The man under negative liberty fritters his life away with his wants steered by others. The man under positive freedom, once the forcing has done its work, chooses the life that answers his purpose. The good life is Bildung, self-development, the Aristotelian mean. High taxation he holds essential, and its decline he mourns. He wants the state to tax wealth away rather than to open the chance of getting rich. He insists, against the long record, that classes do not hold stable. Turner catches the strain. A man who cares about equality should care about the concentration of wealth. A man who accepts equal opportunity as the surrogate for equality should care about mobility. Ringen drops both for agency and planning.

The irony arrives when Ringen turns practical. His repairs resemble the American practices the American Left disdains. He recommends vouchers so parents can place their children, common in the United States and fought by the teachers’ unions. He praises the Swedish statement that tells a citizen his pension and how the state figured it, a document the American social security system has mailed for decades to lend the benefit the feel of an earned right. He wants the rich forced to pour wealth into foundations bound to public purposes, which the United States already coaxes through the tax breaks behind its endowments and its foundations. None of the American money lands in Ringen’s totals, because in the United States that money counts as private.

Ringen loves high taxation and skips its economic train. The rich shelter their wealth, keep it from the income-tax man, and turn it to uses of lower yield than investment. The Swedes excel at the sheltering: after a century of high taxes the concentration of wealth in Sweden sits slightly above the American figure. Ringen calls the middle-class fear of taxes paranoia and wants the middle classes recruited against the rich. The fear holds up. Salaries make the easy target, and the wealth of the rich does not.

Subsidiarity gets the same treatment. Ringen would push power down to elected municipal government, close to the people, and Turner notes that the move resembles American practice, where elected officials hold authority at the low levels that Europe and Scandinavia hand to bureaucrats. Subsidiarity, as it runs in those systems, passes from one bureaucracy to a smaller one. The American device for local accountability is the ballot, and the ballot lets vouchers beat the public-employee unions. The device draws no warmth from Ringen, who prizes the tie between client and benevolent patron over the older idea of the citizen.

Turner circles the question Ringen never puts. If this form of state serves people so well, why do people vote against it? Ringen comes near it through the distortions of economic power, through the middle-class fear that taxing the rich will reach the salaried, through his gratitude that Scandinavia built its welfare state under the shadow of poverty and before prosperity, through his plans for recruiting the middle classes. The answers circle and do not land. People want benefits they decline to fund, and undisciplined polities, California and Greece and the United States, close the gap with wishful financing.

The crisis in public finance brings the problem back hard. Greece and California buckle under the pressure of public-employee unions and make ruinous choices to accommodate them. Iceland, set near the top of Ringen’s scale, falls amid political ineptitude, bureaucratic incompetence, collusion with bankers, and a supine press. Turner leaves the door open. The paternalist state, the legitimate bureaucracy that rules by consensus, or the cartel of unions with no countervailing power, might ride out such storms better, and the state that watches its outputs might deliver over the long haul. It might not, and such states might generate demands they cannot meet even under firm discipline. The older view of democracy places no such bet. People do the inputting through regular contested elections and own the outputs. The consensus Ringen celebrates comes from the institutions that sit between the people and the state, muffle the inputs, and add their own. Turner closes on the warning Ringen should heed: the bets behind his ideal of democracy resemble the bets behind regimes no one calls democratic.

The Heir of the Parish: Ringen and the Hero System of the Competent State

He says the word from a lectern in London. The room is the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at King’s, the spring of 2022, a new book on the table beside the water glass, and the word is freedom. He has said it for forty years, in Oslo and Stockholm and Oxford, and he says it the way a man says the name of a thing he loves and trusts. Freedom, for him, is the room a person needs to find and live a good life. The state clears that room. The state guards it. A good state hands a man the conditions to become what he should want to become, and a bad state leaves him to fritter his life away on what Ringen calls liberty as license, the freedom of the drifter, the freedom that comes to nothing.

The word leaves his mouth and travels, and this is where the trouble starts, because the word does not carry his meaning with it.

Ernest Becker built his account of culture on a single wound. A man knows he will die, and the knowledge would crush him, so culture hands him a way to matter past his own end. Becker called the apparatus a hero system. A hero system tells a man what counts, what a life is for, what he must do to earn a place that death cannot cancel. The system feels to the man inside it like plain reality rather than one answer among many. He does not see it as scaffolding. He sees it as the floor. The sacred is the part of the floor he will not let anyone lift, the value he cannot weigh against other values because to weigh it would be to admit it could lose.

Ringen has a hero system, and it is the rarest kind, because it disowns heroes.

Look at where he comes from. The disenchanted Lutheran north, the country where the state church thinned across a century into something quieter and then handed its work to the welfare office. The parish once carried the weight. The pastor knew the poor of the village by name, kept the rolls of birth and death, stood between the family and the dark. Then God receded, as God receded across the whole of educated Europe, and the weight did not vanish. It moved. The caseworker inherited the pastor’s rounds. The ministry inherited the parish books. The pension statement, the one Ringen praises because it tells a citizen what he has earned and how the figure was reached, inherited the catechism, the document that told a man his standing before a power larger than himself. Ringen gave a lecture late in his life on religion and the making of modern Scandinavia, and the through line of his work is the answer that lecture circles. The competent state is the heir of the parish. It carries the meaning the church set down. His sacred values are relics, secularized, polished, set in a steel-and-glass reliquary called good government.

So the values arrive in his hands already shaped. Freedom, the good life, trust, legitimacy. He treats them as the plain furniture of any decent mind. They are the furniture of one room.

Take freedom out to the granite and watch what happens to it.

