Robert Nozick tries to knock out anarchism as a possible political theory in his argument for the Minimal State. But does he really knock it out? Or can anarchism as a political theory be defended? And what is at stake?
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick imagines a world in which, as if by an invisible hand, society moves away from Anarchy toward the Minimal State—an organization with a monopoly on violence and protection, including protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Nozick believes the Minimal State is the only political organization that is morally justifiable. The movement away from Anarchy, however, is not to be confused with anarchism. Anarchy is the imagined condition when human beings lived without anyone claiming a monopoly on violence and coercion. Anarchism is the commitment to the principle of autonomy. Nozick conflates the two concepts, and so with a little parsing I think his claims can be rebutted and anarchism can be defended as a principled position, even if ultimately it’s best considered one valuable position among others.
Nozick lays out five possible scenarios in which someone could try to defend political organization and still maintain a commitment to the individual’s natural rights.
Scenario 1: Anarchy. Human beings are self-governing to the extent that they do not harm others. The old saying runs, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins”—have all the freedom you want but just don’t go around using that freedom to hurt me or anybody else. Of course, the outbreak of violence or coercion is always possible under this scenario even if it’s never morally justified.
Scenario 2: Competing Protective Agencies. Human beings are not entirely self-governing because in this scenario there are little protective agencies that people pay cash or kind to in order to keep from being harmed by others—but with no pay comes no protection, in which case the people who are entirely self-governing are open to harm.
Scenario 3: Dominant Protective Agency. Human beings are not self-governing if they pay tribute to this big protective agency but they can rest assured that if someone tries to harm or defraud them, they are going to be covered. Anybody not paying tribute to the big agency gets no protection but are self-governing.
Scenario 4: Ultraminimal State. A big protective agency controls an area and nobody within that territory is allowed to exercise force or coercion—but it only protects those who pay. Anybody who harms a non-paying member may suffer but the non-paying member is not entitled to compensation for violence, fraud, or other harm.
Scenario 5: Minimal State. A big protective agency controls an area and nobody within that territory is allowed to exercise force or coercion—to people who pay the agency and people who don’t pay the agency. Nobody is allowed to harm anybody and therefore anyone who is harmed or defrauded is entitled to compensation.
Nozick reasons that Anarchy is insufficient because I am always at risk of being harmed, and I have only me and my friends and family’s recourse for retaliation to help solve problems. Nozick thinks, too, we can quickly dismiss Competing Protective Agencies, the Dominant Protective Agency, and the Ultraminimal State because these scenarios do not respect the natural rights of people who are outside the coverage of these protective agencies. The only legitimate political organization, therefore, is the Minimal State, which will protect people in a territory, no matter what, from violence, coercion, and fraud, and will enforce the rights, especially the property rights, of everyone. Criticizing the Ultraminimal State, Nozick writes:
A proponent of the ultraminimal state may seem to occupy an inconsistent position... Greatly concerned to protect rights against violation, he makes this the sole legitimate function of the state; and he protests that all other functions are illegitimate because they themselves involve the violation of rights. Since he accords paramount place to the protection and nonviolation of rights, how can he support the ultraminimal state, which would seem to leave some persons' rights unprotected or illprotected? How can he support this in the name of the nonviolation of rights? [Nozick's emphasis]
What is deeply troubling to Nozick is that the Ultraminimal State (and its intermediaries, the Competing Protective Agencies and the Dominant Protective Agency) violates natural rights because it excludes non-paying members to the protective agency from being properly compensated for wrongdoing. His argument is an argument from unfairness: it would be unfair to make those who can’t pay for protection suffer life's vicissitudes. But the argument is also an argument from rights: above all, we ought to preserve the natural rights of human beings to the extent that they’re not harmed or defrauded—to the extent that they can maintain their freedom.
Yet what Nozick gives with one hand he takes with the other.
