Category: Anarchism

Albert Jay Nock on the origin of the state

In his article “Anarchist’s Progress” the writer Albert Jay Nock dryly observes that many authors have speculated about the origins and legitimacy of the State but that few of them actually bothered to investigate how states come into being and survive.

So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction; and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork; none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this-or-that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes — an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.

Nock’s observation still applies to much of what we call political philosophy. There is no shortage of ideas about what the State should do but there is little interest in what it actually does and how that might constrain what we can reasonably expect from it. Such an attitude would strike us as an odd approach in science but when the topic involves human interaction strange assumptions about the malleability of humans and institutions guide the mind.

Nock’s complete article is available here.

Analytical anarchism

The phrase ‘analytical anarchism’ is so attractive that a number of different definitions are in circulation. The most logical seems to be the one that “uses the methods of analytic philosophy to clarify or defend anarchist theory” (Wikipedia). Such a definition would include writers like Jan Narveson and Anthony de Jasay but it may not include ultra-rationalists such as Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Peter Boettke defines analytical anarchism as “the positive political economy of anarchism, or simply, anarchism from the economic point of view.” This definition is used on the new website Analytical Anarchism, which contains an interesting list of working papers, anarchist literature, and, of course, a link to Boettke’s seminal paper ‘Anarchism as a Progressive Research Program in Political Economy‘.

A good introduction to serious anarchism, and many of its modern and contemporary representatives, is the massive reader ‘Anarchy and the Law (The Political Economy of Choice).’

Anthony de Jasay on liberalism, democracy and conventions

Despite losing his eyesight, Anthony de Jasay still publishes some of the most thought-provoking papers in social philosophy. In a recent article for the Institute of Economic  Affairs, de Jasay inspects the foundations of liberalism and observes that:

In contrast to made law whose legitimacy is ultimately hypothetical, vulnerable to logic and cannot be confirmed, rules that arise spontaneously have the great strength of being immune to problems of legitimacy…The liberal principle of ownership is neither derived from nor enforced by any authority. Its content is a set of liberties the owner may employ, notably the liberty of use, usufruct, contract and disposition.

Building on these Humean concepts of justice, de Jasay is clear that liberalism, properly conceived, is not compatible with government and political democracy:

The term ‘liberal democracy’ has in recent decades become the standard way to refer to the liberal form of government. The first principles of liberalism are fully compatible only with ordered anarchy, a spontaneously emerging framework of conventional rules. Even imperfectly liberal orders are biased towards small government. Democracy has historically been associated with a dynamic, expansionary area of collective choice, in the shape of big government. Coupling ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ could hardly be more incongruous than ‘smallbig government’….Whether by conviction or by dire need, democratic governments are condemned by political competition constantly to press against the frontier that divides individual from collective choices. They must willy-nilly swallow up and regurgitate a part of the resources produced by society, a part large enough to attract a winning coalition in the face of competition by rivals similarly seeking to form a winning coalition.

In his recent publications de Jasay more explicitly contrasts the role of conventions with government-made law and contractarian approaches to justice. In one of his strongest essays to date, “Fairness as Justice,” he critically reviews game theorist Ken Binmore’s book Natural Justice and highlights the difference between bargaining and conventions and its consequences for the doctrine of fairness:

While bargaining solutions presuppose an intent to agree, conventions are adhered to without anybody agreeing with anybody else. Nobody intends to initiate them. They may be imagined to start from some random bunching of behaviour into a patterned subset within a patternless set of behaviour of the population…Justice in compliance with spontaneously emerging self-enforcing rules supersedes unenforced considerations of fairness; it does all the work in its sphere and leaves none over for fairness.

“Fairness as Justice” is included in Anthony de Jasay’s most recent collection of essays, Political Philosophy Clearly: Essays On Freedom And Fairness, Property And Equalities.

