Willow Ferry

Willow Ferry lies downstream of Apple City. The Town Water Works draws water from the river to supply the whole town with drinking water. Apple City’s Sewerage Office releases treated city wastewater into the same river, under an effluent permit issued by the State Environmental Agency, and in compliance with it. From Year 5 on, the Water Works has been detecting at its intake a substance above the state drinking-water standard. The residents of Willow Ferry want Apple City to explain, and to change. Apple City replies in two sentences: “Our releases comply with the permit. The residents of Willow Ferry are not residents of Apple City.”

Three things first. Whom it concerns: the residents of Willow Ferry; and the residents of Apple City, on whom the cost of an upgrade falls if a change is made. Which line: the life-substrate of Willow Ferry’s residents in their drinking water, if the exceedance reaches a harmful level. Baseline: the state drinking-water standard.

Three governments are in this matter: Apple City, which releases; Willow Ferry, which draws the water; and the Kingdom State, which issues the permit and sets the standard. There is a nearer level too: Orchard Court, the residential complex in Apple City from the second essay. A resident of the complex is in the interior of three levels at once: the complex, Apple City and the Kingdom State. That several levels have a hand in one matter is the normal state of government; this essay is about levels.

Every Level a Construct

That resident swipes her entry card to go in and out of her building every day; the entry system is the complex’s to manage, and so is the surface parking space where she keeps her car. Outside the gate, the street belongs to the city. Her line of work requires a license issued by the state. Three things, three levels of government. Orchard Court counts as a government in the series’ sense by the public decision-making and carrying-out functions it actually carries; the property-management company that serves the complex does not.

Every level is a construct. The series sets up no separate ought for levels: the five oughts of Institution Theory fall whole on every level, the complex included. Each level has its own interior, and Institution Theory says plainly how it is drawn: “those in the entanglement the construct handles, together with those its acts reach who have no way to avoid it by exiting, make up the interior.” That she is in the interior of three levels does not turn on what identity she has registered where; it turns on whether she is in the entanglement each handles, and whether the acts of each land on her. She can avoid none of the three.

The levels are both nested and overlapping. Nested: jurisdictions sit one inside another, the complex within Apple City’s, Apple City within the Kingdom State’s. Overlapping: the interior does not follow the jurisdiction; someone who lives in Willow Ferry and works in Apple City is in the interior of both towns, and, as will be seen, Willow Ferry’s residents may be in Apple City’s interior without working there at all.

The Permit Slot

Between an upper and a lower level one relation must first be stated precisely. The State Environmental Agency issues Apple City an effluent permit, and its conditions rein in what the Sewerage Office can do. What does Apple City hold in that slot? Accountability, not duty. On Accountability says: “Only a subject can hold a duty; construct and subject alike can hold accountability”; for “A duty’s source must lie inside the bearer, and a construct has no inward source,” while “Accountability’s source lies in the power that converges upon the position, and a construct can be converged.” Apple City has no law of its own; the load it holds in the permit slot comes from the power that reins it in.

In one respect this accountability does not look like accountability: it “has its source in the power that converges upon the position, binds the position, and is released by exit,” yet Apple City cannot exit the state’s permit system. On Accountability gives a close example, “A government converged by a constitutional order cannot exit unilaterally,” and says that in such cases exit has no availability, yet efficacy is present. Released by exit means that if the slot actually ends, the load is no longer held, not that there is always a way out. So what Apple City holds in the permit slot is still accountability, and whether it has been fulfilled is checked by the conditions of the permit.

So two things hang on one construct and do not stand in for each other: the ought toward its own interior, which the series addresses to it, and the accountability it holds in the slot where the level above reins it in, which comes from that level’s power. Fulfilling the second is not achieving the first. “Our releases comply with the permit” is caught at exactly this point.

Levels change one more thing: against whom the independence of a channel is checked. Institution Theory says of independence that “it is checked against the party actually questioned, and when the party questioned changes level, independence must be checked again.” The Office of the State Ombudsman takes residents’ complaints against every level of government in the state. For Apple City’s decisions it stands outside Apple City, and Apple City cannot seal it off; but if what is questioned is a permit the State Environmental Agency itself issued, the ombudsman and the Agency are both inside the state. “Independence is functional and does not require being outside the institution”; what must be checked is whether the Agency can, on its own, seal off review of itself. The same ombudsman is independent with respect to the city and must be checked again with respect to the state.

“Our Releases Comply”

Back to Apple City’s two sentences, each checked in turn. “Our releases comply with the permit.” This is the fact; it says that Apple City’s accountability in the permit slot has been fulfilled. It cannot answer three things. First, whether the line of Willow Ferry’s residents has been crossed. Institution Theory’s first ought says that an institution’s acts cross no line against any internal subject, “also those who hold no registered position at the construct yet have no way to avoid it by exiting.” The line is set by structure, and “crossing the line does not require that anyone intend it”; doing what the permit says changes nothing here: “That a demand bears the name of procedure does not prove that complying with it is within the line.”

Second, where the substance comes from. What Willow Ferry measures is an exceedance at its intake; whether it comes from Apple City’s releases the paper does not assume. That is exactly what Apple City must explain. Third, whether the permit itself was set adequately. That is the State Environmental Agency’s account. The accounts of two constructs are each checked by their own source: Apple City’s does not pass to the state because the state issued the permit, and the state’s is not closed because Apple City complied. This step is the series’ own, grounded in Institution Theory: “Nesting is only an example, not a guarantee: a layer above is not necessarily there, and if it is there it does not necessarily have this authority.” It puts it more bluntly still: “If there is a further institution above, with the corresponding authority, that layer also undertakes the guarding within its own range; but ‘there is a layer above’ cannot be a reason for this layer to be absent.”

“Not Residents”

“The residents of Willow Ferry are not residents of Apple City.” Residence is an identity within a jurisdiction; the interior is drawn not by identity but by entanglement. What Apple City releases into the river flows to Willow Ferry’s intake; the people of Willow Ferry are within the reach of its acts, and they cannot avoid it: to avoid it they would have to give up the river the town draws from, or leave their homes. So they are in Apple City’s interior, not in its jurisdiction. A jurisdiction is the stretch of ground where decisions and compulsion land; the interior is the people in the entanglement. Apple City’s ordinances do not reach Willow Ferry, and its police do not patrol there; but Apple City’s acts have arrived there.

Being in the interior does not mean being under Apple City’s management. Institution Theory says that “reach of influence is not reach of authority.” That the people of Willow Ferry are in its interior gives Apple City no authority to manage their water, fine them or make rules for them. What being in the interior adds is laid on Apple City itself: its acts cross no line against them; the channel through which it is questioned is within their reach, since the fifth ought’s “can initiate” extends to all internal subjects, “including those who hold no registered position”; and when they ask, it must answer, and answer the very matter asked. What Willow Ferry’s residents asked was where the exceedance comes from and whether Apple City will change. What Apple City answered was: we comply with the permit, and you are not residents. That answer does not answer the matter asked; what is missing is the burden of explanation.

The relation between Apple City and Willow Ferry’s residents is thin. Relational thickness is how far a construct actually organizes the lives of those in its interior, and “it counts arrangement, not harm”; Institution Theory gives the same example: “If the wastewater the mill releases ruins the livelihood downstream, that is being affected, not being arranged.” Apple City hardly arranges the lives of Willow Ferry’s residents, so the third ought scarcely reaches here; but that takes nothing from the rest: “The first and fifth oughts, the ‘not sealing the channels’ half of the fourth, and the trigger of the second do not vary with it.” Thin as the relation is, the line still may not be crossed, and a question still must be answered.

Whose task is it to write about this? Institution Theory hands “conflict among all institutions” to the Theory of the State, and itself treats only the interior of one particular construct, with possible nesting above and below. The series does not take Willow Ferry’s case as a conflict between two towns: Willow Ferry’s residents are in Apple City’s interior, the interior of one particular construct; above both towns stands the Kingdom State, and that is nesting. What goes to the Theory of the State is the state’s outward face and borders, and membership; spillover across jurisdictions within one state is taken up here. The paper does not judge whether Willow Ferry’s line was actually crossed; that turns on whether the exceedance is harmful and where it comes from, matters of fact. What it says is what each of Apple City’s two sentences fails to answer.

Who Checks Apple City?

