I have tried to sum up my argument at various points along the way. Here I will do that one more time for the book as a whole, and then offer some final reflections on the somewhat besieged state of domesticated competition in the present, at the time of writing. I will not try to predict the future, but I will try to assess the state of health of liberal society, using competition as a diagnostic.
Citizens of liberal democracies live in a form of society saturated with competition. It is deeply built into our organisations, institutions, and culture. It is so integral to how we deal with social conflict, with divergent interests, that we must learn how to work with it, with critical awareness. It is not something we can abandon, or get around. Moreover, this domesticated kind of competition brings benefits, as a spur to achievement, and an alternative to more brutal forms of conflict. It can and does become dysfunctional and pathological, as many recent critics of neoliberalism and meritocracy have emphasised. But it is not a recent development, it is a perennial aspect of social relations, now highly elaborated in modern liberal society. That is why we need a realistic understanding of competition, so we can bring out its benefits, and limit its injuries.
A focus on competition provides a way of understanding what has often been called ‘the rise of the West’, linked to the historical emergence in that context of the modern nation state. I have tried to show that the institutionalisation of competition across military, economic, political, and ideological spheres is intimately tied to the development of major forms of large-scale organisations, and organisational ecologies. At the global level, states and their militaries, the ultimate political form, position themselves in the relatively ungoverned arena of geopolitics and international relations. However, this book has been primarily concerned with the institutionalisation of competition below this level, within states and their civil societies. There the emergence of the legal form of the corporation has been critical, providing the organisational infrastructure of the capitalist economy, democratic politics, and struggles over knowledge, ideology, and public opinion in the public sphere. I have targeted the modern firm, political parties, and universities as exemplars of this process, but have also shown that these develop in a wider field of organisations devoted to charitable, moral, and discursive purposes, all caught up in competition in one way or another. In all of this the underlying claim is that this complex of competition and competitive forms emerged for a reason. Domesticated competition provides a rule-governed means of allocating power and resources, while justifying those allocations at the same time. In the emerging form of liberal society, in which claims to authority based on inherited right and religious tradition were faltering and being demoted, the institutionalisation of competition provided a way to legitimate allocations of social goods. This could appear legitimate because competition seems to naturally reward native abilities, and yet also legitimate because it is a human made institution that we ourselves have created and chosen.
Because this kind of competition is basic to the structure of liberal society, to how it works, liberal culture reflects this, in effect endlessly cogitating on the competitive form through performance and ritual. We don’t just pragmatically allocate goods through competition, we glorify the form itself in all kinds of games and entertainments, that become encapsulated dramatisations, and validations, of the social order. To be received as salient, any critique of such a society must at least begin by working within its own structural and cultural terms to evaluate it. It must examine the contradictions, tensions, and implications of a competitively based society, asking where, specifically, competition goes wrong. I have argued that there are practice-specific spheres of competition, each with their own telos, and that when the boundaries between spheres are transgressed, ends are distorted and problems ensue. Moreover, if competition legitimates the social order, then at the largest extent of the state-society there must be some general balance of power among society’s members, and the array of organisational forms that give it structure, such that everyone can be ‘in the game’ on a relatively ‘level playing field’. This is not a call for equality or justice in the abstract, but rather for a practical commitment to dispersing power and opportunities widely enough that competition can genuinely adjudicate emerging distributions, rather than simply validate established concentrations of power.
I think that the argument I have made is demonstrable from the historical record, viewed from my perspective on the institutionalisation of competition. However, I have been quietly guided by the theoretical premises laid out in Chapter 2. All social life involves the constant play of power, the development of human capacities to do things, and the growth of organisational forms that are able to do greater things, generally by forming internal organisational structures and chains of command. Power over increases power to. Power becomes manifest as agency – the agency of individuals, generally invested in the agency of corporate groups with the capacity to be social actors. Broad categories of social types – races, sexes, classes – lack the capacity to concentrate power and agency, to become real actors in history: this requires organisation. The story I have told is one of a new ecology of corporate actors taking shape, as the very terms of authority and legitimation that had supported previous forms of kin-based and religious corporate actors went into decline. Such broad parallel changes in social morphology, while clearly historical processes, I think warrant the term social evolution. This helps specify the broad pattern of changes, the domestication of competition, out of the welter of historical contingency that is always with us.