Anything that’s peaceful

Libertarians spend a non-trivial amount of time arguing for the obvious. At best, such arguments are redundant because there is no widespread believe that violence or threats of violence are a good thing. At worst, these debates hurt the prospects for a society with less violence because theories about the existence of  “natural rights” are rightly a source of  ridicule. The idea that “rights” just exist out there in the world without actual individuals engaging in contracts to establish rights is not going to persuade anyone with a sober mind.  In that sense, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and the (early) Robert Nozick did not do the renaissance of classical liberalism a favor.

A similar problem is encountered with terms like “liberty” and “freedom.” There have been extensive debates about the meaning of liberty as if there is a God-given “real” meaning of the word that just lies out there waiting to be discovered. Many libertarians would argue that we should seek a free society. But as Anthony de Jasay has noted, “The question of whether freedom is valuable or a free society is good ought not to enter at all into a properly thought-out political doctrine, liberal or other. It should be resolutely ignored. Whichever way the question were answered would, it seems to me, inevitably steer us in a teleological direction, and undermine the foundations on which the society that we could consider free might stand and survive. ”

“Consequentialist” libertarians have rejected the emphasis of “moralist” libertarians on (absolute) rights and liberty and have argued for evaluating public policies in light of their consequences. Liberty founder R.W. Bradford (1947-2005) repeatedly held the moralist libertarians responsible for the poor acceptance of libertarianism.  But it is hard to see why conventional consequentialist libertarianism would do much better. Most people do not come into this world seeking to optimize some kind of social welfare function or overall efficiency. In this sense consequentialist libertarianism is even further removed from reality – a point that has been well recognized by former utilitarians like Jan Narveson.

A small minority of libertarians have hopes of reconciling egoism and libertarianism. These authors often spend considerable time making the case for ethical egoism. For people who tend to look at such questions from the perspective of empiricism and modern science such investigations are rather excessive. The interesting question is not so much whether there are objective moral truths but what happens when people who have left such beliefs behind interact.  This question can be approached from a Hobbesian perspective or from an evolutionary perspective. But what often is discovered is a general desire to discourage and prohibit violence.

It is not likely that Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard will be remembered for their breakthroughs in moral philosophy but what these authors have in common is their identification of classical liberalism with non-aggression. This re-conceptualization of classical liberalism has been an important breakthrough because it enables to see things like “regulation” and “public policy” in fairly non-ambiguous physical terms. If one strips away all the rhetoric about “rights” and “democracy” one is left with a State that mostly engages in violence and threats of violence against peaceful people. One of the major contributions of modern libertarians has been to show this is the case – even when the State only claims a  “monopoly on violence” to solve public goods problems.

Contra libertarians such as R.W. Bradford, the desire for peace is neither outdated nor ineffective. People may differ on the importance of “negative” or “positive” liberty or growing “the economy” but few people go out in public  speaking out in favor of violence against the innocent. The main task of libertarians is not to look for “justifications” or “foundations” but the demystifying of the State and the defense of anything that’s peaceful.

The useless Constitution

Lysander Spooner expert and legal scholar Randy Barnett argues that Obamacare is unconstitutional. It does not seem likely that such an argument will prevail. Over the course of American history it has become clear that the Constitution presents little obstacle to a changing political climate. This makes the Constitution basically useless. When the prevailing political climate supports the Constitution it is redundant. When the prevailing political climate goes against it, it is toothless.

One might argue that some constitutions are better than others. But as the social philosopher Anthony de Jasay has argued, perhaps the relatively good historical track record of the United States on individual liberty has more to do with the generous amount of unowned land available to its people than any intrinsic qualities of its Constitution. During the 20th century this advantage of the US has largely disappeared  as governments have claimed unoccupied land as  “public” (a development that does not receive the attention of libertarians that it deserves). Add mass democracy to this  development and the groundwork for the predatory and redistributive state is in place.

Constitution advocates and skeptics can agree on one thing. If the individual mandate (which has been called a “tax on living” by some critics) will be ruled constitutional it is hard to imagine anything that could be deemed unconstitutional when the right political climate is in place.

One wonders how long the love affair of conservatives and some libertarians with the Constitution will  continue. When the government engages in mass coercion the proper response is not to waive a piece of paper containing a hypothetical agreement but to fight back.

Further reading:  Lysander Spooner – No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority