At Cato Unbound, economist Peter Leeson has summarized some of his innovative research showing that the anarchy is, at least in many situations, superior to government.
Peter's post is followed by responses by Bruce Benson (himself a leading libertarian anarchist scholar), Dani Rodrik (a prominent liberal economist), and Randall Holcombe, a nonanarchist libertarian scholar. Peter replies to the critics here (quite effectively, in my judgment).
I know there is a tendency among many to respond to defenses of anarchism with snickering or derision. Given all the harm caused by government (mass murder, genocide, repression, war, and so on), this tendency should be resisted. We should at least consider the possibility that there is a better way to organize society - that we can get all or most of the benefits of government while avoiding its often massive costs. Scholars such as Leeson, Benson, and David Friedman have made a serious theoretical and empirical case that anarchy is superior to government, even (perhaps especially) under modern conditions.
On balance, I remain unpersuaded (or at least far from wholly convinced). I will try to explain why in a follow-up post. However, I do buy the argument (advanced by Peter in his interesting paper on Somalia) that anarchy may be the best feasible alternative for some parts of the world. And I also believe that technology and economic institutions might develop to the point where this is true of more and more areas.
In any event, the case for anarchism needs to be taken seriously rather than just derided. If you are at all interested in anarchism, libertarianism, political economy, or the justification of government, you should check out Peter Leeson's essay and the responses it has generated.
UPDATE: I see that many commenters are confused about the definitions of "government" and "anarchy" as those terms are used in this post and in Leeson's(and also by most social scientists, legal scholars, and political theorists). Let me clarify. "Government" is simply an entity with a monopoly (or at least overwhelming preponderance) of force over a particular territory, usually financed by some system of coercive taxation. "Anarchy" is simply the absence, in a given area, of government as defined above. Thus, it is inaccurate (or at least misleading) to use "government" as a synonym for any and all forms of social organization or to claim that any system of lawmaking or law enforcement necessarily equates to government. People can use words any way the see fit, of course. However, using them in a way that basically defines anarchy out of existence is both unlikely to lead to a productive discussion and also contrary to the way the terms are used in most of the serious literature on the subject - by anarchist and pro-government scholars alike.
UPDATE #2: I have corrected the previously faulty link to Holcombe's response essay.
During the Spanish Civil war the Republicans stood up a Anarchist Brigade. The most prominent reason for their poor performance the lack of organization. Neither would the government wouldn't pay them until they participated in the command structure.
I don't think that proves very much. In any event, the left-wing anarchists of the Spanish Civil War were in reality quite statist in practice if not in theory, as Bryan Caplan shows here.
umm, professor, that's what government is -- societal organization. Wave your magic wand and make federal, state and local government disappear, and the very next thing you're going to do is request that your local home security company increase the rate at which it patrols your neighborhood. Or maybe you won't, because you'll free-ride off of your next-door neighbor.
Here in sunny Southern California our water comes from the Feather, Colorado and Owens Rivers. I recommend you research the amount of government needed to support the population density of an area that gets the same amount of rain annually as Morocco. How's the water supply reliability and safety in anarchic areas of Somalia and Colombia?
Final point: Leeson's rebuttal relies on the existence of an international system of trade to rebut Rodrik's claim of lack of scaling. Leeson massively misses the point -- the international trade system consists of fewer than 100 major actors, all of whom are fixed in place. It's not like the US (Russia, France, China, India) can run and hide from its responsibilities. International trade is precisely the kind of scheme that Rodrik claims can work due to the small number of actors and the repeated number of contacts.
Seriously, though, his definition of an anarchical society appears problematic (no police force pre-19th century England = type of anarchy? Really?). Moreover, his use of SOmalia and 19th century pirates as evidence that the developped world could function well and in fact would be better off with NO government is utterly ridiculous. As long as the "empirical" scholarship continues to be this silly, I think we can all safely continue to snicker.
does lesson not get that his empirical idea that 'for most of the world's history many areas were under anarchy' doesn't convince anyone...since most of world history has been tragic.
the idea that the international community gets along without a supernatural arbiter of international law is also stupid- does he think that if one existed it would be worse? is that an empircal argument?
somalia has done better under anarchy than before-well wouldn't it have gotten even better with a good government? just because anarchy may be better than somalia's old government does that mean anarchy is better than our government?
his real agenda-be counter conventional wisdom-feel intellectually superior for it even when what your saying is a wildly gross over exaggeration
The history of government has been pretty tragic as well.
the idea that the international community gets along without a supernatural arbiter of international law is also stupid- does he think that if one existed it would be worse? is that an empircal argument?