A man hangs two thousand feet up a wall with nothing on him but chalk and rubber. No rope. The rope is the point, or the absence of it. He has trained for this the way Ringen trained for the dr. philos., years of it, and the training serves the same end, mastery, except the climber’s mastery buys him the right to remove every guard the state and the gear and the partner would put between him and the fall. Ask him what freedom is and he will not answer, because freedom for him has no sentence in it, only the next hold and the small dry sound of his breathing. His hero system makes a sacrament of the removed safety net. The thing Ringen builds the state to provide is the thing the climber strips away to feel free at all. Death is not the enemy here. Death is the witness. The wall gives the climber what no ministry can give, a place where he counts entirely or falls, and the counting is his alone.

Carry the word into a storefront church on a Sunday in the American South. The organ is a secondhand Hammond, the congregation is Black and dressed sharp and standing, and the preacher leans into the word like a man leaning into wind. Freedom. He does not mean a room cleared by the state. He means the empty tomb. “Freedom ain’t down at the courthouse,” he says, and the room answers him. “Freedom is what the Lord did when He rolled back the stone.” His hero system runs straight past the state to a throne above it. The state is Caesar, owed his coin and nothing of the soul. A man here becomes free by surrender, by losing the self Ringen wants the state to cultivate, by dying to the old man and rising new. Bildung, self-development, the Aristotelian mean, the whole patient ladder of Ringen’s good life, would strike the preacher as a long climb up the wrong wall. You do not develop your way to glory. You are washed into it.

Now a low room in a provincial Chinese capital, tea cooling in glasses, a Party cadre in a soft dark suit explaining the world with the patience of a man who has already won the argument in his own mind. He has read enough to know the Western words. He uses freedom and means by it the nation’s freedom, the long climb back from the century of humiliation, the sovereignty of a people who will not be carved up again. Individual liberty as the climber or the preacher would know it strikes him as a child’s toy, and liberty as license he would name, with a thin smile, the Western disease, the thing that left the rich democracies with their open mouths and their dead in the spring of 2020. Ringen wrote the book on this man’s state and gave its method a name, controlocracy, rule by surveillance and oversight and the citizen’s own caution rather than by terror. What the cadre hears in the word care, Ringen hears in the word control. They are closer than either would like. The cadre’s hero system promises a man significance through the rejuvenation of a civilization, and the state is the vehicle and the altar both. Trust, for him, runs upward, toward the Party, and the cameras stand in for the trust a village once kept on its own.

Set the word down on a kiosk counter in Athens in a bad year, among the lottery tickets and the phone cards and the cigarettes sold one at a time. The owner has a view of the state that no survey of Ringen’s would capture, because Ringen measures trust in government and this man’s trust in government sits at the floor and stays there through every government. The state is the tax inspector and the bailout and the pension that shrank overnight. Freedom is the room you find around the state, the cousin in the ministry, the euros that never meet a receipt, the favor banked against the favor owed. “The state?” he says, and tips his head. “My state is Stavros, my cousin, at the tax office. That is the only one I trust.” His hero system is the old Mediterranean one, kin and patron and the closed circle, and trust is a thing you spend only on blood and the man who has done you a good turn. Ringen’s word trust names a public, a faith extended to strangers and offices and rules. The kiosk owner has no such word, and would think a man who did either a fool or a Swede, which to him might be the same thing.

Carry it last into a glass office south of San Francisco, a founder in a vest, a cap table on the screen, the future arriving in increments of funding. He has a word that ends the conversation Ringen has spent his life inside. Trustless. He builds systems that remove the need to trust a person, a bank, a state, because the protocol does not take bribes and the contract executes on a chain no minister can reach. Freedom, for him, is exit. Where the activist raises voice against the state and the climber removes the rope and the preacher waits on the Lord, the founder routes around. The state is legacy friction, a slow incumbent, a thing to be disrupted and outpaced. Significance comes from building what did not exist, from the company that outlives the man as surely as Ringen hopes his well-run office will, except the founder’s monument runs on servers and the founder would find Ringen’s monument, a smoothly functioning ministry of pensions, a definition of failure.

One word. Six rooms. The same is true of the good life, of trust, of the state, of every relic on Ringen’s shelf. The values do not float free. Each makes sense only inside the system that gives a man his shot at mattering, and outside that system the word goes strange.

What does Ringen fear, then, under all of it. Becker says find the terror and you have found the spine of the hero system. Ringen has two.

The first is misrule. He opens his last book on the failures of the spring of 2020, the rich democracies that could not protect their people, the command that could not grasp the size of the thing. Under that example sits the older dread, the dread of a north that knew hunger inside living memory, the dread of the state that cannot feed or shield or hold the line, the war of all against all that Hobbes named and Scandinavia escaped late and barely. Ringen’s whole science is a wall built against this terror. Statecraft, his word for the skilled use of power that no rulebook can fully capture, is the craft of keeping the dark out.

The second terror is the wasted life. The man who frets his years away under liberty as license, who never becomes anything, who reaches the end unformed. This is the parish dread in modern dress, the soul that comes to nothing, transposed from sin to self-development. Ringen wants the state to save a man from this end the way the church once promised to, by handing him the conditions and the nudge and, where needed, the gentle force, so that he climbs the ladder he would have climbed had he known his own good.

Here the rare shape of his hero system shows itself. The climber, the preacher, the cadre, the founder all keep a hero at the center, a man who counts by rising above other men, by faith, by sacrifice, by building. Ringen’s system treats the towering individual as a hazard. The charismatic leader, the great man, the populist who stands against the state elite, these are to him the weather of failure, the signs that the smooth thing has cracked. His sacred is the boring center, the trusted office, the committee that runs the same on Monday as it ran before the minister was born. He wants symbolic immortality not in a statue but in an institution, in a body of work read as instruction by people he will never meet, a manual for keeping the dark out after he is gone. The man who spent a career explaining how free men can be governed well wants, at the last, to be survived by the governing, not by the name.