Willow Ferry’s residents asked, and Apple City answered beside the point. Where else can they ask? Who checks Apple City? The paper answers in three steps. Step one: every government is subject to questioning, and not on the precondition that exit is hard. Apple City must be open to questioning, and so must Willow Ferry, the Kingdom State and Orchard Court; whether one can leave does not change this. Apple City’s residents can move away; moving away does not answer “where does the exceedance come from?” How Is Institution Possible, setting out the self-correction at each level, lists for the community level, where exit is easiest, that “organizers can be questioned” all the same. Exit and questioning are two things, and the first does not stand in for the second.

Step two: diagnosis level by level. The checks on a level of government can come from three places: people can leave; there are other routes outside to complain by; there are other positions inside to check. How Is Institution Possible wrote at the level of the nation-state: “Exit is constrained, so the check of voting with one’s feet fails and the check must come from elsewhere”; its conditional is that where exit cannot bear the check required and there is no independently invocable external route, then, if the member protections already undertaken are to be kept, a real and usable checking function must be kept inside. It adds at once that this is written within that case, “not as a general theorem.” The series borrows the shape of the conditional, not a general theorem; hence the diagnosis level by level, with exit and the outer layer each read for what they are.

Read Apple City. Exit: residents can move away, but moving has a cost; more to the point, exit does not answer the everyday. A patrol officer pinning someone down and cuffing him, the Tax Office freezing an account: these land before anyone could move. Moving away answers “I no longer want to be governed by this city,” not “this city pinned me down today, froze my account today.” Willow Ferry’s residents do not even have moving: move or not, the river flows on to them. External routes: the Kingdom State has them. The State Environmental Agency issues permits and monitors the river; the state courts hear appeals and suits against city decisions; the state ombudsman can call for the file, require a written explanation, issue a public report and refer a case to the state courts, but cannot itself annul or rewrite the city’s decisions. These routes exist, and a single major matter can go down them. But Apple City makes rules and carries them out every day; the state courts are distant, expensive and slow, and do not reach the everyday; the ombudsman is within reach but cannot carry the day-to-day check. These are facts of the Apple City case, not evidence that “external remedies are unavailable to cities in general.”

The threshold is now clear. It lies in conditions, not head count: holding compulsion, where neither exit nor the outer layer’s routes can carry the day-to-day check. Apple City holds compulsion, and neither exit nor the outer layer can carry the day-to-day check on it: it has reached the threshold. Here the series undertakes a statement: from the city level up, the threshold is reached. This is a normative undertaking, a practical judgment, not a factual assertion about cities in general; holding compulsion, and exit and the outer layer being unable to carry the everyday check, are its reasons and explanation, not antecedents to verify case by case beforehand. Whether a given city’s outer layer actually reaches the everyday is a fact about that city and does not change the conclusion. “The city level” is drawn by function: general local governments that make their own rules and carry out compulsion themselves are all included; Willow Ferry, with its own Town Council and mayor, making and carrying out its own rules, is included too.

You Cannot Question Yourself

Step three: why, at the threshold, powers must be separated. This step the series takes on its own account, on two legs. One is independence, which Institution Theory already has: “Questioning must be independent, and the reason is that the party under review may not monopolize the decision on whether a challenge exists and whether it is over; self-checking can be done, and does not replace the position of being questioned independently.” Apple City makes its own rules and carries out its own compulsion, and the outer layer does not reach the everyday; so checking must be placed inside Apple City, and a check placed inside must be independent of the party checked.

The other is keeping three functions apart, borrowed from the Law Series. Its third paper divides power into three: rule-making, execution and checking. Rule-making produces rules; execution brings rules down onto particular matters, and those who carry them out cannot help bringing their own deviations in; checking asks whether the first two have deviated. It says: “Three branches form the minimum closed loop for processing remainder”; take one away and the chain short-circuits somewhere. And if one person or one institution holds more than one branch, its fourth basic law, that law cannot not be questionable, is rendered nominal: “You cannot genuinely question yourself.”

Both places were set up at the scale of the nation, and borrowing them means saying which half is borrowed. The Law Series says, “In a small group, this recursion chain is short: every link can be observed by other members”; at national scale the chain is too long, and “The solution is not to lengthen the chain (that only multiplies breakpoints) but to fold the chain into a closed loop.” These two turn on scale, and the series does not borrow them. It borrows only the two reasons that do not depend on scale: take one function away and the chain short-circuits; no party can genuinely question itself. Why a level of government needs the closed loop rests not on the length of a chain but on the threshold of step two.

Put the two legs together: at the threshold, checking is placed inside the level, independent of the party checked; rule-making, execution and checking are not held by one and the same position. Holding together means one position holding the whole of two; partial participation and mutual control do not count, and what the Law Series calls “Multi-cornered balancing: the remainder of each branch is questioned by the others” needs exactly these. This is a strong claim. Where the upstream has a strong and a weak form of one point, the series takes the weak by default; the separation of powers is one place where it says outright that it takes the strong. The weak form is in How Is Institution Possible: “The separation of powers taken here is one implementation of that function, not the only one”; the strong is in the Law Series: a minimum of three, more possible.

The strong form and “no form is fixed” hold together by what is counted: functions and independent checking positions, not agencies; no constitutional form is fixed. Apple City has the City Council, the mayor with the city departments, and the City Court: three agencies; counting three agencies is not the same as checking being independent. The City Court’s judges are nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the Council; the second essay said this appointment relation must be checked and does not by itself prove capture; if the party checked can remove or suspend the checking position, no number of agencies counts. To Willow Ferry’s case: the outer layer has routes here too, but the threshold is read by level, not by case. Apple City has reached it, so a check inside Apple City must exist, and must be within Willow Ferry’s reach: one that the Sewerage Office and the mayor cannot seal off, and whose answer answers the matter asked. The paper does not design this position for Apple City; it says only that there must be one.

With The Federalist

How power is kept from collecting in one place, and how a party is kept from checking itself: The Federalist made this famous, and two of its papers bear on it, each differently. No. 47 says: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The same paper says that Montesquieu “did not mean that these departments ought to have no PARTIAL AGENCY in, or no CONTROL over, the acts of each other”; only that “where the WHOLE power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the WHOLE power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted.” Here the two run the same way: total concentration is refused, without demanding that the departments have nothing to do with each other. Holding together, in the series’ sense, is exactly the whole-against-whole kind.

No. 51 says: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others”; “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Both stand under a premise: “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” At the auxiliary layer it relies on giving each department’s people the means and the motive to resist one another; that is not the same thing as “You cannot genuinely question yourself.” And of the compound republic it says: “The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.” Control from the outer layer and separation inside are two things, not substitutes for each other; this too runs the same way. They part in that The Federalist treats the two as stacked safeguards, while the series requires the inside check on the ground that the outer layer cannot carry the day-to-day; requiring it from the city level up is the series’ normative undertaking, and does not wait on checking each city’s outer layer.

The paper drafts the strongest objection on behalf of No. 51: count only functions and ignore people’s motives, and the separation of powers is a boundary on paper; unless each department’s people have the means and the motive to resist encroachment, the checking position will sooner or later be swallowed. The reply: the half about means is just what Institution Theory’s independence speaks of; independence is such that “what it guards against is the party under review sealing off review of itself on its own”; a checking position that the party checked can abolish, restaff or defund is not independent. They part only on motives: the series writes no motives into people and counts on no one’s ambition; it puts that half in channels that those inside can reach and use without retaliation. The objection has its weight: the series does not vouch that the checking position will never be swallowed. It gives a criterion: once independence is gone, there must be explanation and correction; a channel fallen into the hands of the party questioned is capture, which the sixth essay takes up.

The Complex

The Orchard Court covenant was passed by the owners’ assembly in Year 3. The second essay used its clause on arrears: a household six months in arrears on the management fee is fined monthly and loses the clubhouse and the surface parking; the owners’ committee decides, and the property-management company carries it out on instruction. How the six months are counted, how much the monthly fine is, from what day use is suspended, are set in detailed rules made by the committee. A household that objects makes representations to the committee, and the committee hears them. It can sue the committee in the City Court, but needs a lawyer, and a first-instance case usually takes a year. Whom it concerns: the households in arrears; the other owners. Which line: fines and the suspension of clubhouse and parking act on facilities and property that may be agreed upon: within the line. Baseline: owners who pay on time.

Take the three steps. Step one needs little comment: the complex is subject to questioning, and owners being able to sell and move does not exempt it. Step two, diagnosis. Holding compulsion: fines and suspensions are decided by the committee and carried out by the company, passing through no position outside the complex from start to finish; when the complex enforces its own covenant, the fines and suspensions are compulsion it holds. The outer layer: when the complex enforces itself, the outer layer’s check is not in each act of enforcement; what is left is the route after the fact, a lawyer and a year’s wait, which cannot carry the day-to-day check on a fine that grows monthly and a parking space stopped today. Exit: selling takes time and needs the committee’s written consent, and does not answer a space stopped today. All three are present: the complex is at the threshold. This too is the series’ normative undertaking: enforcing its own covenant is the normative trigger; a complex that enforces its own covenant reaches the threshold, one that does not, does not. The outer layer and exit being unable to carry the check are its reasons and explanation; the year-long suit and the consent to sell are facts of this case that explain it.

Step three: see whose hands the three are in. The covenant was passed by the owners’ assembly, so part of rule-making lies elsewhere; but the detailed rules for enforcement are made by the committee, the measures are taken by the committee, and representations are heard by the committee too. If a household says “I already paid last month,” the one who hears it is the one fining that household. That is what “You cannot genuinely question yourself” looks like. That the complex is small and its people can see each other does not stand in for that position. What must be separated is functions, not agencies: the position that hears representations must not be the one that took the measure, and the committee must be unable to seal it off; making the detailed rules and taking the measures are not to be held by one position either, since the rules set how much is fined and from what day, and if those who set them are those who fine, rule-making and execution are in one hand. How to separate them, whether the assembly elects a few others or something else, the paper does not fix.

The property-management company’s position must be stated precisely. When it fines and suspends under the covenant on the committee’s instructions, that counts as the complex enforcing itself: those who write the fines and stop the spaces are the company’s staff, and the act traces back to their invoking the covenant and the instructions, with the complex as its address of attribution; as Institution Theory says, “the construct’s acts can be traced back to their invocation by particular nodes.” In between, the company is a construct acting on commission, holding its own accountability toward the complex, and does not answer to the households in the complex’s place. So one cannot say “the fine was written by the property-management company and has nothing to do with the owners’ committee,” nor, the other way, count the company as a fourth level of government. Now a branch: suppose the covenant provided that fines could be enforced only by the committee suing and the City Court giving judgment. The outer layer’s check would then be in every act of enforcement, and that item could be weaker; but if suspending the clubhouse and parking were still done by the committee itself, that item would still be at the threshold. The threshold is read item by item.

Two things are set beside it for contrast. The community level in How Is Institution Possible has as its conditions voluntary entry, frictionless exit and almost no coercive power, and so its institution is very thin; Orchard Court is often called a community too, but one moves in by buying a home and leaves by selling it, and it enforces fines and suspensions itself; sharing a name does not inherit the thinness. The same paper says of the early start-up that “five people do not need four-branch separation,” a sentence that speaks by head count; the series’ threshold does not count heads: a complex of a few dozen households that enforces its own fines reaches the threshold, an owners’ body of thousands that holds no compulsion at all does not. That paper has another sentence that puts it more exactly: “A construct’s scale cannot by itself fix the necessary number and granularity of its institutional provisions.” A last sentence: the separation of powers may weaken with conditions; being open to questioning does not.

Can One Leave?

If that resident dislikes the complex’s covenant, she can sell and move, but selling needs the committee’s consent; if she dislikes Apple City, she can move to Willow Ferry; if she dislikes the Kingdom State, she must leave the state, at greater cost. Exit is a check: where people can leave, a construct cannot do as it pleases. But how much it can carry differs from level to level.

The conditional from How Is Institution Possible was borrowed above. The paper extends it to every level, at two points. One is scale: from the nation-state case to every level of government. The other is the antecedent: that sentence speaks of member protections already undertaken; the series draws the interior by entanglement, not by membership, and a government always carries the guarantee of the recognition-based rights it has embedded, so for a government that “if” is always met. Both steps are the series’ own; each level’s exit and external routes are still read as they actually are.

The Law Series’ third paper states plainly how exit stands to law: “Exit is a condition of law’s existence”; where there is exit, law is thin, since exit is itself a counter; where there is none, law must be thick; “The thickness of law is a function of the degree to which exit is absent.” This reading was set up at national scale; extending it to every level is the series’ own step, resting on two things. Those sentences stand on exit, not on scale. And the Law Series itself carries it beyond the nation: it says a closed node such as a generation ship still reproduces the logic of national law, because “The variable of the parabola is exit, not era”; and its reading is that “Exit cost is the primary variable; relational density is the modulator.” Head count is not among its variables. Each level’s exit is read as it is: for the complex, selling and moving; for the city, moving; for the state, leaving the state; what this reads is the thickness of law, not the threshold for separating powers, which is read by level under the undertaking above. And there are people with no exit at all from a given level: Willow Ferry’s residents with respect to Apple City. For them the check on Apple City can come from two places only, the state outside and the checking position inside that they can reach.

One more point must be made clear: the thickness of law is not relational thickness. The Law Series’ thickness of law measures how thick rules, institutions and the structures of questioning must be; How Is Institution Possible has a thickness of provisions and a thickness of accountability, which that paper itself says are not the same explanandum; Institution Theory’s relational thickness is how far a construct actually organizes the lives of those in its interior. The three are not run together. Willow Ferry’s residents show why: Apple City hardly arranges their lives, so the relational thickness is thin; and they can hardly exit from Apple City, so the check on it must come from elsewhere. The two can move in opposite directions.

Riverbank Park

In Year 4 the State Legislature of the Kingdom State passed a bill taking the management of Riverbank Park from Apple City’s Parks Office and placing it with the State Parks Authority, on the ground that the flood levee was being reinforced at the state’s expense. From then on the park’s opening hours, vendor permits and event approvals were all decided by the state. Whom it concerns: Apple City, as a construct; the residents who use the park. Which line: no one person’s line is involved; what is involved is which matters are the state’s common affairs and which Apple City’s local affairs, and Apple City’s capacity to handle its local affairs. Baseline: before the taking.

First, convergence must be kept apart from taking. The state issuing Apple City an effluent permit is convergence: Apple City still releases, still answers to those in its interior, and holds accountability in the permit slot. Riverbank Park is taking: those matters were lifted out of Apple City’s hands entirely. The taking is a judgment of the state. To whom it answers: to those in the state’s interior affected by it, the park’s regular users among them; Apple City’s Council and Parks Office can ask through their positions. For what it answers: what is taken, on what ground, and why it belongs at the state’s level. The state’s ground is the levee; but more than the levee was taken: opening hours, vendor permits and event approvals went with it. A ground cannot hold up a scope larger than itself. After the taking, park users who have something to ask, where they once went to a council member or the Parks Office, must now go to the State Parks Authority; whether that road is within reach is checked again, independence measured against the new party questioned.

One misreading must be headed off: that once things are taken upward, the relation grows thinner. Not so. Whether opening hours count toward relational thickness is checked separately, from the structure; whether the state or the city sets them does not change the reading. The fault of swallowing is not thinning; it lies in three places: the ground does not reach the scope taken; after the taking, those affected cannot reach a road to question it; and a place where the lower level was judging and answering has been taken away, with reasons that never speak to those matters. Nor does this mean the upper level may take nothing: some matters belong to the level above, and moving upward is not in itself swallowing. What is required is only that the taking be explained, that its ground reach the scope taken, and that afterwards the road to question it be within reach.

Alexis de Tocqueville drew the line between upper and lower in Democracy in America. He says “there exist two distinct kinds of centralization, which it is necessary to discriminate with accuracy”: “Certain interests are common to all parts of a nation, such as the enactment of its general laws and the maintenance of its foreign relations. Other interests are peculiar to certain parts of the nation; such, for instance, as the business of different townships.” Concentrating the first is centralized government; concentrating the second, centralized administration. He does not oppose the first, “I cannot conceive that a nation can enjoy a secure or prosperous existence without a powerful centralization of government”; what he opposes is the second: “a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit.” What meets this paper is the latter half: how common and local affairs are divided, and which local capacities ought not to be replaced by concentration; Riverbank Park falls exactly here, the levee looking like a common affair, vendor permits and event approvals like local ones. They part in reasons: he opposes centralized administration because it diminishes public spirit; the series derives no requirement from effects of that kind; it asks that a taking be explained and that the road to question it be within reach.

Consent to Sell

On the lower level’s side the fault is of another kind. The same covenant has another clause: an owner who sells must have the owners’ committee’s written consent, and the committee may refuse “to maintain harmony in the complex.” Whom it concerns: an owner who wants to sell. Which line: the channel of exit. Baseline: selling without anyone’s consent.