It proves his point that large-scale cooperation is possible without government. And, yes, there are good reason to believe that a world governmetn that could enforce international "law" would be worse than the status quo. Consider the potential for tyranny and rent-seeking inherent in any such government.
Actually, the relevant actors (as Leeson makes clear) are the thousands (perhaps millions) of private traders in these markets. Leeson's point is that these actors have for centuries come to fairly successful arrangements often without government backing or interference.
It's not the only form of societal organization, however, and often not the best available to fulfill a given function.
It would also be even better if Santa Claus waved a magic wand and made all the Somalis happy. As Leeson emphasizes, "good" or even tolerable government is probably impossible in Somalia under current conditions. For Somalia, anarchy may be the best feasible alternative.
just because anarchy may be better than somalia's old government does that mean anarchy is better than our government?
Leeson doesn't make any such claim.
What is this supposed to prove about anarchy?
I'm left, after any defense of anarchy, with the overwhelming impression that the authors have never been unpopular. Why? Because anarchy is your sixth-grade gym class locker room. Those who have power (usually physical) use it to exert control, or merely to indulge their own fantasies. Those who don't are split between those who toady to those with power and those who are exploited. And the moment people cooperate with the idea that the society as a whole is better off if they do so, that's government.
Anarchy defenses fall into two classes: either they define some unusual style of government as anarchy or they indulge in the same level of wishful thinking that led Karl Marx to believe communism was the road to Utopia.
I don't see why this is true, unless you are using the words "anarchy" and "government" in in a very different sense from the way most people do. Most people use "government" to mean an institution that has a monopoly of force over a particular territory. Anarchy is simply the absence of such an institution in a given area. It does not preclude all sorts of other social organizations, including families, nonmonopolistic protective agencies, and so on.
Because anarchy is your sixth-grade gym class locker room. Those who have power (usually physical) use it to exert control, or merely to indulge their own fantasies. Those who don't are split between those who toady to those with power and those who are exploited.
Of course the same things happen with great frequency under government. The question is which form of organization can limit their occurrence more effectively. Rhetorical flourishes do not even begin to provide an answer.
Not true. There was no government in large parts of the world (much of medieval Europe; north America before Columbus; some parts of Africa today, and many, many, other cases), for much of history.
His point is that they did these things without a territorial monopoly of force and without coercive taxation, which are the hallmarks of a state. Separation of powers, law enforcement, and social insurance all can and do exist without government (which is not to say taht government can't sometimes perform these functions more effectively than other organizations).
With Africa, we're back to the "Somalia" argument, which has a lot of unanswered questions (Where is he getting the before and after data? What was going on in the few years before the government collapsed?). The Somalia example wouldn't even be generalizable, since all it proves (if it proves anything) is that no government is better than a really bad government.
But ask yourself - would you want to live in any of those places or times if you were weak, poor, or otherwise disfavored? Do you think you would be able to significantly better your situation? Do you think that modern societies advancements could have developped under those conditions? Do you think society could continue to advance scientifically and economically under those conditions?
Like I said, I will continue to snicker until the proponents of anarchism actually show some contact with historical and modern reality.
There were not governments in these areas in the sense meant by Leeson, myself, and others who use that term in the conventional way it is used by scholars: a territorial monopoly of force backed by coercive taxation. THAT is what I am writing about and what Leeson is arguing against.
That depends on the available alternatives.
To be against government is as ridiculous as being against crime. Rather, the goal should be to have good government and low crime.
The vast majority of people who say they are anarchists are really communists who aren't even honest enough to call themselves socialists.
I did not say that NONE of them had a government. Rather that many of them none. Linking to the unusual cases of the Aztecs and Iroquois does not disprove that point.