Nozick acknowledges that there might be some really existing material conditions where the lack of money limits the possibility of people being free from harm or coercion because they cannot pay for the services that will allow them to be free from such harm. But what if there were a world in which some of these scenarios were mixed? What of the following?
Scenario 6: Minimal State with Competing Protective Agencies. A big protective agency controls an area and nobody within that territory is allowed to exercise force or coercion—to people who pay the agency and people who don’t pay the agency. Nobody is allowed to harm anybody and therefore anyone who is harmed or defrauded is entitled to compensation. But there exist some smaller protective agencies to whom people pay cash or kind in order to suffer fewer opportunities of harm from others—but with no pay comes no protection, in which case the people who are outside the smaller agencies are more open to harm.
Nozick seems to think that among really existing states of affairs, Competing Protective Agencies naturally turn into a Dominant Protective Agency and later into the Ultraminimal State. But it seems to me that mixed forms could exist, as with Scenario 6, where the State provides blanket protection but where smaller organizations exist alongside the State that could increase the probability that one is not exposed to bodily or mental harm and that sometimes do a better job, all told, at protecting people’s claims.
In fact, I think that to a less idealized degree, certain conditions within the United States approximate to Scenario 6. To the extent that some people can afford higher priced attorneys with regard to their legal claims, better health care, better universities, better neighborhoods, more comfortable exercise facilities, and healthier food, they enjoy more freedom from harm. This is because their quality of life is better and they have greater capacities to exercise their rights. The freedom to exercise your rights is no use to you if you never have the chance to use it, or if you’re dead, and real freedom is always more important than nominal freedom. Even constitutional guarantees to freedom and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless words on parchment without the opportunity for use, rendering a constitution little more than a paper tiger.
In Scenario 6, everyone is free from harm but some people are freer from harm than others. Such a world seems morally unjustifiable. In which case, I’d propose the following scenario for rectification:
Scenario 7: Welfare State. A big protective agency controls an area and nobody within that territory is allowed to exercise force or coercion—to people who pay the agency and to people who don’t pay the agency. Nobody is allowed to harm anybody and therefore anyone who is harmed or defrauded is entitled to compensation. To the extent that there exist any Competing Agencies, the lesser off are compensated for the disproportionate amount of harm they incur when some people have greater access to the protections of private agencies.
Scenario 7 would rectify occasions when Scenario 6 more closely approximates the world we live in, and it uses much the same justification for its moral legitimacy as Nozick uses for his argument for the Minimal State as opposed to its less fair alternatives. Yet the whole reason that Nozick got off on this track in the first place is because he thought that Anarchy, where everyone had maximal exercise of his natural rights, would naturally devolve toward a state of war where everyone would be competing every man for himself, and so he needed to find some legitimate institution that could bring order out of all this chaos. But does Nozick’s argument against Anarchy constitute an argument against anarchism? Nozick seems to have thought so but I believe otherwise.
Nozick writes as though his arguments for the Minimal State constitute an argument against anarchism. In the beginning of the work, he writes:
I treat seriously the anarchist claim that in the course of maintaing its monopoly on the use of force and protecting everyone within a territory, the state must violate individuals' rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Against this claim, I argue that a state would arise from anarchy (as represented by Locke's state of nature) even though no one intended this or tried to bring it about, by a process which need not violate anyone's rights.
Nozick’s claim “that a state would arise from anarchy…even though no one intended this or tried to bring it about” is a non sequitir in view of the anarchist’s objection because the anarchist views the State as morally illegitimate, even if not factually indispensable, by virtue of analyticity. The State violates a person’s autonomy: it seeks to govern people instead of let people govern themselves.
