Alfred G. Cuzán contributed “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?” (pdf) to the Summer 1979 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, an article which Roderick Long describes as “invaluable”, (also see Stephan Kinsella). This short article, only 7 pages of text, is one of those little pieces of conceptual dynamite that blows apart the way you’ve seen the world.
Cuzán challenges the notion that we are ever really under “Government” if what Government means is a “third party” external to all relations in society. He points out that “such a ‘third party’ arrangement for society is non-existent among those who exercise the power of government themselves.” (p. 152) Therefore “whereas without government it was market or natural anarchy, it is now a political anarchy, an anarchy inside power.” (pp. 152-3) Cuzán goes on to explain that not all these political anarchies are created equal. Some are more violent than others. The least violent political anarchies begin to look more and more like market anarchy… So wouldn’t outright market anarchy be the least violent of all? Read the whole thing.
For more on this topic see the Anarchy subject. This is part of the new Libertarian Studies category of the Study Guide which I have been creating to categorize the large amount of non-economic libertarian literature in the Study Guide.
{ 8 comments }
Reminds me of Deep Anarchy: An Eliminatist View of the State by Max T. O’Connor.
I found the paper very interesting, but suffering from some of the semantic problems many discussions of the sort do, particularly what is anarchy and government.
The fundamental problem is that we have only men to work with. We can’t get ETs, or angels, or perhaps a Faust-per-generation demon to act as a greater authority. We are in a closed system, so if he means that collectively men cannot be governed from without, he is correct, but it is a tautology.
There is hope even in the deist’s belief that God will judge us eventually, so there will be an accounting to a higher authority.
But what would give most theistic libertarians cause for simultaneous great hope and great fear is that divine providence is ready to help us in our efforts to create something. The adult is in the other room trying to get the children to learn to do something instead of doing it for them.
I think he gets the idea of checks and balances right or wrong depending on how you parse “three branches of government”. It can mean different arms of a single government, i.e three branches, or three kinds, e.g. communism, anarchy, and democracy are three kinds of government, but they are mutually exclusive competitors. The difference is whether there really is plurality or not.
If the three branches of government acted more like a hockey game than a chess match things would be better. If congress impeached a few judges each year, judges threw out laws with derisive decisions (nailing those who proposed and passed them), and the executive would arrest members of the other two branches on a regular basis, there would be true plurality. If you read beyond the gloss history of the US under Washington, you find there was more of this going on. I would also go on with jury nullification and such as further controls, but that gets off the central(izing) point.
Here is where I think the paper is wrong in principle but correct in (current) practice. Any branch is supposed to be ruled by the authority of the other two branches, and are responsible to them and thus aren’t in a state of anarchy. It forms a circle (or triangle if you prefer). This becomes dysfunctional when it is reduced to a point – where they act like three arms of one branch instead of three petty fiefdoms vying with each other for power.
Because we are in a closed system, the only way possible to have a minarchical government is to have a duopoly, or triopoly where each government checks the other. In the middle ages, this was the church v.s. the secular authorities – the bishop v.s. the king (the former could excommunicate someone who feared hellfire or otherwise destroy legitimacy, the latter could imprison or kill someone who feared temporal fire).
The only thing I know Sandra Day O’Connor to have said that is true is the title of her book, “The Majesty of the Law”.
The critical question is whether the Law is to be above men – even kings. And that was a debated point earler and has come back now with Bush.
If you believe in natural law, it says not only what is right and wrong, but also which of those things ought to be criminal (enforced by a governmental authority) and which should not be (personal vices).
And this is the problem with market anarchy. You get whatever law you can pay for – either through money or threat or violence.
Many libertarians find abortion to be a violation of the unborn baby’s rights, others say either it has no rights or that the Mother can evict a trespasser even if it means death. Is this decision to be settled by the purse? And if you allow for this corruption, how can you avoid the purse saying if reputation or copyright are or are not property? And if the law, the purse, and violence are on the same level – in the marketplace – why is it not legitimate to use any one to acquire or destroy the other?
And here is the key. The most ardent supporters of anarchy must appeal to authority – that they have rights even the most minimal government will violate. But in doing so they are claiming a higher authority – be it god or nature or reason – which gives man rights. And they are saying they will rule and be ruled by that authority without really identifying it or saying why this unnamed and invisible abstraction should have authority over anyone. A ghost without a body.
(I don’t mean to be silly, but to illustrate the point, assume we are in the utopian anarchy and I take your stuff. You tell me I stole your property. I then simply ask which authority that we are both mutual subjects defines property or theft – if you answer anything but “nothing”, the answer is a government, or becomes one once even you personally embody it).
I would simply point out we can’t access pure spirits, only embodied spirits. And bodies get sick and decay. That is the world we are in.
I can imagine songs which my vocal cords cannot sing. I can imagine objects which my hands cannot fabricate. But I have to do what is possible and right with my body even if my spirit could do more elsewhere.
The pure spirit of natural law can only have effect through a body of government, realizing that every body is subject to passions and corruption and decay.
–”And here is the key. The most ardent supporters of anarchy must appeal to authority – that they have rights even the most minimal government will violate. But in doing so they are claiming a higher authority – be it god or nature or reason – which gives man rights. And they are saying they will rule and be ruled by that authority without really identifying it or saying why this unnamed and invisible abstraction should have authority over anyone.”
Somewhat of an odd example here. I think you’re conflating, multiple possible meanings of the word “authority” in your comment.
Of course nature is a higher “authority” than government, in at least some sense of the word. No matter what the latter does, it can never force the former to, for instance, suspend gravity or change the value of pi. At the same time, the latter has no choice but to submit to the dictates of the former, no matter how many tantrums they throw that pi should eqaul 3 to make things neater.
It’s hard to see how this is at all arguable. Appeal to authority isn’t a fallacy when it’s independently experimentally confirmed.
Reminds me of stuff by the Terra Libra guys, as can be found on Build Freedom site, such as this essay: The Nature of Government.
If congress impeached a few judges each year, judges threw out laws with derisive decisions (nailing those who proposed and passed them), and the executive would arrest members of the other two branches on a regular basis, there would be true plurality. If you read beyond the gloss history of the US under Washington, you find there was more of this going on.
I’d like to respond to tz about the origin of ‘rights’.
Roderick Long had a power-point that explained it really well…
It said something like this:
~”[...
*Conflict is costly in nature.
*So we follow non-conflicting patterns in life.
*Sometimes we argue about these patterns.
*Sometimes these patterns become rights; laws.
]“
“The most ardent supporters of anarchy must appeal to authority – that they have rights even the most minimal government will violate”.
No. All the anarchists need do is deny authority. The fallacy is assuming that all rights are like positive rights which intrinsically must rest on a source (or they could not be supplied), whereas negative rights simply emerge “naturally” (as a mathematician would put it) from the absence of anyone to say them nay legitimately – they don’t need a source.
I read this essay, but I remember reading a similar essay in which the arguments were much better explained. I don’t remember the author or the title and I have been searching online, but unable to find it. The author argues that there exist four kinds of anarchy, anarcho-capitalism, anarchy between members of separate states, anarchy between separate governments, and anarchy between man and his government. I would really appreciate it if anyone could link me the essay.
Comments on this entry are closed.