That is the cost hidden in the relic. A church that becomes a welfare office keeps the care and loses the throne. Ringen’s state can clear the room and guard it and warm it, and it cannot tell a man what the room is for, because the answer to that question left when God did, and the office that inherited the parish books did not inherit the pulpit. He measures trust and freedom and the good life with the confidence of a man reading off the plain world, and the world he reads off is the north after the subtraction, the disenchanted floor that feels to him like the only floor there is. The climber on his wall, the preacher at his tomb, the cadre at his altar, the kiosk owner with his cousin, the founder with his chain, each stands on a floor of his own and reads off it with the same confidence. None of them can see the scaffolding under his own feet. That blindness is not a flaw in Ringen. It is the price of admission to any hero system, the thing that lets a man stop trembling long enough to work. He has built, out of a Lutheran childhood and a civil servant’s hands and forty years of patient measurement, a cathedral of administration, and he prays in it the way a man prays who no longer remembers the building was ever a church.

Neutral Weight: Ringen and the Death in Power

Most of mankind has treated power as the holiest and most terrible thing in the world. The king’s touch healed the sick. The tyrant’s name could not be spoken without a glance over the shoulder. Men have knelt before it and killed for it and fled to the desert to be rid of it, and they have given it the names they gave their gods. Ringen looks at the same thing and sees weight. Power, he writes, is the capacity to make a decision stick, the raw ability of a state to throw its bulk and have the throw land. It carries no morality in itself. It sits there, inert, like water behind a dam, and the only question worth asking is how a man channels it. He draws a clean line between power and the use of power and puts all the value on the second. Power is neutral. Statecraft is sacred. The political scientist who spent a life on the use of power begins by draining the thing of every charge it ever carried.

Four kinds of men hear it, and each breaks Ringen’s neutrality in a different place.

A sage sits in a bare hut on a mountain and has put power down. He had it once, an office, a seal, men who waited on his word, and he walked away from all of it, and he did not walk away out of weakness. He walked away because he came to see what the gripping costs. He keeps an old book and its hard sayings, that the rigid and the strong keep company with death and the soft and yielding keep company with life, that water owns no power and wears the mountain to sand. “The man who takes up the sword cuts his own hand on it,” he says, and he says it without regret. “I stopped reaching. What reaches is always afraid.” For the sage power is not neutral weight but a danger to the soul that holds it, a thing that grips back, and the freedom he sought lay in the one act Ringen never considers, the setting of it down. His renunciation is its own denial of death, a claim to step out of the whole anxious game of accumulation and find in the letting-go the permanence the powerful chase and never reach.

A raider works a deal in a glass tower and worships the thing the sage threw away. He buys companies men spent their lives building and breaks them for the parts, and he does it with a joy he does not trouble to hide. To him power is the only honest thing in any room, the truth under the manners, the thing every soft word is reaching toward while it pretends to reach for something else. “A company is not a thing you build,” he says, watching the tape. “It is a thing you take. Everyone at this table wants what I want. I am the only one who says it out loud and goes and gets it.” He feels most alive in the taking, largest in the moment another man’s work passes into his hand, and Becker would name the feeling at once. The raider is piling life against the dark, proving with each acquisition that he is the kind of man death waits longer for. Power is not weight to him. It is the blood in his mouth, the closest thing to immortality a market offers.

A man in a white shirt stands in a road and faces a line of police, and he holds no power at all, and that is the whole of his power. He will not strike and he will not run. He has worked out, with a cold clarity that the warlord would recognize as strategy, that his emptiness of force is a force the armed man cannot answer. Hit an unarmed man who will not lift a hand and the watching world turns against the hand that struck. “You have all the force,” he says to the officer over the shield, not unkindly, “and I have all the strength. Use what you have and you give me more of what I have.” His powerlessness is a weapon honed against the conscience of the powerful, a moral judo that throws the strong man with his own weight. For him power inverts. The empty hand defeats the full one. Ringen’s neutral capacity to make a decision stick meets, in the road, a man who has built a life out of making the decision refuse to stick no matter how hard it lands.

A woman moves through a salon and has never held an office in her life. She rearranged the place cards before the guests arrived, and by the end of the evening three decisions will have been made that she wanted made, and every man who made them will believe the thought was his own. She wields what she does not possess. Authority sits with the men at the head of the table, and the men at the head of the table do, in the end, what she has made them want to do. “Power,” she says later, amused, taking off an earring, “is for people who have to be seen holding it. I have never needed to hold a thing in my life. I only need a man to believe he reached for it himself.” She breaks the neutrality from a fourth side. Power for her runs through no formal channel Ringen could measure, leaves no fingerprint on any decision, and moves the world all the same. The political scientist counts the weight a state can throw and misses the woman who never throws anything and bends the throwers.

Set Ringen back among the four. The sage who put it down, the raider who adores it, the empty-handed man who turns it inside out, the charmer who works without it, all of them know power as a charged and living thing, holy or accursed or intoxicating or sly, the very substance of who lives large and who dies small. Ringen alone treats it as plumbing. And here is the strange achievement and the strange blindness together. His neutrality is a real feat of the mind. Cool, he can analyze power the way an engineer analyzes water pressure, trace its flows, design the channels, see clearly where the warlord and the worshipper are too dazzled to see at all. The disenchantment buys him clarity. It costs him the thing under the clarity. He can tell you how power is channeled and not why a man would rather rule than live, why another would walk into the desert to be free of it, why a third would die rather than wield it, why a fourth would spend her whole gift moving men who never know they were moved. To Ringen these are noise. To Becker they are the signal, the four directions in which the human animal runs from its own death, and power is the road they all run on.

Ringen could call power neutral because his north had made it behave. For a few generations, in a few quiet rich places, the holy and terrible thing was plumbed into institutions, metered, made to flow through courts and offices where it no longer bit the hand. He looked at the domesticated thing and mistook the leash for the animal. The sage and the raider and the empty-handed man and the charmer were looking at the animal. They knew what Ringen forgot, that power is made of death, that it is the currency in which men buy the feeling of not dying, and that nothing made of death is ever neutral for long. Let the institutions thin and the metered flow finds the old channels, and power stands up again as what it always was, charged, adored, fled from, lethal, and Ringen’s serene instrumentalism has no word for the thing once it stops behaving. He wrote the clearest account of how to channel power and went deaf to what power is. For the man who studied it most coolly, it was weight. For everyone who ever wanted it or feared it or threw it down, it was the nearest a creature comes to feeling that the grave has lost his address.

