The Obviousness of Anarchy
John Hasnas asks us to look around, not just at historical evidence but at so much of the world that runs without monopoly law enforcement.
by John Hasnas
Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England … offers a wonderful test case of how human beings behave in the absence of central political authority.
—John Hasnas
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a contribution by John Hasnas, a Georgetown legal scholar dedicated to what I would term radical common law. Dovetailing as it does with my “The Law of Consent,” I offer Hasnas’s classic, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” and present interstitial commentary in italics.
I am presenting an argument for anarchy in the true sense of the term—that is, a society without government, not a society without governance. There is no such thing as a society without governance. A society with no mechanism for bringing order to human existence is oxymoronic; it is not “society” at all.
I am arguing only that human beings can live together successfully and prosper in the absence of a centralized coercive authority.
Notice immediately the contrast between Hasnas’s understanding and the chaotic mess of vandalism, Molotov Cocktails, and black bloc tactics that pass for *anarchism* on the West Coast. Socialist anarchists, to the extent they hold a coherent worldview, are far too comfortable with destruction and violence as means.
There are, of course, certain rules that must apply to all people; those that provide the basic conditions that make cooperative behavior possible. Thus, rules prohibiting murder, assault, theft, and other forms of coercion must be equally binding on all members of a society. But we hardly need [monopoly] government to ensure that this is the case. These rules evolve first in any community; you would not even have a community if this were not the case.
These evolved rules give credence to the notion of “empirical natural rights,” which are far more philosophically palatable than rationalistic or theological rights talk. Under Hasnas’s construal, we can observe human groups that contrive and embrace similar rules and norms that become preconditions of community. Hasnas’s justification is not as doctrinaire as claims that rights are derived from Government, God, or Reason. Instead, we can observe emergent patterns that help justify his position by showing how humans tend to adopt norms and rules that give rise to the proper balance of freedom and order.
Societies do not spring into existence complete with government police forces. Once a group of people has figured out how to reduce the level of interpersonal violence sufficiently to allow them to live together, entities that are recognizable as government often develop and take over the policing function. Even a marauding band that imposes government on others through conquest must have first reduced internal strife sufficiently to allow it to organize itself for effective military operations. Both historically and logically, it is always peaceful coexistence first, government services second. If civil society is impossible without government police, then there are no civil societies.
Hasnas seems to share my view of governments not as paladins bestride white horses, but as violent protection rackets wrapped in pomp, circumstance, and spectacle.
When government begins providing services formerly provided non-politically, people soon forget that the services were ever provided non-politically and assume that only government can provide them. … Traditionally, police services were not provided by government and, to a large extent, they still are not.
Therefore, government is not necessary to provide police services.
In about five lines, Hasnas dispenses with the notion that the need for rule enforcement automatically justifies a violence monopoly in some jurisdiction. Defenders of monopoly states justify the status quo by skipping over objections, arguing that *Rules need to be enforced* Ergo: *Monopoly government is justified.* Such a weak argument seeks not only to derive an ought from an is, but fails to address the obviousness of competitive markets in governance and enforcement. But we must take care: Defenders of monopoly states might try to use a parallel structure to Hasnas’s empirical natural rights with arguments from empirical monopoly states. Is that which is imposed “natural”?
If a visitor from Mars were asked to identify the least effective method for securing individuals’ persons and property, he might well respond that it would be to select one group of people, give them guns, require all members of soceity to pay them regardless of the quality of service they render, and invest them with discretion to employ resources and determine law enforcement priorities however they see fit subject only to the whim of their political paymasters. If asked why he thought that, he might simply point to the Los Angeles or New Orleans or any other big city police department. Are government police really necessary for a peaceful, secure society? Look around. Could a non-political, non-monopolistic system of supplying police services really do worse than its government-supplied counterpart?
Q.E.D. (I titter with a note of sadness.)
Do you ever wonder why people believed in the divine right of kings? They believed in it because they were taught to believe in it and because they could imagine it was so, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. We no longer believe in such silly things as the divine right of kings. We believe that government is necessary for an orderly, peaceful society and that it can be made to function according to the rule of law. We believe this because we have been taught to believe it from infancy and because we can imagine that it is so, regardless of all contrary evidence.
And that, folks, is what I mean when I say monopoly governments are protection rackets wrapped in pomp, circumstance, and spectacle. Ironically, fewer school children are indoctrinated even with the notion that “government is necessary for an orderly, peaceful society and that it can be made to function according to the rule of law.” While such lovely notions were once inculcated in Americans to maintain popular support for our constitutional republic, academics and activists replaced this mythology with errant notions of social justice and political activism as the summum bonum of education.
One should never underestimate the power of abstract concepts to shape how human beings see the world. Once one accepts the idea that government is necessary for peace and order and that it can function objectively, one’s imagination will allow one to see the hand of government wherever there is law, police, and courts, and render the non-political provision of these services invisible. But if you lay aside this conceptual framework long enough to ask where these services originated and where, to a large extent, they still come from, the world assumes a different aspect.
If you want the strongest argument for anarchy, simply remove your self-imposed blinders and look around.
It’s not just that there are credible alternatives to monopoly governments in the provision of peace and order, but that, in time, monopoly governments are destructive of these. Such is a case for another day. —MB
Whenever a people give the job of enforcement to another group of people, they thereby give up the right of self-governing. But any time a group of people arrogates to themselves the right to rule of steal from or in any way harm a self-governing people, they must resist them with force or give up the right to freedom. Either way, the invasive group take their freedom from them, whether or not they conquer them. For the act of self-defense is also permission to commit violence. It may be preferable to being conquered, but not an absolute good. A sword that can kill others is also capable of killing yourself. Violence always begets violence.
It's estimated that the first species of humans evolved about 2 ½ million years ago, and our species has existed for more than 300,000 years. The first government is said to have been established in Sumer (Mesopotamia) about 6,500 years ago. More than 1,000 years passed before the next government was established. I don't know how much time passed before a majority of the world's population lived under one government or another, but it seems clear that for much more than 99% of the time humans have existed, they existed without governments, and for more than 98% of the time our species has existed most have lived without governments. The evidence indicates that humans can survive without governments.