North American tribes did not, to my knowledge, exact taxes, although they did use coercion to enforce their society's norms, but we also don't know much about their pre-modern history and any tragedies they might have suffered. Lets stick with the ones we did know about. South American societies used coercive taxation. As did China. As did Egypt and Ethiopia and other premodern states in Africa. As did Persia. As did every other society that advanced technologically and economically.
Yeah, I'm sticking with the fact that most of history is the history of government and the part that isn't, we don't know very much about because they weren't advanced enough or organized enough to write anything down.
And seriously, what alternative would be worse than post-government Somalia, unless it was Somalia immediately before it collased into a stateless country?
What medieval rulers (at least many of them) lacked was not coercive taxation but territorial monopolies of force. See, e.g., the account here. The Mafia and other private organizations also sometimes forcibly extract payments from people. That does not make them a government.
The first point is false given thousands of years of history to the contrary. The second is an empirical prediction that may or may not be true.
There is actually quite extensive scholarship on nonstate societies ranging from medieval Europe to various Indian tribes, and many others. We in fact know a great deal about them.
And seriously, what alternative would be worse than post-government Somalia, unless it was Somalia immediately before it collased into a stateless country?
Actually, there have been a great many governments worse than post-government Somalia - consider those of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and quite a few others. Of course there have been many governments better than post-government Somalia as well. However, it is unlikely that such a government could have been established in Somalia in the 1990s (or today), whereas it is very clear that Somalia could and did for a time have a government that was worse than anarchy.
Actually, at least in the US and Canada, the vast majority of self-proclaimed anarchists today are libertarians, not socialists, and certainly not communists.
What current state with a government would be less desirable to live in than medieval Europe as a peasant?
So the case for anarchy is that it is possible for governments to be worse?
His point is that they [pirates] did these things without a territorial monopoly of force and without coercive taxation, which are the hallmarks of a state.
But the organization did have a monopoly on force on the ship, which was the relevant "territory." And enforced agreements about how to split up the loot are logically the same as coercive taxation. It doesn't matter if Peg-leg Pete grabbed more gold doubloons than Black Jack. Pete has to share according to the rules.
No, I'm talking about the fact that neither Kings nor lords had a territorial monopoly of force (nor did anyone else in much of Europe). The link was supposed to point to this article.
So the case for anarchy is that it is possible for governments to be worse?
Not that wasn't the point at all. I referred to Stalin, et al., merely to respond to another commenter's assertion that nothing could be worse than post-government Somalia except for the govt that Somalia had immediately before.
But the organization did have a monopoly on force on the ship, which was the relevant "territory." And enforced agreements about how to split up the loot are logically the same as coercive taxation.
I'm not sure it did have a monopoly on the ship. Even if it did, a ship is much easier to exit (anytime you come into port) than most governmental territories. And unanimous agreement, even if enforced, is not "logically the same as coercive taxation."
(BTW, I'm really not sure what you mean by "territorial monopoly on force". Do you mean monopoly on LEGITIMATE organized force, or any force? Because if the latter, then the United States doesn't have a government, either - see GANGS.)
Also, and I guess this is the Somalia example people refer to, but does a gang/mafia/tribal warlord count as a government or not?
me:
just because anarchy may be better than somalia's old government does that mean anarchy is better than our government?
Leeson doesn't make any such claim.
my response: yes he does..hes trying to argue anarchy is better than government...his argument is that exaggerated...hes not talking about revising government or small government..hes talking about anarchy.
it is true that YOU don't make such a claim because you qualified your position by saying anarchy may be better only for some parts of the world at some times..but lesson has made no such qualifications
some more arguments:
1. what if we replace pirates with another self governed outlaw group..drug dealers....is the way they make their transactions not relevant to this discussion (they are another form of anarchy..which is one reason why many people argue for the legalization or partial legalization of certain drugs. in fact wouldn't drug dealers be a much more modern example and probably a much more demonstrative one?
2. you describe lesson's point about the supernatural arbiter of international law as saying that:
the international community cooperates despite not having an enforceable international law. thus-anarchy can work
professor-do you really think the international community 'cooperates" better than say-the states with each other (which cooperate under the governmental rubric of federalism)
3. arn't mr. lesson's cherry picked examples really just anacdotal?
is your opinion-really-that
historically-anarchical peoples got along better-were happier than-those who had a government..or that we can somehow determine that they would have all other things being equal?
You chide commenters for not using the politico-economic definition of anarchic capitalism, and the corresponding definition of government as a force monopoly with coercive taxation. Which is fine, we certainly need to define our terms clearly so we can have reasonable discussions.
But then you seem to switch definitions yourself when you claim that government causes harm that anarchy does not: to wit, "mass murder, genocide, repression, war, and so on".
Medieval and earlier European and pre-Columbian American societies were, under the economic definition, anarchic, as you have discussed. But they certainly practiced "mass murder, genocide, repression, war, and so on". Indeed, all of these harms seem to predate the emergence of government by a long time. So how can you say government causes them, or that anarchy alleviates them?
Why? There is no difficulty in leaving the US, or most other modern democratic countries. You may not like the choices you have of where to go, but that's not the fault of the place you leave.
They did not practice mass murder and genocide on anything lke the scale that many governments have (none of the anarchic societies massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent people or - to my knowledge - sought to exterminate whole ethnic groups). As for the other harms, I did not claim that government was the ONLY possible cause of them. However, anarchy would alleviate the large share of those harms that is caused by government - which is not to say that anarchy is the only possible source of alleviation or doesn't create other harms of its own.
No.
Why? There is no difficulty in leaving the US, or most other modern democratic countries. You may not like the choices you have of where to go, but that's not the fault of the place you leave.
Most governments control a much larger territory than a pirate ship and don't let you take all your property with you (particularly landed property) if you choose to leave. This makes exit much easier from an 18th century pirate ship than from almost any modern government.
Governments of all modern nation-states exist on the premise of national sovereignty, yet globalization in all its forms, especially pervasive instant global media like the Internet, makes that underlying premise more and more tenuous every year. We live in a world where international commerce and cultural commingling is taken for granted, where the U.S. can't enforce many of its own laws and policies, even putatively domestic ones, without stepping on the toes of other nations, and where organized troublemakers of all stripes (John Robb's "global guerillas") have learned not only how to circumvent state and government authority with impunity but to directly challenge that authority.
Those are an awful lot of genies that we have to chase down and stuff back into their bottles in order to make the world safe once more for traditional nation-states, and their governments. I have my doubts about the long-term viability of even the strongest nation-states, such as ours. Many nation-states have already effectively succumbed to this, and no doubt many more will follow.
Leeson doesn't make any such claim.
my response: yes he does..hes trying to argue anarchy is better than government...his argument is that exaggerated...hes not talking about revising government or small government..hes talking about anarchy.
Yes, he is arguing anarchy is better than govt. But NO he did NOT say that it is better simply because Somalia's preexisting government was worse than it later anarchy.
Drug dealers, unlike 18th century pirates mostly operate in territories under the control of governments. Many of the drug dealers' more unsavory practices are in large part caused by governments' "war on drugs." While I think that evidence of drug dealers' practices is to some extent relevant, it doesn't tell us nearly as much about anarchy as evidence from a group that truly did live outside government control.
You mean if I choose to emigrate I forfeit my property in the US? Could you cite the relevant laws?
And how do you exit from a pirate ship at sea?
Yes, he is arguing anarchy is better than govt.
Then he is a fool.
However, this was not universally so. Kroeber wrote a fascinating ethnography about the Indians of the far northwest of California, riverine inhabitants of the lower Klamath and Trinity Rivers who not only possessed none of the elements mentioned above -- admitting into their conceptual universe no organization larger than the individual -- but also parceled out all things of value such as land and fishing holes into private ownership, enforcing this division by a well-defined law involving negotiations between the affected parties!
See here for Kroeber's complete ethnography on these unusual California peoples, in particular read this on the "Quality of Civilization," this on "Principles of Law," and this on the native concept of war. Kroeber notes that "woe to the victors!" for the Yurok et al. might be considered to have taken the place of the Western tradition of "vae victis!"
It's very interesting that the highly individualistic, private-property oriented peoples of the far northwest of California are basically the only Indians of California to have retained the bulk of their ancestral lands. (As Kroeber points out, originally the Indian inhabitants of the region privately owned up to about a mile from the river on both sides -- which is indeed exactly what the Yurok reservation, as a for instance, encompasses.)