By What Right: Ringen and the Grounds of Obedience

Legitimacy sleeps until it is refused. A man obeys all day without a thought, pays the tax, stops at the light, files the form, and the authority over him stays invisible, the way a floor stays invisible until it cracks. Then one day a man says no. He stands in the road and asks the oldest question a ruler can be asked. By what right. And the authority, which a moment before had no need to speak, must now produce its warrant or fall. The warrant it produces tells you everything about the world it lives in.

Stein Ringen has an answer to the question, and he gives it the way a man gives an answer he has never doubted. Authority earns the right to be obeyed, he says, by two things together. It performs. It keeps the dark out, runs the hospital, pays the pension, protects the citizen from power and want and the man next door. And the citizen consents, sees the office as deserving of his obedience, trusts it enough to be bound by it. Performance and consent. Earned, not given. Held only so long as the earning holds. To Ringen this is not one theory of legitimacy among many. It is what legitimacy is, the plain adult sense of the word, the thing every other answer is a childish or a brutal approximation of. That certainty is the tell. Ernest Becker taught that a man cannot see the floor he stands on, because the floor is what lets him stand at all.

Becker’s whole account turns on the question under the question. Why should a man obey an order outside himself, bend his short life to a thing that will outlast him. Because the order claims to be larger than his death. That is what legitimacy is, down where Becker dug. It is an order’s claim on the living, its assertion that it transcends the man it commands and so may command him. The crown, the altar, the constitution, the tally, each says the same thing in its own grammar: this is bigger than you, older than you, it will stand when you are gone, and that is why you must bow to it now. Legitimacy is a death-denial worn as a right. And defiance, the man in the road saying no, is the order’s small taste of its own mortality, the moment it must show it deserves to bind a life it cannot give back.

Watch the warrants come out, one room at a time.

A man refuses a king. Not a reigning king, because reigning kings have armies, but a pretender, the heir of a house that lost its throne three governments ago, holding court at a corner table in a hotel that has seen better decades. He keeps the genealogy in a leather folder, the line drawn back nine hundred years in a clerk’s careful hand. The young journalist across the table asks him, not unkindly, why anyone should follow him now. The pretender does not raise his voice. He turns the signet ring on his finger. “You ask what I have done to deserve it,” he says. “That is the question of a shopkeeper. I have done nothing. I was born to it. A man does not earn his blood. He carries it.” For him legitimacy is descent, a thing that runs in the veins and cannot be won or lost by performance, and Ringen’s earned authority would strike him as a tradesman’s counterfeit, a thing for sale, here today and audited away tomorrow.

A soldier hesitates before a colonel. The colonel sits in the presidential palace he took at dawn, the radio station already broadcasting his voice across the country, the medals on his chest awarded by his own hand the week before. The soldier asks, carefully, by what authority the colonel now governs. The colonel does not reach for a folder. He walks to the window and points at the tanks parked across the square, their engines warm. “There,” he says. “That is the authority. The palace is mine. The radio is mine. The capital is mine. When the other man holds them, the authority will be his.” For the colonel legitimacy is whoever stands on the ground when the shooting stops, a fact written in fuel and steel, and Ringen’s talk of consent would sound to him like a luxury for countries that have forgotten what holds them together.

A young priest questions a bishop. They are in the sacristy, the vestments laid out, the chrism in its silver. The young man has read his history and knows the bishop was a politician before he was a saint. He asks how a man of such ordinary cloth came to speak for heaven. The bishop is not offended. He takes the young priest’s hands in his own. “These hands were laid on me by hands that were laid on by hands,” he says, “back and back, an unbroken line, to the hands of the Apostles, and on them the hand of the Lord. My voice is nothing. The line is everything. No election made me and no failure unmakes me, because the thing that ordained me does not poll the living.” For the bishop legitimacy descends from outside time, conferred by touch along a chain that men cannot break and votes cannot reach, and Ringen’s survey of public trust would seem to him a way of asking the sheep to ordain the shepherd.

A challenger climbs into the ring. Here there are no words at all, which is the point. The champion has worn the belt two years and calls himself the best, and the only court that hears the appeal is the canvas. Twelve rounds, and the belt comes off one shoulder and goes onto another, and the new man holds it up in the light, and that is the whole of the proceeding. Legitimacy in the fighter’s world is the win, taken from the body of the last man to hold it, defended until it is taken back, a title that no lineage and no ballot and no committee can confer or protect. “You want it,” the new champion says into the camera, blood in his teeth, “you come and take it. That’s the only judge there is.” Ringen’s earned authority is closer to this than he would like, except Ringen wants the earning measured in outcomes and trust, slow and bloodless, and the fighter wants it measured in the only ledger that cannot be cooked.

A man disputes a count. He stands in a school gymnasium turned polling place, folding tables under the basketball hoops, sealed bags of ballots, a chain-of-custody log filled out in three colors of ink, bad coffee going cold in a paper cup. He does not like the result and he says so to the clerk, a tired woman in a lanyard who has worked elections for thirty years. She does not argue about who deserved to win. “It is legitimate,” she says, “because the seal was not broken and the count was right and every step is in this book. I do not care who you wanted. I care that the procedure held.” For the clerk legitimacy is the integrity of the process, the warrant written in the unbroken seal, and she would tell Ringen to his face that his outcomes and his trust are beside the point, that a government is legitimate when it was chosen by the rules whether or not it performs, and that performance is a separate question for a separate day.

A woman watches a number fall. She built a following of forty million, and her authority is the following, the count beneath her name that ticks in real time on the screen propped against the ring light. Today it is ticking down. A thing she said has turned the crowd, and the legitimacy bleeds out of her in front of her eyes, ten thousand an hour, because her right to speak was never anything but the crowd’s love and the crowd is leaving. “They follow me because they choose to,” she had said in better days. “No senator can say that. No bishop. Forty million people woke up and picked me.” For her legitimacy is the gift of the crowd, charisma made countable, the purest consent and the most fragile, granted by the many and revocable by the many in an afternoon. Ringen wants consent too, but he wants it settled and slow, banked in institutions, and her consent is weather.

Now set Ringen back among them. The citizen asks him the question in the road. By what right. And Ringen points, not at blood or steel or the apostolic line or the belt or the seal or the count of followers, but at the train that ran on time and the surgery that did not bankrupt the family and the pension statement that told a man what he had earned and how the figure was reached, and then at the survey that says most people, asked quietly, still trust the office to do its work. Performance and consent. The warrant is the outcome and the trust the outcome buys. It is a real answer, a serious one, the answer of a man who watched a poor north grow decent and wanted to know what made the difference and refused to call it luck. Inside his hero system, the disenchanted competent north where the welfare office took up the burden the parish set down, it is the only answer that does not embarrass a grown man.

Every warrant but Ringen’s claims permanence. The blood does not thin with a bad harvest. The apostolic line is not broken by a wicked bishop. The colonel’s steel is a fact while it lasts and asks nothing of tomorrow. The seal is valid or it is not, once, forever. Even the fighter holds the belt until the next bell, certain in the meantime. Ringen alone has built a legitimacy that must be re-earned every morning or forfeit. Performance is a verb. An authority that lives by performance lives on probation, and the probation never ends. He calls this the mature kind, the honest kind, the legitimacy that does not hide behind a crown or a god, and by his own light he is right. But Becker would name the price. The order that grounds its right to bind you in this year’s results is an order living in full view of its own death, an order that has agreed, in advance, that it could lose the right to command you and deserve to. The king never wonders in the night whether he is still king. The bishop does not poll his diocese to learn if he still speaks for heaven. Ringen’s state wonders every morning. It wakes, and checks the trains, and checks the wards, and checks the survey, and only then, if the numbers hold, does it dare to ask the man in the road to obey. The bravest legitimacy is the one that knows it can die. It is also the most afraid.

What It Costs to Kneel: Ringen and the Obedience of Free Men

Kant left a hard joke at the door of modern politics. Even a nation of devils could build a workable state, he wrote, if the devils had sense, because the trick of government is not to make men good but to get self-seeking creatures to obey rules they did not write and might not like. Ringen took the joke for a title and the problem for a life. Nation of Devils asks the question under every government, the one that survives the fall of kings and the rise of parliaments alike. How do you get a free man to obey. Not a slave, not a subject, not a child, but a grown man who knows his own mind and could in principle refuse. Ringen wants the obedience and he wants the freedom kept whole, and he believes the two can live together, that a state can be obeyed by men who remain free because they judge it worth obeying. He calls this the willing compliance of free men, and he treats it as the natural fruit of a decent order.

Ernest Becker would tell him to look at what obedience has cost everyone else.

Becker’s reading of the human animal starts with a body that knows it will die and a will that cannot bear the knowledge alone. So the man hands the weight to something larger. He folds his small mortal life into a thing that promises to outlast him, a flag, a faith, a leader, an order, and in the folding he buys a portion of significance and sets down a portion of his dread. Obedience is the act of folding. To obey is to say, this thing is bigger than I am and will stand when I am gone, and I will give it part of myself so that I may belong to what does not die. The surrender is the price of the rescue. Every hero system runs the transaction, and the size of the surrender tells you how much terror the man needed to set down. Watch what each kind of obedient man gives up, and watch the posture his body takes when he gives it.

A soldier raises his right hand. The words are old and he says them into a room that smells of floor wax and other men’s nerves. He swears. The oath does not bind him to a salary or a season. It binds him to carry an order he may not understand, into a place he may not return from, for a thing that will outlive him, the regiment, the flag, the dead who swore the same words before him. A sergeant tells the new ones what the oath means in plain speech. “You do not have to understand the order,” he says. “You have to carry it out.” The soldier gives his body and the years it has left, and in exchange he joins something deathless, a line of the fallen that the living are sworn to deserve. His posture is the salute, the body snapped straight, the hand to the brow, the will offered up in a gesture older than the country it serves. The cost of his obedience is everything, paid in advance.

A monk wakes in the dark. The bell goes at an hour that has no business being an hour, and he rises because the Rule says rise, and the Rule does not consult him. He chose this once, walked through the gate of his own free will, and the choice he made was to stop making choices, to hand his will to the abbot as to God and be done with the exhausting freedom of wanting things. The novice master told him the bargain on the first day. “The Rule does not ask your opinion,” he said. “It asks your obedience, and in the obedience you will find the freedom you came here for.” His posture is the prostration, the full length of the body laid on cold stone, the self pressed flat. He gives his will, the whole of it, and what he buys is release from the burden of being the author of his own days. The freest act of his life was the one that ended his freedom, and he calls the ending peace.

A convert turns toward a city he has never seen and puts his forehead on the floor. The word for his faith means submission, and he means it with his body five times a day, the kneeling, the bowing, the brow to the mat until the skin of it darkens with the years. He gives up the old self, sometimes the old name, the old appetites, the man he was before the surrender. “When I say the words and go down,” he says, “I am not asking for anything. I am submitting. That is the meaning of the word, the whole of it.” His posture is the prayer itself, the drilled and daily fold of the body toward the one thing he holds above all things. He gives his autonomy to a will he reads as higher than his own, and the gift returns to him as certainty, a place in an order that the grave cannot cancel.