The anarchist, committed to the principle of autonomy, believes people ought to govern themselves. One of Nozick's contemporaries and a vocal philosophical expositor of the anarchist position Robert Paul Wolff argues that anarchism is a commitment to the principle of autonomy, and that “[t]he autonomous man, insofar as he is autonomous, is not subject to the will of another. He may do what another tells him, but not because he has been told to do it. He is therefore, in the political sense of the word, free.” “The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled” (In Defense of Anarchism). The stage is already set for conflict:
The anarchist may grant that if we reached a world where we had only the Minimal State to contend with, where private tyrannies were excluded, it would be better than the alternatives, better than a subscriber State or rule by competing agencies. The anarchist could even say it would be better than Anarchy if Anarchy naturally entails that people do harm to one another and others go out on vengeance killings, for example, to rectify wrongs. But this is all beside the point. The anarchist has no truck in these affairs because these are imagined scenarios whereas anarchism is a principled position in view of real scenarios. The anarchist considers what the really existing states of affairs are and tries her best to maximize her autonomy within those states of affairs. Wolff writes:
Now, of course, an anarchist may grant the necessity of complying with the law under certain circumstances or for the time being. He may even doubt that there is any real prospect of eliminating the state as a human institution. But he will never view the commands of the state as legitimate, as having a binding moral force. In a sense, we might characterize the anarchist as a man without a country, for despite the ties which bind him to the land of his childhood, he stands in precisely the same moral relationship to “his” government as he does to the government of any other country in which he might happen to be staying for a time...
The anarchist is like “a man without a country” because he lives according to the principle of autonomy, the principle where he avers that he must obey his own law, and only obeys the laws of the land out of expediency or because they’re in accord with a law he’d give himself. Autonomy and authority are diametrically opposed, and the anarchist in principle believes it always best to choose to be autonomous to the extent that it’s possible.
... If autonomy and authority are genuinely incompatible, only two courses are open to us. Either we must embrace philosophical anarchism and treat all governments as non-legitimate bodies whose commands must be judged and evaluated in each instance before they are obeyed; or else, we must give up as quixotic the pursuit of autonomy in the political realm and submit ourselves (by an implicit promise) to whatever form of government appears more just and beneficent at the moment... It is out of the question to give up the commitment to moral autonomy... When I place myself in the hands of another, and permit him to determine the principles by which I shall guide my behavior, I repudiate the freedom and reason which give me dignity. I am then guilty of what Kant might have called the sin of willful heteronomy.
The anarchist seems to share some overlap with the libertarian. They are both ultimately committed to freedom and autonomy. But libertarians believe the way to get there is to minimize government and cut to the chase—they want to mate the king but without all the foreplay. Anarchists, however, believe there may be multiple avenues that will allow greater and greater freedom and autonomy. This is why it’s so hard to get a straight answer out of them when you ask, regarding making a more perfect world, “So what do you think the solution is?” Freedom can come in baby steps as well as leaps and bounds, and we’re invited to be suspicious of proposed avenues to get to a greater freedom that would seem to undermine the very thing we’re all after.
I am not an anarchist. I think there are other valuable principles worth fighting for than autonomy—but autonomy is a principle well worth preserving. Therefore, to the extent that anarchists fight for autonomy, they’re fellow travelers. What I do hope is taken seriously, however, not only by the anarchists but people no matter what their political affiliations are, is that there are always more pressing and proximal goals to attend than some final vision of society. There are any number of issues worth tackling as they’re really affecting us, including crime, health care, and poverty, and if we believe in principles like tending to the less fortunate, reducing suffering, and extending our fellow feeling to other human beings, then it ought to be reflected in behavior somehow.
Thanks for bringing up the subject, very interesting. This post describes a large part of why Nozick and libertarianism is so bad.
Having grown up in the worlds most progressive welfare state, I personally consider scenario 7 a fraud and a pipe dream meant to pacify the disadvantaged when in fact their states are just as much in bed with special interests and the privileged as any other.
