Tag: Anarchism

Strict contractarianism or anarchist conventionalism

The June 2011 issue of Economic Affairs features my review of Anthony de Jasay’s most recent collection of articles, Political Philosophy, Clearly: Essays on Freedom and Fairness, Property and Equalities.

As in all his works, in this book Anthony de Jasay uses a non-cognitivist knife to cut through all the incoherent, but influential, arguments about “fairness,” “rights,” and “the public good” that have been offered as a rationale for government.

As I note in my review, in this collection Jasay also offers his analysis of the State’s monopoly on the use of “legitimate force”, the taboo on “taking the law into one’s own hands” and its effects on crime. His analysis has similarities to what the paleo-conservative writer Samuel Francis has called “anarcho-tyranny”, a situation in which rules against violence, theft and vandalism are poorly enforced (or even deliberately ignored) but the coercive power of the state is used to engineer an egalitarian society and suppress freedom of speech.  Before Francis, these tendencies in modern liberalism were identified in James Burnham’s ‘Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.

Until recently, I had a difficult time understanding Anthony de Jasay’s arguments against moral contractarianism. It seemed to me that Jasay could only conceive of contractarian arguments as arguments in favor of collective choice, ignoring thinkers such as the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker and, more recently, Jan Narveson, who use a contractarian framework to argue against the state. But upon more closely inspecting Jasay’s (increasingly) Humean ideas on justice I think I have a better understanding of what his fundamental objections against the contractarian approach are.

An important key to his objections can be found in the following quote from his book The State:

People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other … On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? …

Anthony de Jasay’s starting point in social philosophy are the spontaneously evolved rules that facilitate mutual benefit. These rules were not “established” through a one-time agreement but through an incremental process of mutual adjustment by individuals. A danger of all forms of moral contractarianism is that it shifts the locus from such spontaneously evolved rules to subjective and arbitrary debates about what the terms of hypothetical contracts should be. For example, if we cannot agree to the terms of a social contract because some participants want a more interventionist state, should the social contract exercise be considered a failure or can the parties that want the least government interference just proceed and consider that person “outside” of the social contract? It is hard to imagine how such a question can be answered in a satisfactory manner from within the contractarian framework without introducing some kind of meta-contractarian framework, which in turn… and so forth.

The philosopher David Gauthier has argued that agreements that do not satisfy certain conditions (his revised Lockean Proviso) might be unstable because some people will have a strong incentive to ignore or re-negotiate them. It is quite conceivable that social contracts that do not reflect mutual advantage are inherently unstable and will be pulled towards less government, but ultimately such questions about stability can only be answered empirically.

In light of Jasay’s preference for actual contracts, as opposed to hypothetical contracts, I have often been tempted to call Jasay’s position “strict contractarianism” or “strong contractarianism.” Obviously, strict contractarianism is inherently anarchist because there is no way that any government can be considered to be “agreed to” by all the parties (and their descendants) who are presumed to be obliged to it, either explicitly or tacitly. Is the difference between strict contractarianism and conventionalism just semantics then? There is an important element in Jasay’s thinking that cannot be incorporated by any kind of contractarian thinking, and that is his refusal to place himself outside of society (or in the “state of nature”) in an effort to determine what the ideal terms of social interaction should be. It might seem strange to present this as a virtue but it would not surprise me that it is exactly this attitude that gives rise to what we would call a free society.

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.

Rand Paul and the anti-discrimination paradigm

In the aftermath of the Rand Paul civil rights controversy a surprising number of self-identified libertarians have endorsed state-restrictions on freedom of association. In essence, the argument is that historical and contextual circumstances can warrant the broadening of anti-discrimination laws to the private sector. This  is not just  a trivial exception to libertarian support of strong property rights but also ignores the distinct classical liberal outlook that the *withholding of a benefit* should not be treated as a harm and punished by the state. As a matter of fact, it seems to be an argument that past “crimes against humanity”  and “group rights” should trump peaceful individual choice.