A child says why, and is answered. The answer is not an argument. “Because I said so.” The child obeys before he can weigh whether to, obeys out of need and love and a little fear, obeys because the large warm person who holds him is the first and only god he knows, the one who feeds him and frightens away the dark and stands between him and the nothing he cannot yet name. Becker found the root of all later obedience here, in the nursery, in the transference of a small creature’s terror onto a parent who seems able to hold it. The child gives his judgment, which he does not yet have, and takes in return the feeling that someone larger has the world in hand. His posture is the upturned face. Every oath and vow and prayer that comes after is a grown man reaching back for that face, for the someone larger who will hold what he cannot hold himself.

A prisoner stands for the count. The lights come up, the steel doors, the line on the painted floor, the number called and answered. He obeys the timetable to the minute, eats when told, walks where pointed, and none of it is consent. The wall extracts his obedience the way gravity extracts a falling body’s speed. He gives his body to the institution because the institution holds the only door, and he gives nothing else, not an inch of the inside of him. “I stand for the count because the door is steel,” he says. “In here,” and he taps his chest, “I bow to nothing.” His posture is the shuffle and the still face, the compliance of the muscles over a will that has withdrawn entirely. He shows the floor beneath obedience, the place where it stops being a gift and becomes mere physics, and he shows, by contrast, what all the others were giving that he refuses to give. The soldier and the monk and the convert hand over the inside. The prisoner hands over only the outside and keeps the inside like contraband.

Now Ringen’s free man. He sits at a desk in a quiet country and obeys his state. He pays the tax, and the paying is a click, a button on a screen that says submit and means nothing by the word. He stops at the light on an empty road at midnight. He files the form, registers the birth, keeps to the speed of the school zone. His obedience asks no oath and no vow, breaks no body, demands no surrender of the self, requires none of the child’s blind trust. He gives a slice of his income and a habit of deference, and he keeps, in his back pocket, the right to vote the whole arrangement out at the next election and obey different men by spring. “I pay because it works,” he says, “and because I can throw them out if it stops working. That is the deal.” He does not kneel. There is no posture for what he does, no gesture the body learns, because the body is barely present. He obeys sitting down. Ringen looks at this man and sees the summit of political history, obedience drained of domination, compliance without the crushed will, the devils governed and still free. By his own light he is right, and the lightness is real, and it is new. Three or four generations old, in a handful of rich and peaceable places, this freak of the human record, the obedience that costs almost nothing.

Becker would not deny the lightness. He would weigh it. The soldier hands his dread to the flag and the regiment of the dead. The monk hands it to the Rule and the God behind the abbot. The convert lays it on the floor five times a day and rises lighter. Even the child, reaching up, gives his terror to a face that seems to hold the world. The whole point of obedience, down where Becker dug, is the handing-over, the transfer of a weight no single man can carry to a thing that promises to carry it. Ringen’s free man hands over almost nothing. He keeps his judgment, keeps his exit, keeps the inside of him entire, gives only the click and the slice of income and the midnight stop. And what he keeps is also what he is left alone with. The order he obeys is too light to take his dread. It runs the trains and pays the pension and asks his deference and does not pretend to be larger than his death, because it has agreed, in the modern bargain, to be only a useful thing he could vote away. A man cannot lose himself in a useful thing. He cannot fold his finitude into a button marked submit. Ringen built the gentlest yoke in the history of rule, a yoke so light the neck under it stays free, and he counted the gift and missed the cost, which is paid in another currency in another place. The free man obeys lightly and carries his own death on his own back, unrescued, because he has kept too much of himself to hand any of it away. The willing compliance of free men is the proudest obedience ever devised. It is also the loneliest, and the loneliness is the part of the bill that comes due in the dark, where no state was ever built to follow.

The Wall You Stop Seeing: Ringen and the Shapes of Order

Every people fears the same thing and gives it a different face. The night. The flood. The war of each against each. Rot. The formless, the place where the line blurs and a man cannot tell inside from outside or clean from unclean or his own hand from the dark. And every people, having looked at the thing once, builds a wall against it and calls the wall order. The wall is the first work of any culture, older than law, older than the gods who come later to guard it. A man cannot live trembling. He draws a line, names one side cosmos and the other chaos, and steps inside the line so that he can stop shaking long enough to plant a field or raise a child or sleep.

Ernest Becker built his account of culture on that trembling. The human animal knows it will die and knows, under the knowing, something worse, that existence has no given shape, that the order he sees might be a thin skin over a formlessness that would swallow him. So he makes meaning the way other animals make nests, out of dread and necessity. Culture is the wall, the imposed order, the structure of roles and rules and rituals that holds the void at arm’s length and lets a creature who should be paralyzed get up and work. To live inside an order is to live inside a meaning that keeps the dark on the far side. The question Becker leaves on the table is the one worth carrying through every room. What is on the other side of your wall, and do you still look at it.

Ringen names order the wall against chaos and the condition of every good life. He means it without metaphor. Strip the order from a place and nothing else he values can stand. No freedom, because the unprotected man is not free but prey. No good life, because a man cannot plan a life he cannot count on living. No trust, because trust is only the habit of expecting tomorrow to keep faith with today. Order comes first, the predictable state, the rule of law, the police who answer, the courts that decide, the quiet machinery that lets a man leave his door and expect to find his home as he left it. Ringen watched a poor and frightened north grow into a place where this could be taken for granted, and he spent a life trying to name what held the wall up, and he refused to call it luck. Order, for him, is the floor under the good life, and a good government is the thing that keeps the floor from cracking.

He is right that it comes first. He is right about the dark on the other side. What the other builders of walls can teach him is that his wall is made of a strange new material, and that he has built it so well it has begun to disappear.

A Brahmin tends a fire before dawn. The altar is laid to the inch, the ghee measured, the wood set in the pattern the texts command, and he speaks the syllables in the exact pitch his father taught him and his father’s father taught his father, back past memory. He believes, and his belief is older than belief, that the order of the world rests on the order of the rite. Get the syllable wrong and the rain holds back. Skip the offering and the year goes crooked. The cosmos for him is not a fact but an achievement, a thing held in place each morning by men who keep the measure, and chaos is what leaks in the instant the measure slips. “The fire does not forgive an error,” he says, feeding it. “What I do here holds the world together. If I am careless, the world is careless with us.” His wall is woven of repetition and exactness, and the dark behind it is the unraveling of everything, the slide back into the formless that the gods themselves obey the order to prevent.

A kitchen comes up to service. The chef stands at the pass, the tickets begin to rail, and the brigade snaps into the shape that took years to drill, every man to his station, the mise en place laid out like a surgeon’s tray. The order here is hierarchy and preparation, the chain that runs from the chef’s call to the youngest hands on garnish, and the word that holds it is two syllables answered without thought. “Yes, chef.” Then the rush comes, the tickets stack, a man falls behind, and the word for the chaos is old kitchen slang. They are in the weeds. The chef does not philosophize. “The line holds or the night dies,” he says, expediting. “There is no third thing.” His wall is the brigade and the prep and the call-and-answer, and the dark behind it is the collapse of service, the eighty-six, the dining room turning while the kitchen drowns, the small nightly proof that order is a thing you stand up fresh every evening and that it falls the moment the chain breaks.

A market settles a price. There is no chef here, no priest, no one at the pass, and that absence is the whole of the order. Ten thousand choices made by ten thousand strangers who never meet, the bids and the offers, the shouting or the silent flicker of a screen, and out of the noise comes a number that no committee set and no minister could improve. The man who works the market loves the order precisely because no one built it. “Nobody runs this,” he says, and he says it the way the priest speaks of the gods. “That is not the flaw. That is the order. A thousand men chasing their own ends, and out of it a price truer than any planner ever wrote down.” His wall is the unplanned settling-out of all those wants, and the dark behind it, for him, is the planner, the single hand that would seize the noise and freeze it into a scheme and call the freezing order while the life went out of it.

A corner keeps its law. The state quit this block a long time ago, stopped answering, stopped protecting, and into the vacuum came another order, the code, the set, the territory, the price exacted for disrespect. The young man who runs it does not think of himself as the enemy of order. He thinks of himself as its last provider where the official kind withdrew. “Out here nobody was coming,” he says. “No police that helped, no court that heard you. So we made law. You cross the set, there is a cost, and everybody knows the cost, and that is order. It is the only order this corner ever got.” His wall is respect and fear and the known price, and the dark behind it is the war of all that Ringen names, the same formless violence, held off here not by the state but by the code that grew where the state died.

A gardener works a bed. He has shaped this plot for thirty years, the espaliered pear against the south wall, the beds squared, the gravel raked, and he knows what it costs, because he fights for it every morning against a green that wants the whole of it back. Order in a garden is not a state but an act, repeated or lost. “Turn your back a week,” he says, working the secateurs, “and the bindweed has the roses by the throat. Frost takes the tender ones. The slugs take the rest. A garden is the war you wage against the world’s first wish, which is to grow over everything and rot it down.” His wall is the daily labor of pruning and weeding and watching the sky, and the dark behind it is entropy plain, the patient return of the formless that he holds off one season at a time and knows he will lose in the end, the year he cannot kneel.

Now Ringen’s wall. The citizen leaves his door and finds the street as he left it, drives to work on roads that hold, banks on a currency that means tomorrow what it meant today, falls ill and is treated and is not ruined, grows old and is paid. The order around him is total and it is silent. He does not perform it. He speaks no syllable to keep it standing, answers no call, exacts no price, fights no morning war against the weed. He does not even see it. That is the measure of its success. Ringen would say so himself, that a man notices order only when it fails, that good government is the floor he forgets he is standing on. The wall here is so well built, so smooth, so quiet, that the citizen passes his whole life with his back to it and never turns to look at what it holds back.

This is the strange new material, and here the other builders earn their place. The priest looks at his dark every dawn and re-enacts the threat with his own hands. The chef meets the weeds every night and learns again that the line can break. The market man watches the planner at the gate. The corner lives on the edge of the war it holds off. The gardener loses ground to the green every August and so never forgets the green is there. Each of them keeps his chaos in view, and keeping it in view is what keeps the wall standing, because a wall is held up by fear of what is on the other side, and a man who can still see the dark still tends the stones. Ringen built the only order in the catalog that works by vanishing. And an order that vanishes takes the dark with it. The citizen behind the perfect wall forgets there was ever a war of all, forgets the north was hungry inside living memory, forgets that the floor was laid by hands and can be let go by hands. He comes to believe the order is the nature of things, a free gift of the modern air, and a man who believes that stops paying for the wall, stops drilling the brigade, votes for the men who promise he can keep the order and stop tending it. Ringen half saw this at the end. He opened his last book on the rich democracies that forgot, that could not protect their people in a plague because they had stopped believing the dark was real, that had mistaken a tended wall for a law of physics. The best order breeds its own forgetting. The forgetting thins the wall. And the dark, which never left, which was only held at arm’s length by men who kept looking at it, waits on the far side of a barrier that fewer and fewer hands remember how to mend. Ringen built the wall you stop seeing. He did not reckon with the cost of being unseen, which is that the thing it holds back becomes, to the people it shelters, a story they no longer believe.

The Craft You Cannot Bottle: Turner on the Tacit in Ringen’s Statecraft

Ringen draws a line down the middle of political science and sets power on one side and the use of power on the other. Power is the weight a state can throw. The use of power is the skill of throwing it well, the persuasion, the timing, the ear for what a people will take and what it will refuse. Influence in the world follows from the second, he says, and not from the first, and the science of power has spent a century with its eyes on the weight and its back to the throwing. He calls the skill statecraft. He treats it as the thing that separates the government that works from the government that merely spends.