There are good reasons to worry that institutionalised competition is losing its capacity to negotiate and legitimate power and authority in liberal societies (cf. Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2022). In the realm of beliefs and ideas in public discourse, an increasingly cavalier attitude towards truth prevails, signalled by terms such as ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’. To the degree that these are simply signals of contestation over the truth, there is little danger, but where they indicate a loss of confidence in the presumption of a shared underlying truth, they raise severe problems. Such a presumption provides the basic structure of a competitive ‘game’ of truth claiming, where dispute aims towards common understanding. While highly formalised methods and criteria of proof, as found in the physical and natural sciences, tend to have this basic structure ‘hardwired’ into the practice, the social sciences and humanities are less tightly bound by shared methods and rules of practice. Arguments more often rely on interpretation and subjective judgement, and at the extreme, on the ‘lived experience’ of the researcher. Some parts of the human sciences concern humans as meaning-using creatures, and so, some interpretivism is unavoidable when we want to understand motivation and social action. But this means that a commitment to a hypothesis of shared truth is even more crucial for binding this kind of science together as a practice. The more this shared ground is in doubt, the more the competition over ideas and interpretations dissolves, replaced by mere positional struggles within institutions over which discourses will dominate. In recent decades theoretical trends such as postmodernism and poststructuralism have tended towards a deep scepticism about underlying truth, which leads to a highly instrumental attitude towards truth, as being not what people make claims about, but simply the label for those truth claims that succeed in dominating beliefs. This can be a difficult distinction, but the former encodes a commitment to common understanding, to a shared ‘game’, while the latter presumes a kind of state of nature, a ‘war of all against all’.
In universities, especially in the social sciences and humanities, this divergence has played out as the increasing polarisation between an older, more ‘realist’, ‘objectivist’, and ‘naturalistic’ pursuit of true interpretations, and a newer preference for ‘social constructionism’, ‘subjectivism’, and a primary commitment to the moral messages of arguments. In the latter case research can become not so much the pursuit of truth, as the pursuit of ‘social justice’ (Haidt Reference Haidt2016). Thus, fields of study influenced by identity politics often see the purpose of research and writing as the emancipation of, or at least struggle on behalf of, various identity groups. I am not criticising political struggle as such, which is inevitable and necessary. But to the degree that universities and their various sciences become zero-sum contests over ideological supremacy and institutional turf, rather than collective, ongoing, rule-governed competitions in search of truth, they cease to be either sciences, or universities.
This divergence has its corollary in wider public discourse sustained by various modern media. In an atmosphere of deep distrust towards public truth in some quarters, with people ‘siloed’ in networks of mutually reaffirming messages about reality, and deeply distrustful of messages from outside those silos, productive public debate about truths, both material and moral, breaks down. Domesticated competition in the realm of ideas and beliefs risks devolving into a more wild, anarchic contest.
This febrile atmosphere of public debate has become associated in liberal democracies with political movements of populist distrust towards ‘elites’ and government, and the intensifying polarisation of leftward and rightward political views. The prime example at the time of writing is the US, with a two-party system in which the extremes in each constituency have a preponderant influence on the positions and policies of the parties as a whole. The ability of the system to articulate a politics of the centre, in which the aim is to shape opinion in the centre-ground, has weakened (Lilla Reference Lilla2018). Such centrism needn’t be a symptom of stifling conformism and compromise. In the sphere of democratic politics, the idea of the value of a central consensus, no matter how hard won, serves the same function as the presumption of truth in the sciences. It is the shared goal that unifies the ‘game’. Opposing views must struggle to define the centre-ground, where it lies, and to orient the wider society to it. But once this ceases to be the goal, again, the domesticated competition of democracy gives way to an all-out struggle for domination, with no holds barred. Donald Trump’s appropriation of the Republican Party, and his refusal, along with his followers, to accept the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, threatens genuine democratic competition. It denies the legitimacy of the central game of politics. The system has not failed so far, but it is under severe strain.
Capitalism has always had anticompetitive tendencies towards monopoly and oligopoly working against the dispersion of power in expanding markets. As we have seen, the modern corporation is partly a product of this tendency, as firms seek larger scopes and scales of operation, and dominant positions within markets. Successful competition in the economy leads towards anticompetitive practices on the part of those who achieve market dominance, unless counteracted by government action, the unpredictability of the market, or strategic and innovative competitors. There is a genuine tension between these contrary forces, but a central dynamic of the economy is that some corporate actors manage to concentrate power in their own hands, accumulating both power to, and power over. Without a strong separation between the powers in the economy and those of the state, and without the capacity of the latter to police the former and break up concentrations of power, the capitalist economy will tend towards control by a few major actors, and thereby stagnate. The troublingly concentrated powers of ‘Big Tech’, ‘Big Pharma’, and ‘High Finance’ are continuing evidence of this perennial problem of capitalism.
In societies which are concatenations of complex organisations, there will be multiple systems of hierarchy according to skill, expertise, and seniority. Social complexity inevitably brings a degree of inequality. Sometimes hierarchy is also due to socially privileged access to entry and promotion within those organisations, but if this were eliminated, the other principles would still create a degree of stratification, even if there are opportunities of mobility within organisations. This kind of inequality can be regulated and justified by fair structures of competition. However, to the degree that inequality does not result from the inner logic of various organisations but rather, as in the age of aristocratic rule, from an inherited status with limited opportunities for escape, the wider system is delegitimated. The tendency in capitalist liberal democracies, especially in the anglosphere, towards the concentration of great wealth in an elite at the top, relative stasis in the middle class, and a persistent and growing class of the un-, under-, and precariously employed, undermines the idea that all are engaged in the same open field of competition. Those at the top may be inclined to rationalise their success and think that all are in the same game, but to those further down this is less plausible, and it will appear that they have been summarily relegated to the minor leagues and shut out from the larger game. Although individuals can sometimes make themselves exceptions, achieving great feats of social mobility, as a general rule opportunities for such mobility, as determined by such things as family wealth and class, are maldistributed. The result of this failure to ensure the conditions of fair competition is to sow alienation from, and distrust towards, the wider society among those who feel they have been excluded.