Would you mind elaborating on how anarchism is about autonomy? I always saw it as fundamentally about scepticism of political authority, but without any prescriptive preferences beyond that. (including autonomy, collectivism, individualism etc)
The simplistic notion of anarchism as lawless and everyone following their own rules is not only a misunderstanding of theory but also flies directly in the face of everything known about actual stateless societies. (which do have laws, effective means to enforce them, and are highly aligned and ordered)
For a brief overview and some examples of law in stateless societies and contexts, check out this article:
http://benjaminwpowell.com/scholarly-publications/journal-articles/Public-choice-and-the-economic-analysis-of-anarchy.pdf
Mainly I wish we could drop the issues around libertarianism, anarchism, etc. For my part, I never find them informative. At best,they are inveighing against a straw-man version of the argument for states or sovereignty.
One of he indelible memories of my education is from a seminar with Gregory Kavka and David Gauthier, discussing the work of Thomas Hobbes. One thing they both agreed, and bemoaned how often the point was misunderstood, is that the Social Contract is *not* an agreement between the population and the Sovereign. Instead, it is an agreement entirely among the people – that they will hand over all their own means of violence to the Sovereign.
Hobbes is quite clear that the citizens realize full well how much they risk by creating a Sovereign. He is equally clear that they would never be motivated to do so, if there were any rational alternative. You may disagree with Hobbes’ views on man’s inhumanity to man, but if you do, you are making an empirical, anthropological claim. Not a philosophical or ethical one. You can deny that Hobbes’ premises are true, but you cannot deny his logical right to argue from them.
So there is at least one version of Social Contract theory which does not in any way assume that it is essential to the State that it rule over the public, exercise authority in any form, protect or defend private lives or property, or obtain a patterned outcome of resource allocation. The Sovereign exists only to create a “regional monopoly on the means of violence,” to borrow a phrase from Max Weber. Hobbes is prepared to call a wide variety of government behavior unjust. But – he says – it could be worse.
For my own part, I would say Hobbes also anticipates the objections raised by contemporary Libertarians. – e.g. that it is degrading to free people to be under anyone’s thumb. His answer is that without a Sovereign, we are already under each other’s thumb. And he does not pretend everything will be rosy under the king – only that it will cease being “red in tooth and claw,” to borrow from Blake.
There is a hard problem at the foundation of political philosophy, and I think Hobbes is the greatest example of facing up to it.. It’s an overused excuse in philosophy to say that sometimes one must “bite the bullet” and accept that an attractive theory has counter-intuitive consequences. But I would say the anarchists et. al. are only trying to dodge the bullet, and doing so very badly.
Death by government is by far the leading cause of non-natural death, even in modern times and with democratic governments. How do Hobbesians explain this? And how do they explain all the empirical evidence that show stateless societies aren’t anything like portrayed by Hobbes?
I’m a new listener and I find this material very entertaining. I hope Chomsky, Proudhon, Huemer, Caplan etc will be brought up eventually. Kooky “philosophers” like Peter Joseph and Stefan Molyneux would also be fun.
I am afraid you have missed the point. Hobbes is not trying to argue that the sovereign should be trusted to make life better for anyone else in the nation. His argument is that it takes only a few bad apples, either in the society itself or withing striking distance, to make life itself impossible. If a nation is unarmed then it is vulnerable from without. If arms are widespread, then opportunists can join up against each other.
Hobbes is perfectly aware that the government can go bad. He is not advising anybody to trust any government. His point is that there is no point at all in trusting any agency which does control the monopoly on means of violence.
How to get to a trustworthy political structure is still a subject of active research. But there is a well-known term for nations which do not maintain a monopoly on violence – they are called “failed states”. Like Somalia.
Again, there’s plenty of empirical evidence that show stateless societies aren’t anything like portrayed by Hobbes or how you seem to imagine them. Stateless societies aren’t “failed states”, and they aren’t “nations”.
Since you bring up Somalia, did you know…
Somalia has been better off across the board stateless than under a state, and compared to other comparable societies with states. This is not only in terms of basic measures: e.g. Somalia also has a comparatively vibrant and growing economy, some of the most technologically advanced and competitively priced telecommunications and internet services in the world etc etc.