Stephen Turner has a name for what Ringen has described. It is tacit knowledge, the knowing-how that runs ahead of any knowing-that, the competence a man shows in the doing and cannot lay out in full beforehand. The line runs back through Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) on knowing-how against knowing-that, through Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) and his phrase that we know more than we can tell, through Wittgenstein (1889-1951) on what it takes to follow a rule. Ringen reaches for the idea without the name. Turner has spent a career on the idea under the name, and most of that career has gone to taking it apart.

Start where the frame backs Ringen to the hilt. Turner’s first move is the regress that Wittgenstein set going. A rule does not carry its own application. To use a target, an audit, a spending plan, a written procedure, a man must know how to read it onto the case in front of him, and that knowing-how cannot be supplied by a further rule without starting the regress again. Rules run out. At the bottom of every codified system sits an uncodified judgment that makes the code mean anything at all. This is the whole of Ringen’s case against managerialism stated in a sentence he did not write. When he examined the Brown years and found large rises in public spending that bought small gains in the lives of citizens, he blamed a government that had mistaken the rulebook for the craft, that had built targets and inspectorates and central plans and believed the apparatus would govern in place of the governing. Turner’s regress says the belief was always going to fail, because the explicit apparatus rides on a tacit competence it can neither contain nor replace. The manager who trusts the metric has confused the shell for the living thing inside it. On this, the two men stand together, and a single-frame essay could stop here and call it a fit.

The fit comes apart the moment Ringen turns from critic to builder, and the coming-apart is where Turner earns his place on the page.

Turner’s deeper work, the argument of The Social Theory of Practices (1994), turns on a doubt about the very thing Ringen needs statecraft to be. Social theory likes to treat tacit knowledge as a shared possession, a common stock that a group carries in its collective body and that explains why its members act alike and read one another with ease. Turner says the inference is bad. From the observation that people in a place behave in similar ways, nothing follows about a hidden content they all hold in common. You cannot find the shared object. You cannot show that the same tacit knowledge sits in two heads, and you cannot trace how it would pass from one to another as a single thing. What you can find is individual men, each habituated by his own training, his own apprenticeship, his own years of imitation, arriving at rough functional likeness that looks from the outside like a shared mind and is nothing of the kind. The collective tacit is a ghost, a posit that does no causal work. The real tacit is personal, learned by contact, lossy in transmission, never quite the same twice.

Set that against Ringen’s Scandinavia. He rejects the easy stories. Nordic success is not geography and not national character, he says. It is the slow building of institutions, trust, the practical art of governing, the accumulated craft of a competent state. So far Turner nods. Then Ringen does what the reformer must do. He treats the craft as a body of statecraft that can be understood, set down, and carried elsewhere, and he writes the manuals that carry it, the lists of repairs for Britain and for the United States, proportional representation here, a ten-seat high court there, control of the legislative timetable, a fit-and-proper-person test for those who would hold office. Turner’s frame turns on him at this point. If statecraft is tacit in the strong sense Ringen needs against the managerialist, then it cannot be bottled. It lives in habituated officials and a long particular history, and it does not travel as doctrine. You cannot explain the Norwegian ministry into being in Athens or Sacramento any more than you can hand a man a violinist’s hands by describing how she plays. The recommendations are explicit rules proposed to install a competence that, on Ringen’s own account, no explicit rule can hold. The reformer has smuggled back the managerialism the critic threw out the door. He attacks the belief that government runs on codified procedure, and then he prescribes codified procedure to produce the uncodifiable thing.

The fit-and-proper-person test shows the bind. Ringen wants citizens governed by men who have statecraft, the tacit gift, and he wants a screen that selects for it. Turner’s account of the tacit says a screen of that sort cannot work, because the quality being screened for has no set of explicit criteria to screen by. You know the craftsman by the craft, after the fact, in the doing, and not from a form he fills out before the trial. The same trouble runs through Ringen’s late hope for leadership. He asks a people to trust leaders whose merit is a feel for the use of power, and Turner’s longer worry about expertise presses here with full weight. A tacit competence cannot show its grounds. The expert who knows more than he can tell cannot lay his reasons before the layman and win assent by argument, because the reasons live below the line of telling. So the citizen is asked to defer to a craft that cannot display itself, to trust on faith a competence that by its nature withholds its proof. For a man who wants legitimacy to rest on the citizen’s reasoned consent, the tacit character of the thing he prizes is a problem he never names.

The trust Ringen leans on takes the same damage. He treats trust as a social possession, a stock a society holds, a culture of conversation a people keeps in common, and he measures it and mourns its decline. Turner’s cut reaches the floor of this. There is no common stock to hold. There are many men with uneven, separately built habits of dealing with one another and with offices, and the appearance of a shared Scandinavian trust is read off similar conduct, not drawn from a substrate that two countries could share or one country export. The Nordic model, taken as a transferable thing, is the ghost Turner hunts. Ringen would carry it to the democracies in trouble. Turner says there is nothing of the sort to carry, only the long, local, personal work of habituation that made these particular officials in this particular place, work no manual reproduces and no summit transmits.

Ringen saw what the managerial political science of his century looked past, that governing is a skill and not a procedure, that the rule-bound state fails because rules run out, that the use of power is a craft and the weight of power is only its raw material. Turner agrees, and Turner built the apparatus that explains why Ringen is right against the managerialist. The quarrel sits one floor down, on the question of what a craft is and what can be done with the knowledge of it. Ringen the critic needs statecraft to be tacit, beyond the reach of the target and the audit. Ringen the reformer needs it to be teachable, screenable, exportable, a thing a manual can install and a test can find and a citizen can rationally trust. Turner’s account of the tacit shows he cannot hold both at full strength. The craft that escapes the rulebook escapes the reformer’s hand as well. What cannot be written down to defeat the manager cannot be written down to build the good state either. The competence Ringen loves is real, and it is his, by Turner’s measure, in the worst way for his project: it is tacit all the way through, and the tacit does not come when it is called.