As I have emphasised throughout, the international arena of geopolitics by its nature is less domesticated, more wild. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War allowed some to imagine a world in which globalised commerce would tie together a community of liberal democracies, and liberalism and democracy have been making steady advances. But the power of autocracy has also been consolidating, particularly in China and Russia, and some in the ‘West’ now proclaim the value of ‘illiberal democracy’, with reduced tolerance for a diversity of values and ideology, and a newfound faith in the tyranny of majorities. We may be heading towards a new ‘cold war’, with China taking the place of the USSR, and a new cast of states negotiating paths between east and west. And China’s novel combination of global capitalism and single-party rule make it a very different geopolitical rival to the West than the USSR was. As in the previous Cold War, all sides have an interest in limiting the extent of conflict, and even more this time in sustaining a global capitalist economy. Whether this geopolitical tension will reinvigorate domesticated competition within the liberal democratic sphere, or dampen it in search of internal social stability, is an open question. A deeper question is whether the marriage of internal autocratic rule with external capitalist competitiveness in the global arena, the Chinese model, is a new corporate form of the modern state that will outcompete the more haphazard model of internally competitive and dynamic liberal societies that produce enough statehood to hold things together, but often lack a strategically consistent presence in the international arena. If states are now the ultimate corporations acting in the global market, then corporate discipline may trump democracy as their organising principle.
As mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 2, general theories of social evolution, not just among humans, but among all species, grapple with the question of the boundary between a society of organisms, and an individual, internally complex organism (Birch Reference Birch2017, Bourke Reference Bourke2011). Is a colony of ants, or a coral reef, a society or a single organism? At what point does an aggregate of mutually supporting single-cell organisms transform into a single multi-celled organism? At some point in this transition co-operation and subordination displaces competition, and cells get permanently differentiated into those that reproduce (germ cells) and those that simply serve specific functions within the whole, but cannot reproduce.
In the study of human social evolution there is a corresponding problem. I emphasised in Chapter 2 that our powers of communication and language, and corresponding recognition of ‘other minds’, makes us a highly individuated species. Using social coordination to achieve greater collective power is a challenge, and the solution, forms of social organisation with authority over and legitimacy among members, is difficult to construct. Like the transition from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, the long process of transition from societies assembled out of kin groups, to one assembled out of legally constituted corporate actors, is a major transition in human social evolution, and human sociality itself. The more these new ‘bodies’, including the state, become the ultimate competitors, the more actual individuals become significant, not as competitors, but as functional components within those larger competitive beings. But if this is the case, then competition is thereby weakened as a legitimator of the distributions of social power in the given social order. The logic of social organisation will need to assign people to their place in the system and minimise internal conflict and competition. It may be that the liberal competitive society I have been talking about, with its heightened individualism, and its ability to unleash social energies while keeping their more destructive tendencies in check, has just been a passing phase on the way to new, more tightly bound forms of social organisation. Forms we associate with terms like bureaucracy and autocracy. Forms that are ultimately ‘selected’ for their competitive capacities at the level of the global economy and geopolitics, while supressing or muting competition lower down the scale. This raises a disturbing image that has permeated folk mythology, especially in science fiction – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Cybermen, the Borg, the Matrix – in which the individual is fully subordinated and subsumed in the whole.
On the other hand, there are reasons to doubt that intractable human individuality, which I have located in the nature of our species, not simply the modern era, can ever be fully reprogrammed by new forms of social organisation. Most despotic forms of rule achieve their ends not by controlling every aspect of people’s inner and outer lives, which would be too costly, but by using sanctions to define certain ‘no go’ areas, especially those that would challenge the given power structures. Individuality rumbles on, beneath the surface, in private. The idea of domesticated competition that I have explored in these pages, is about harnessing and limiting social conflict, channelling it along more productive paths, that beneficially serve a larger social order. It is about a balance, a midpoint between conflict as anarchic disorder, and a controlling order that allows no room or vent for conflict. It is about a form of society in which there is a balance of power among numerous separate spheres of competition, in which none fully dominates the others. It is about a liberal society which is not the ideal of certain philosophers, but the practical if substantially unintended achievement of average human beings. Despite the worries about our current state essayed above, I will hope that the domestication of competition can continue to serve human purposes, and maintain that delicate balance.