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Somalia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Somalia
UNODC murder rates puts 87 countries with states before Somalia. Even if you count the people killed in the Somali civil war the numbers pale in comparison to deaths by government in e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#cite_note-UNODC_Homicide_Chart_by_Country-9
Somalia has a very interesting stateless, customary law polycentric legal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer
Does your criticism of anarchism/libertarianism work at the margin (government should let you smoke weed for reasons of autonomy/individual rights/etc) or does it only work as a criticism of the whole-hog utopian vision?
If it does work on the marginal anarch/libert claims, then are you advocating for (in principle) unbounded rule, of is there some other limit?
I think what this discussion misses is that the anarchist position isn’t merely life without the state. Anarchism is a critique of authority more than the state, though the state is conceived of as the ultimate example of authority, but anarchists are still supporters of collective action. It was Errico Malatesta, I believe, who once defined anarchy as freedom with solidarity. So us anarchists consider “Protection Agencies” to be psuedo-states, capitalistic enterprises to be little tyrannies, patriarchal gender relations as a proud barony (to use the wording Joseph Déjacque used in his critique of Proudhon’s sexism), and “outbreaks of violence and coercion” (to directly address Nozick) as attempts for rulers to assert themselves.
But none of us, not even the most radical individualists among us, such as myself and Max Stirner, would seek to leave us unprotected so that such assertion of rulership is “always possible”. Rather, we see communities and small groups as coming together as equals to defend ourselves. Stirner speaks of unions of egoists who all agree to cooperate with each other, Proudhon posits agro-industrial federations which would allow for cooperation, Rudolf Rocker seeks to create synicates. Each of these are seen as means to cooperate for communal good, oftentimes economically, but each of them are also means of defence. In the Spanish Civil War, the CNT had pushed back the state in most of Catalonia and Aragon, and, as an industrial union, they organized themselves into egalitarian militias through which they fought against Franco on the frontlines of the war. This isn’t a case where they simply allowed for violence and coercion to go unchecked, thus making it always possible, but they thought up ways of fighting violence and coercion in which each individual remains free rather than under the control of someone else.
So I don’t think Nozick gives enough credit to anarchist ingenuity and doesn’t allow for the mechanisms we actually propose in his characterization of anarchy. He presents it as a static state of a bunch of separate and atomistic individuals, yet no anarchist actually conceives of people atomistically or anarchy as a static state. And his presentation of anarchy is easy to attack and knock down, but actual anarchists advocate something more robust.
I don’t think Pritchett’s post really addresses Nozick’s argument in a meaningful way. The accusation that his claim is a non sequitir is used to dismiss the argument without giving it due consideration.
The bit Pritchett quotes of Nozick that the state arise “even though no one intended this or tried to bring it about” is not the main point against anarchism and perhaps the reason that he considers it to be a non sequitir. The same sentence (of Nozick) continues “…by a process which need not violate anyone’s rights” which is the meat of the argument and directly addresses the point that the State is morally illegitimate. Should the State arise through a non-rights-violating process (the argument goes) it is not necessarily morally illegitimate and the anarchist argument is defused. Anarchism remains plausible, but is no longer the sole moral option.
To defend against Nozick’s argument, there are only a few types of counter-attacks possible:
1) Nozick is factually wrong and the State will turn out to require violation of rights in practice (the theory may or may not hold internally, but fails to describe the possibilities of the real world)
2) Nozick is theoretically wrong and even under his conception there is some violation of rights that must occur to form the State (the theory doesn’t even hold internally)
3) There is more substance to the moral (il)legitimacy of the State than violations of rights (Nozick’s proposed process is insufficient to guarantee a moral State)
I think Pritchett does touch on a weakness in Nozick’s argument, which is that there is something of a rights violation occurring (or allowed to occur) in the proto-State forms of Protective Agencies or the Ultraminimal State. If this is enough to make the Ultraminimal State (or Protective Agencies) morally illegitimate as forms of the State (and Nozick rejects them on those grounds), then Nozick’s argument struggles. After all, the narrative where the State forms naturally and legitimately requires these intermediary forms to allow the Minimal State to be established. As the Minimal State is legitimate on the basis of a history of forming legitimately, any issue with the Protective Agency or the Ultraminimal State casts the whole narrative into doubt.
Nozick seems to be utilizing a more substantial conception of moral legitimacy than simply “Did process X violate anyone’s rights?” This criterion is necessary to defend a state against an anarchist critique, but he establishes a second criterion along the lines of “Does process X maximally defend rights?” to extend his narrative past the initial protective agency and provide impetus for the Minimal State. There are a few issues with this extension. It’s not clear that he needs it at all – perhaps there are forces pushing towards political equilibrium of a Minimal State (and further expansion would be critiqued on moral grounds, along the lines of the anarchist). If the expansion of the State is amoral (up to the Minimal State) then Nozick can rely on a very simple conception of legitimacy as the first criterion I have given. If on the other hand the expansion is driven by a moral process then there seems to be an extra argument needed as to what precisely the additional criteria for legitimacy are and why the Minimal State meets these criteria. Extending minimal protection to all persons and their property may be an improper use of the Minimal State – just as the Ultraminimal State leaves the property of some people and persons ill-protected or unprotected, the Minimal State (as Nozick conceives it) may poorly allocate protection. Perhaps those who naturally face lower chances of rights violations (such as a hermit in the wilderness) should receive less protection than those who face high chances of rights violations (such as a wealthy woman in the city). Nozick seems to have a conception of access to legal remedy as the meaning of “protection” in the Minimal State, but consider a view of “protection” as (say) having a police patrol regularly or a certain response time for police (so that in case of a rights violation the individual may call the police to respond and they are near enough to actually do so in a meaningful way). Under this alternate view of protection, Nozick’s critique of the Ultraminimal State seems much less potent, and the Minimal State seems much less likely to fall naturally into a single form.
I don’t think that either “Did process X violate anyone’s rights?” or “Does process X maximally defend rights?” addresses the anarchist critique at all. It certainly wouldn’t address Proudhon’s critique, which would require you to ask “Does institution X constitute an external constitution of collective force?”, or Stirner’s critique, which would require you to ask “Is process X or institution X founded upon a spook of the mind?”, or Tucker’s critique, which would require you to ask “Does process X create monopolies that create a class society such as capitalism?”, or Kropotkin’s critique, which would require you to ask “Does institution X allow for the sort of mutual aid that would maximize well being?”, or any of the other varied critiques anarchists have put forward, practically none of which make an argument that it’s rights that are important. Each anarchist critique focuses on something, such as Proudhon’s arguments about collective force and external constitution, and each one finds something else abhorrent about the state. Simply looking at rights will not bring you to an attack on those many critiques, especially since most rejected rights as a basis of looking at things, if not actively critiquing the idea of rights.
So, in the end, Nozick’s critique, while a bit more substantial than simply asking if the process of state creation will violate rights, is not substantial enough to address the anarchist position.
I’m grateful for the responses the initial post has generated, and I’d like to thank you all for your helpful comments. I’d also like to address some of the points that have been brought up some far. I’ll put them all together here in the following way, and I’ll try to paraphrase everyone’s comments as charitably as possible.
Objection 1. There’s talk here of how a welfare state could be a solution to a State with competing protective agencies. But whatever benefits the welfare state provides to people, it’s still more beholden to special interest groups than it is to the general population.
I’d second this, and do you one better. States aren’t beholden to any old interest group but the interest groups of the wealthiest citizens and to the wealthiest citizens themselves. There’s an interesting expose, for example, of the richest tier of American society and its influence on public policy in a book by Martin Gilens titled “Affluence and Influence.” Gilens’ research got a lot of traction not too long back when he published a paper that concluded that the United States is essentially a plutocracy (the news headlines in Washington Post read ‘oligarchy,’ but plutocracy’s more accurate).