Libertarians who advocate such restrictions on the freedom of association have argued that libertarianism should not be treated as an a-historical set of dogma’s. That is not an unreasonable argument but it is interesting to note that such claims are made by the same people who display a similar kind of dogmatism on the issue of open borders. It appears that dogmatism is more objectionable when it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.

Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the recent eagerness to embrace elements of modern liberalism is that libertarianism has become too popular to concern itself with controversial views. There are now many self-identified libertarians  who wake up in the morning and go to work advocating smaller government and public policy changes. Some of them even run for office. The current transformation of libertarianism is similar to what happened to classical liberalism in Europe. We are inclined to think that ideology shapes politics but we should not ignore the fact that politics shapes ideology as well. What is urgently needed is a “public choice of political ideology.”

Another problem with this position is that it ignores the broader role that “racism” accusations play in progressive thinking. For example, let’s say Rand Paul proposes to repeal the welfare state to prevent a sovereign debt crisis. One obvious “liberal” response is to argue that such a course of action will disproportionally hurt minorities and Paul is back defending himself against racism charges again. It is hard to see how libertarians can effectively counter such accusations unless they simply reject the egalitarian premise that informs contemporary political debate.

It is also interesting to note that small government libertarians are more vulnerable to the racism charge than anarchists. I am not aware of any claims that anarchists are “racist” because they advocate abolishing all government laws, which necessarily will also include laws against racial discrimination. This feature of anarchism might explain why socialist anarchism is no longer popular among progressives. After all, it is hard to imagine how a stateless society will produce radical egalitarianism across the globe.

The libertarian critics of Rand Paul are correct that libertarianism should not be conceived as a sterile rationalist ideology. If there is any chance for libertarianism to survive it should be conceived as a form of rational choice firmly rooted in empirical reality. But if Ben O’ Neill’s Independent Review article “The Antidiscrimination Paradigm: Irrational, Unjust, and Tyrannical” is any indication, the practice of discrimination can be reconciled with rational decision making. Despite this article, and Walter Block’s heterodox articles on discrimination, it is remarkable how little thought libertarians have given to formulating a coherent moral perspective on anti-discrimination laws.

Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are wrongly put. They are not formulated in an inexact or slovenly manner, but they are entirely misconceived; they are questions that beg for an authoritarian answer…They can be compared with that traditional question of political authority, ‘Who should rule’, which begs for an authoritarian answer such as ‘the best’, ‘or ‘the wisest’, or ‘the people’, or ‘the majority’…This political question is wrongly put and the answers which it elicits are paradoxical. It should be replaced by a completely different question such as ‘How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers…cannot do too much damage?’ I believe that only by changing our question in this way can we hope to proceed towards a reasonable theory of political institutions.

Popper’s reformulated question simply takes for granted that we need a mechanism of collective choice  to revolve conflicts between people and produce public goods.  Not only that, as a social democrat he did not just restrict government to such a role but expected it to fight “evil” and “suffering:”

We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement… (in: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1962)

As a hardline political consequentialist, Popper proposed his idea of  “piecemeal social engineering”  to generate a “social technology” to improve the world we live in. As such, he places himself in a long tradition of activist philosophers who take a look at society, conclude that it can be “improved”, and advocate collective choice mechanisms to discover and implement such changes. Fortunately, Popper’s political views have been subjected to a rigorous critical dissection by the social philosopher Anthony de Jasay in his article The Twistable is not Testable: Reflections on the Political Thought of Karl Popper (reprinted in Against Politics).

Popper’s question about “organizing our political institutions” should be replaced with questions that do not assume that the issue of government has been settled. Such questions  may include ‘Can conflicts about scarce resources be resolved without resorting to non-unanimous decision making’ or ‘Can public goods be provided without coercion?’ One attempt to reconcile Popper’s anti-justificatory critical rationalism and anarchism is Jan Lester’s book Escape From Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled.