Our Anomie the State
(posted by Jim Henley)
do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it’s a…marketing ploy. but it’s sincere.
A Philosophical Challenge
My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that
(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use of force is wrong if it lacks a moral justification.)
(3) The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound.
(4) Hence, state power has not been shown to be morally defensible.
Until you show me otherwise, I conclude that government power is in every case illegitimate.Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are pitiful. They are embarrassments to the Western intellectual tradition.
So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.
If you can’t, I insist that you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.
Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an irrational cultist.
We’re all anarchists now, baby, until further notice.
Will Wilkinson argues that
I detect a missing premise or two. For example, that in the absence of a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism. Aren’t you rationally obliged to accept the social system that does best relative to the values you care about? So what if human flourishing, not legitimacy, is your greatest concern. You can still accept that all states are illegitimate. But suppose the path to the best feasible anarchy leaves people worse off in terms of flourishing than in the best illegitimate states. It seems, in that case, you would be rationally obliged to support states that do better for people than anarchy, despite their illegitimacy. In which case, it would be irrational cultlike behavior to endorse anarchy just because it is not illegitimate.
There’s a lot of anarchist in me, but I think there’s a more abyssal problem facing Sartwell’s argument. Sartwell just assumes that failing to prove the legitimacy of the state constitutes proof of the legitmacy of anarchy, that the two constitute a P and ~P pair, to one of which legitimacy must inhere. But there’s no reason to assume that. If I fail to prove that Day is tart, must I accept that Night is? Men can’t fly, so women can! No. It may be that there is no “legitimate” social arrangement for human beings. We may be doomed to unjustifiable relations with our fellows.
Consider just a few of the assumptions Sartwell is smuggling into his negative proof:
- That it can’t be the case that anarchism entails (non-state) force or coercion.
- That there aren’t other sources of illegitimacy than violence that afflict anarcism.
- That human social relations can be legitimated at all.
I’m probably missing some.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
[...] State and our fallen world, by me, over there. Posted by Jim Henley @ 10:29 pm, Filed under: Main « « The Astounding Truth the [...]
May 29th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
A nice point made well.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Will Wilkinson is using the Pareto Optiality argument that many political scientists would use to counter Sartwell’s logical syllogism.
The use of force is justified to produce a Pareto-optimal social outcome.
From my libertarian perspective, Anthony De Jasay’s “Against Politics,” and “Justice and it’s Surroundings” are 2 of the better political critiques of the “State.” De Jasay gives a compelling argument that the State is inevitably a redistributionist coalition. However, in my mind, there are still a question of the stability of market anarchist orders where transactional costs are not frictionless. To me, the question is stability (that is, not devolve/evolve back to monopoly enforcement) not legitimacy, because anarchist mechanism by definition imply voluntary association and the ability to secede from such without retaliation. I still maintain that there needs to be a greater level of technological advancement that would lead to a sufficiently low transaction costs to make adjudication of property rights more feasible in an Ancap setting.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Who cares about legitimacy. Divine right monarchy is dead, after that we should stop pretending. My opinion of the state is the same as that of Randall Holcombe.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Even if you accept Sartwell’s argument, which I’m inclined to do, the question remains: how do we get there from here? The more I think about it, the less inclined I am to push Leonard Read’s “magic button.” I think Landauer had it about right: replace the state with other ways of doing things, as fast as it is feasible to do, until it’s gone.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I have been moving from libertarian to anarchist over the past several years and have sympathy for almost any argument against the State.
A practical problem is the existence of other illegitimate States that may pose a threat to the public of our eventual state-less society. National Security then is a reason for the State, if only because these other illegitimate States pose a threat of violence against us. That does not actually defeat the argument against the illegitimacy of States, but it does limit the degree to which we who live in the US can practically dismantle our own.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:56 am
ka1igu1a: Wilkinson is not using a Pareto-optimality argument. He’s using an argument based on value pluralism. That is, there are lots and lots of things people are right to value and care about — such as virtue, liberty, happiness, health, knowledge, security, et cetera ad nauseum — and legitimacy is one of those many things. Thus, it’s not enough to establish that anarchism is “legitimacy-maximizing” — it might be the case that a good government might improve everything else enough to make a cost in legitimacy worth paying.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:59 am
First Little Pig,
Three points:
1) Most of the foreign governments that hate the U.S. don’t “hate us for our freedoms,” or have designs of conquest (the logistical problems involved in holding American territory would be impossible even if the U.S. were stateless). They hate us because of what the U.S. government is doing in their part of the world. For would-be imperial competitors, that includes competing for control in their part of the world. The U.S. is the only power in the world that claims the right to define “aggression,” not as an actual attack on its own territory, but what a country on the other side of the world does within a few hundred miles of its own border; it’s the only country that reserves the right to define as a “threat” a small country that won’t do what it’s told.