That being said, all things being equal, I think welfare states–States where there are social programs, services, and policies that provide for the least advantaged–are better than States that don’t provide such programs. I’m not saying there couldn’t be a better system. There could be. But as a U.S. citizen if I had my choice to live in one of those States or the other, I’d choose something more approximating a welfare state. Increasing the quality of life–improving health, education, job and income opportunities–might mean making more uses of government than fewer. For the world we live in, at least. And also I’d just like to say that if you wouldn’t want this for your country, you’re under no obligation to support it. I’m talking about what I would want as an American citizen particularly.
Objection 2. The original article says something about anarchism being about autonomy. But anarchism is probably better understood as skepticism of political authority and doesn’t prescribe anything in particular, even autonomy.
Anarchism is such a broad term that I doubt you’d find any consensus on what it means. Same goes for a lot of other movements, including religious movements. (I’m thinking now of Christianity, for example.) But as for what I wrote about, the formulation is Robert Paul Wolff’s. According to Wolff, anarchism is about people governing themselves, which is what autonomy is. That’s the sense I wrote about.
Incidentally, I should say that the general formulation in which anarchism just is skepticism of authority in whatever forms it may take sounds an awfully lot like Classical Liberalism to me. And in fact, the original liberals were accused of being anarchists so it should come as no surprise. There’s a really good book by George H. Smith titled “The System of Liberty,” in which there’s a discussion about how Classical Liberalism was a view suspicious of authority and in favor of maximal freedom but which since its inception took two different forms, one favoring a minimal State and the other form favoring a State that provided for its people through social welfare programs.
Objection 3. The conception of anarchism in the article is not robust enough. The discussion misses that anarchism is, both, as in Objection 2, a critique of authority and often manifests itself as a movement that has social solidarity as its core.
Anarchism is skeptical authority and on at least one formulation (Wolff’s) about maximizing the possibility for a person to govern himself or herself. And it’s correct that anarchism has and does take many forms. One of the prominent examples the commenter mentioned is the activities revolving around the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell (whom I revere) wrote a fascinating book titled “Homage to Catalonia” about his fight alongside the anarchists in Spain and about he complications between the Western powers, the Communist powers, the Spanish Republicans, the Fascists, and the anarchists and anarcho-socialists. It can serve as source material for anyone who’s interested in anarchism in terms of a social solidarity movement, or as a form of socialism, a bottom-up socialism.
And for all my shortcomings in the article, for all that I’ve left out in terms of the possible permutations of anarchism, there’s an exhaustive book titled “Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism” by Pete Marshall, and the book runs through all the major figures, finds all the anarchism that it’s possible to squeeze out of major social, political, and religious movements, and then talks about how anarchism can be individualistic and collectivistic and anywhere else along that spectrum. I neglected to mention these possibilities in the original article because space wouldn’t allow it and in any case it would take me too far afield the discussion about Nozick and anarchism, which is what the article is about.
And I guess I should go ahead and mention it while I’m at it, that anarchism does not only have beef with State power but with economic power, and can even be concerned with the kind of power a teacher could have over a student, a parent over a child, and so on. But Nozick wrote about States, so that’s where my discussion is confined to.
Objection 4. Nozick is looking for how a State could arise without violating rights, and if it could then anarchism is defused. The only way anyone can criticize Nozick’s position is to show that States factually or on Nozick’s theoretical grounds will violate people’s rights or that the violation of rights is not the only thing that makes States bad.