Rights Theory has drawn this line: a constraint is a limit if it “does not seal the subject’s structural channel for exiting, refusing, or revoking a standing bond”; “Whatever crosses these is violation.” It has also said what sealing is: “it is not the presence in a relation of terms, procedures, conditions, or costs of exit; it is the subject no longer holding a structural channel for refusing, revoking a standing bond, or passing into a reviewable procedure”; “a constraint may set the conditions of a standing bond, but it may not seal exit, refusal, and revocation themselves.” So consent being required is not in itself sealing; what must be checked is whether, once refused, the owner still holds a road: to sell after all, or to bring the refusal into a procedure that can review it. “To maintain harmony in the complex” gives review no standard to measure against, and the committee can refuse as it likes; if the only road out is a suit in the City Court, it means a lawyer and a year. Which side the clause falls on must be checked by what road this owner actually still has; how the cost of exit is read, the sixth essay takes up.

Here is the side that concerns levels. The owner who sells is also in Apple City’s interior and the Kingdom State’s; leaving a complex mostly means staying in the same city. The level above guarding this line within its authority is the second ought at its level. The complex cannot say “the City Court is there; owners can go and sue”; nor can Apple City say “that is the complex’s own affair.” The first uses the level above to excuse this level’s absence, the second the level below.

The paper drafts an objection: the covenant was passed by the owners’ assembly, it is the owners’ own choice, and the level above stepping in on this clause is swallowing the level below. The reply has two parts. A vote does not prove that something is within the line; as Institution Theory says, “limit and violation are decided by structure, not by motive or feeling,” and a majority of willing owners does not change the reading. And guarding the line is not swallowing. Swallowing is lifting away the position from which the lower level handles its local affairs; guarding the line is the level above, within its authority, blocking one crossing, while the rest of the covenant stays the complex’s to run. Put together, the two halves make the sentence this part of the paper arrives at: the upper level does not swallow the lower, and the lower does not seal off exit; neither level is absent on the ground that the other exists.

What Each Level Organizes

Back to that resident, this time to read which parts of her life each level organizes. The complex organizes her daily comings and goings: the card at the building door, which space the car goes in, whether the clubhouse is open to her. Apple City organizes much of what lies beyond the gate: her child attends a city primary school, and the day’s routine follows the school; the street at her door is the city’s. The Kingdom State organizes her livelihood: the license for her line of work is issued by the state, and its conditions set what she may do and how she may advance. Some things are there and are not counted: if she calls the police at night, the City Police come; the state courts are there too; not using them, she loses nothing. Institution Theory says that “conditions that carry no direction and whose refusal costs no one his position are not counted.”

This is relational thickness. Institution Theory says: “Relational thickness is how far a construct, in a given relation, actually organizes the lives of its internal subjects”; “it is read from the structure, not from the construct’s own account”; what it looks at is “how much of their time, attention, livelihood and path of development it arranges.” Read from the structure, the three levels have no fixed order: in daily time, the complex and the city organize more; in livelihood and the path of development, a license may weigh more than the whole covenant. Relational thickness is ranked neither by administrative level nor by distance; it is read as it actually is, level by level, matter by matter.

What is the reading for? Whichever level actually organizes more of her time, attention, livelihood and path of development, the third ought weighs more on that level: for what it has organized, taken up or restricted, it must correspondingly explain how room is left and provided for her. If the license’s conditions fix the only way her line of work can go, it is the state that must explain. What relational thickness does not govern must be said too: the first and fifth oughts, the not-sealing half of the fourth and the trigger of the second do not vary with it. However little the complex organizes her life, it may not seal off her road to selling; however thin Apple City’s relation to Willow Ferry’s residents, it must answer them.

What the fourth essay has said comes to this: every level of government is a construct, each with a jurisdiction and an interior, the interior drawn by entanglement; fulfilling one’s accountability to the level above is not achieving one’s ought toward one’s own interior; there is an interior beyond the jurisdiction, and reach of influence is not reach of authority; every government is open to questioning; that the threshold is reached from the city level up, and wherever a complex enforces its own covenant, is the series’ normative undertaking, not a factual claim; at the threshold checking is placed inside, and no one hand holds the three; the separation of powers may weaken with conditions, being open to questioning does not; the upper level does not swallow the lower, the lower does not seal off exit; relational thickness is read from the structure, not by rank or distance. Levels are one dimension. The other is time: when matters are urgent and judgment cannot wait for the channels to run their course, what holds as before, and what may go faster. The fifth essay takes this up.