2) States tend not only to create centralized political and adminstrative centers, but to promote economic centralization and high-value economic targets (e.g. the WTC). A society of tens of thousands of loosely federated, self-governed communities, consuming mainly goods produced in small-scale industry for their own local markets, would present no such targets. There’d be no flag to capture, no government to accept the surrender of, and say “OK, we won.”
3) The American civilian population owns more small arms than all the standing armies in the world put together, and there would be nobody with the authority to say “the war is over” and order them to stop waging guerrilla war.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
My favorite (cynical) argument for the state is that it makes the very worst monsters in our society much more visible and subjects them to constant public scrutiny. This explains why people generally prefer tyranny to statelessness — better the devil you know, than the one you don’t.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Kevin Carson:
I suppose the fact that I live in New Mexico shades my view. Would the Northern Mexican States start offering certain services and/or start annexing parts of my dear state had we no government? For sure. We have a very small population compared with that region of Mexico and no matter how well armed, I doubt we would be a match….. And I think that our poorer communities (most of the state) would welcome the reconquest.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Arguably, Kurt, it makes men into monsters and monsters into who knows what (brings out the worst in a given humans nature). The best-intentioned altruist is still part of the corrupting machine.
Well clarified Neel. OT why don’t you political blog? Your comments are always incisive.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
And you know, Neel has a forum available to him for blogging too. I’m just saying.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:57 am
Neel:
Actually, if you carefully read Wilkinson, he uses terms like “worse off” and “do better” which therefore makes it a Pareto-like argument. A utility function can be arbitrary measure of all the things you mentioned.
“Value pluralism” is vague in terms of it’s application to the study of the State. There’s no preferential ordering of values which therefore makes it a rather useless critique model of State vs Anarchism. To make it relevant, you have to assign a utility function(s) to the “values” you mentioned, which therefore assigns preference, and thusly brings it under analysis of Pareto Efficiency.
May 31st, 2008 at 7:43 am
I agree with Sartwell’s assertion that there are no good a priori arguments for the state (at least in popular political philosophy); however, it’s important to note that our society does currently have a state as a central institution.
I view much of the pro-state “philosophy” as nothing more than an attempt to rationalize an institution that the authors couldn’t imagine living without. Even if I reject their rationalizations, I’m still influenced by the conservative argument that we shouldn’t dispense with central social institutions unless the situation gets unbearable.
This seems to be part of Kevin’s view that we need to build alternative institutions as we dismantle the state, as well as Henley’s assertion that the simple absence of a justification of the state does not indicate that we should eliminate the state.
June 1st, 2008 at 12:49 pm
“Sartwell just assumes that failing to prove the legitimacy of the state constitutes proof of the legitmacy of anarchy, that the two constitute a P and ~P pair, to one of which legitimacy must inhere.”
I don’t think that is what is being expressed by Sartwell’s
challenge. To me, and I venture a number of anarchists, the state is analogous to a loaded gun in someone’s hand. The anarchist is asking the one holding it, and in every direction pointing it at someone, to calmly place it on the ground.
The anarchist is also, with the same arguments, trying to persuade everyone else not in possession of the gun to not pick it back up once relinquished.
From this point of view I don’t understand the statement; “Even though you defeated every argument presented for someone getting to have the gun, I still get to have the gun.”
Why don’t we put the gun down first, then argue the merits of the gun.
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 am
As an anarchist, I stress the issue of stability as well, but from the other side: it is in conditions of instability that the individual has the most power. Stability allows for power consolidation and allows people to let their guard down. Frankly, if people will not be vigilant, I’m not sure we should have a stable society.
I’m not saying anarchists should aim for chaos; I just think that we overemphasize long-term viability for a form of organization that engenders results we can’t really even predict. I’m all for building alternative institutions, but they are merely a means to an end, not the end (at least for me). We may find ourselves rebelling against those alternative institutions when all is said and done.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:13 am
First Little Pig:
If national security is your issue, you may want to check this out:
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=330
Anarchy or no anarchy, I’d be happy with a Swiss or Finnish like foreign policy for the US.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:55 am
Keith Preston:
Thanks for that. It is a good article, but I think the New Mexican experience would be somewhat unique. For large swathes of the state that are poor and majority Hispanic (and of Original Mexican origin) the extension of Mexican sovereignty would happen fairly easily. Maybe not overnight, but there are several likely ways it could come about.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I think the de facto reconquest on the US Southwest by Mexico is a done deal thanks to immigration. I guess whether that is good or bad is an individual value judgement.