The primary concern with this objection is that I didn’t take seriously enough Nozick’s attempt to discharge anarchism. I’ll do my best to make my qualms explicit. I guess what I’m saying is that to an anarchist, at least of Wolff’s stripe (which by no means is the only stripe etc.), States by their very nature violate people’s rights. To wit, they violate the most important right to an anarchist: they don’t allow people to govern themselves. People ought to be able to rule themselves, according to the anarchist, but States claim that they have powers over and above individuals. States can enforce contracts and laws, and they can say who can and can’t be harmed. (Liberal democracies say nobody can be harmed, in principle.) And to the anarchist, anyone or any institution claiming that it ought to be able to govern people is illegitimate because it’s just a foundational principle for the anarchist that people ought to govern themselves. So, according to the anarchist, Nozick never can show that the State can be morally legitimate because by its very nature its morally illegitimate since it violates the most important right of all: telling people what they can and can’t do with themselves, and telling people what laws they should and shouldn’t obey.
For the record, again, I’d just like to say I’m explicating one version of the anarchist position, but I’m not an anarchist myself. In my view, it would be great to let people govern themselves as much as we can, but there are some circumstances where it may be necessary to enforce rules and laws, especially when it might mean that more people on par will suffer if we don’t. Trying to reduce suffering, increase quality of life, extend care and fellow feeling toward other people, be fair with others, and so on, are all competing principles. I don’t pretend to have the magic elixir for any of this. I just meant to say that the desire for self-governance is in no way discharged by Nozick’s argument for the minimal State, and Nozick arguing for a minimal State on grounds of fairness and protection of rights opens up a whole other can of worms toward other State arrangements that would even be more fair and rights-preserving, especially in view of the way the current political and economic arrangements are now.
Thank you for the response, and thank you for mentioning “Demanding the Impossible”. I’ve heard only good things about that (it’s certainly a better narrative than Black Flame’s conception of anarchism that would reject anyone remotely individualistic, such as Stirner or Tucker, from being anarchist), though I haven’t had the pleasure of having the time to read it with school and the vast amount of primary source works by anarchists in history I’ve been trying to read. My objection wasn’t ultimately against you, but against Nozick himself. The most my objection would consist of against you specifically is that you didn’t include the objection I was bringing up. I thought what you wrote up was actually very well written.
Thank you very much for elaborating, very interesting! The following is just a disorganized bunch of stuff I felt like bringing up:
The funniest part about minarchists like Nozick, that I really can’t get over, is how their list of things which are allegedly OK for the state to do is completely arbitrary. If the state can be justified, it’s *really* unclear why the welfare state (or the warfare state or whatever) couldn’t be. It really seems as if minarchists just pick stuff they like and then come up with crummy abstract rationalizations after the fact.
One important point which is often overlooked is that, even if you could somehow justify the creation of a state for some people at some point, that doesn’t how explain others who had nothing to do with it could still be legitimately subjected to it. (Lysander Spooner made this argument) E.g. just because Alice signed made a consensual and completely uncontroversial agreement with Acme doesn’t mean Acme can force Bob, or Alices great-great-great grandchildren, or whoever, to honor the same contract.
It seems you’re still to some degree clinging to a conception of anarchy which is about people governing themselves and without means to enforce laws. I urge you to reconsider this conception and look at all the empirical examples of governance and law enforcement in anarchic contexts.
As a minarchist, I can weigh in on the psychology of the position, although I’m sure others will vary in their thinking.
For me, politics is the extension of individual ethics across the whole society. I personally think prohibitions on the initiation of force are the most important constraint of individual ethics, which right away limits the State to a minarchist or anarchist conception (or at the very least a Classic Liberal State taken seriously in all policies, not just civil liberties).
One thing I’ve started to come around on (perhaps surprisingly) is the welfare state. Obviously coercive funding is problematic and is the chief moral objection. If you set that aside, and assume the minimal State is donated some money or somehow runs a surplus, it seems entirely consistent with non-initiation of force to give it away. It may be problematic on paternalist grounds, but that’s not a very strong critique in my opinion.
As a result, my thinking has started to shift from “the smallest State” towards “the least violent State” or some similar conception.