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This chapter examines the politics of paternalism. It first considers the question of whether the government can do better than the individual, outlining a set of justifications for government paternalism and showing how the state can intervene to improve the well-being of its citizens. It then discusses possible ways in which the government could be held to account to ensure that, in its paternalistic interventions aimed at improving its citizens' well-being, it does actually pursue the “right” agenda. It argues that the government can indeed raise the well-being of individuals who suffer from reasoning failure, even when allowance is made for possible reasoning failure among those individuals who constitute the government. However, democratic mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that the latter do not pursue their own agenda and turn the paternalistic state into an instrument of authoritarianism.

This chapter describes the social sciences. Unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are inevitably statistical. When documenting human behavior, for example, they can at most claim that a trait is present in a certain fraction of the population. However, the social engineer of the paternalistic state must take into account that the “science of happiness” that is being implemented does not apply uniformly to all individuals. A policy that benefits some by preventing mistakes or removing their biases harms those who are immune to these issues. This difficulty, however, entirely disappears as long as the state is utilitarian or, more generally, pursues any objective that aggregates welfare between individuals, for the statistics are the only thing the utilitarian needs to know. Once the population distribution of the relevant effects and mechanisms is known, the social planner can safely use it to balance gains and losses across incarnations and perform the cost-benefit analysis of its policies.

This very brief chapter outlines a framework for the analysis in the next three chapters. The state is at the centre of this framework because it sets the rules for land ownership, use, and taxes. The key is to understand that, on land, the independent Indian state has been a paternalistic entity (sarkar mai baap), simultaneously a giver (through reforms) and a taker (through acquisition).

This chapter focuses on the rural people during and after the land reform in Cambodia in order to understand why the state's strategies are losing legitimacy among its citizens. It connects the rural people's sense that the state has abandoned them to expectations of state power molded by precolonial and socialist-era discourses of the paternalistic state. It also looks at the rapid increase in rural inequality in Cambodia's contemporary market economy. The chapter provides a view of Cambodia's post-conflict capitalist development from the ground to show how contemporary state-making projects articulate with sedimented histories and political ecologies. It cites stories that reveal an ambivalent desire for the potentiality of state-led development and gratitude to the government for delivering the country from war, while also lamenting what is being lost in the contemporary political economy.