Chapter 2. Literature: whose loss is it?

2.1Authorship

Hobbes is a primary text here, read at length in Sections 4 and 5, but his position belongs in the literature because it is the oldest and most complete answer to the question of attribution. The parent study's reading note on Leviathan says two things: that in Chapter XIII, without a common power, men are in a condition of war, and war lies not in battle only but in a tract of time in which the will to contend is known, all other time being peace; and that subjects covenant with one another to make the sovereign (Chapters XVII and XVIII). Everything beyond those two points in this article comes from reading the downloaded text directly.

What the text adds to the note is a theory of who owns the consequences: in Chapter XVII each person covenants to own and acknowledge the sovereign's acts as their own, and in Chapter XXI Hobbes draws from this that nothing the sovereign does to a subject is an injury, and that fear and liberty are consistent. The person who waits is, formally, also the person who chose.

2.2Attribution from two places

Luhmann starts from a different place. As the parent study's note gives it, Risk separates risk, a possible loss attributed to one's own decision, from danger, a possible loss attributed to something outside one's control, and holds that the same loss is a risk to the one who decides and a danger to those who are affected but did not decide. The distinction does not say which description is true. It says the description depends on where it is made from.

Set beside Hobbes, the two positions part at a precise point. Hobbes has one place of attribution: by covenant, the subject stands where the sovereign stands, and the loss is the subject's own. Luhmann has two: the decider and the affected, with no covenant that lets one stand in the other's place. Under the first, a resident waiting for an evacuation vehicle bears a loss that the resident authorised; under the second, the same resident bears a danger that someone else's decision created. The records studied here give a third possibility, examined in Sections 4 and 5: a document written from the decider's place that names the affected, lists what they will lose, and refuses to count certain losses as accepted even when the affected have consented.

2.3Emergency as an exception

Walzer's note is short: the rules on going to war and the rules on fighting it are judged apart, and a supreme emergency (his term) is his narrow, contested exception. The note says nothing about deadlines, budgets or evacuation, and this article does not put any such view in Walzer's mouth. What the note supplies is a structure: a rule, and a narrow, contested exception. Used as a test, which is this article's use and not a claim of Walzer's, that structure lets a decision record written under pressure of time be read for whether it claims an exception: whether it lets the urgency of the deadline excuse a loss that the record's own rules forbid.

Hobbes's position on emergency is different in kind. For him the sovereign is never bound by the subject's claims except as the law of nature binds the sovereign before God, so there is no ordinary rule from which an emergency could be an exception. Chapter XXI nonetheless lists liberties the subject keeps. Walzer's structure (rule and narrow exception) and Hobbes's (unlimited authority with untransferable liberties) can be laid side by side against the same records.

2.4How much the decider can command

Hobbes lists among the powers necessary to sovereignty the power of war and peace, of judicature, of appointing officers and counsellors, and of levying money. Friedberg's note describes a state that did not take all it might have: in the Cold War United States, anti-statist ideas and institutions limited what the state could take in taxes, manpower and control of industry, and defence production stayed largely in private hands. The note concerns one country in one period; it is used here only to name a contrast with the second record's committee, which has no authority to force the conversion of civilian sales.

2.5The deadline as a commitment

Schelling's note names focal points that let parties coordinate without talking, and commitments that bind the one who makes them. A fixed hour after which a schedule cannot change without loss is a commitment of a plain kind; the question here is whom else it binds.

2.6The positions side by side

The table sets out how each position would place the cost of waiting. The second column paraphrases the source (the note, or for Hobbes the text); the third and fourth apply it to a pending allocation, and are this article's.