As for pre-modern societies not trying to extinguish whole ethnic groups - First, ethnicity as it is currently understood was not a concept those societies knew. Second, tell that to the men, women, and children who were slaughtered or starved out when one of those premodern societies conquered another.
Point 1: "anarchy is, at least in many situations, superior to government".
Response: Disputed as to the word "many". If limited to some places, for some people, we can probably get agreement among the commenters.
Point 2: "We should at least consider the possibility that there is a better way to organize society - that we can get all or most of the benefits of government while avoiding its often massive costs."
Response: Void for vagueness. "Possible" includes outcomes so rare that they're not really worth considering. It's possible, for example, that everyone in the US would no longer commit any crime or infraction starting at midnight tonight, so we could get the benefit of safety without the cost of prisons or police. But I ain't holding my breath. You need to be a lot more concrete as to the alternative organizations under consideration if you don't want snickers.
Point 3: "anarchy may be the best feasible alternative for some parts of the world."
response: for whom? The young males who get to collect rents instead of paying taxes, or the women and elderly? Also, by what criteria should US citizens make that determination and lobby their government to enact policies to perpetuate that state of anarchy?
Point 4: "technology and economic institutions might develop to the point where this is true of more and more areas."
Response: Ya, right. See, eg, the current meltdown in the credit and residential real estate markets. And the Russian Communist state just melted away. Or, more succintly, snicker.
Sorry, but I'm unconvinced. Drug dealers (and the Mafia) murder each other, not because the government has a war on drugs, but because violence is the only means of retribution and deterrence. Drug dealers and the mafia live just as much outside the law as pirates. If one group encroaches on the territory of another or steals from another, they have no justice system to petition. There may be agreements, but they are only enforceable through violence.
And the civilized world was just as much at war with pirates as we are with drug dealers. Why? Because pirates "operate[d] in territories under the control of governments," such as Blackbeard in the British-controlled Caribbean and South Carolina.
Why do drug dealers choose to kill each other while at least some pirates ran their ship like a private government? Perhaps pirate in-fighting was particularly costly, as it could lead to mutiny on a ship between warring factions, while it's much easier for one drug dealer to just drive up and shoot a rival. Perhaps members of a seaworthy pirate crew (who are skilled) are harder to replace than brain-dead drug dealers (who are not). Who knows, but there is nothing mystical about outlawing drugs that makes drug dealers rely almost exclusively on violent means. It's anarchy in motion. I'd like to hear a serious explanation of how the "War on Drugs" causes these two groups of outlaws to behave so differently.
I agree with Francis's point about voidness for vagueness, though. I'm not sure it's possible to compare "government", in the abstract, with "anarchy", in the abstract, rather than with some reasonably definite proposed class of alternatives.
As Ella points out, they lacked the ability to do so. And of course most medieval societies did not deal with a variety of ethnic groups. To the extent they did they had no problem with murdering, expelling, or strongly discriminating against them. Why did all those Jews leave England(1290), and France(1182), and Spain(1492)?
Suffice it to say that it's far from clear to me that Somin's definition of "government" would be accepted by anyone who hasn't thoroughly drunk of the Ayn Rand kool-aid.
Funny you should say that, because as a drinker of the "kool-aid" I'm the only one rejecting Somin's definiton on the grounds that it does not distinguish between limited and unlimited government, where the limiting principle is that of individual rights.
All the "tragic" parts of the history of government pertain to uncontrolled types of government; these are all the various tyrannies, including unlimited democracy. When governments are constrained, things aren't so tragic; that's the root of the truism that limited governments (usually misidentified as "democracies") historically don't go to war with each other.
In any event, the case for anarchism needs to be taken seriously rather than just derided.
There are no grounds here or in any of the cited articles to substantiate that claim. Anarchism is the political equivalent of the Flat Earth Society; it's not even wrong.
Anarchy is an unstable situation, which varies only in the rate of speed with which it is replaced by government of one form or another... not in the inevitability of it.
IMO, the need for government is caused by the "bad people" in the world. A world full of people like you, Ilya, and me would allow anarchy to exist, because we are decent people who would negotiate and cooperate in good faith. Hopefully, maybe in a millennium or two, the number of "bad people" will be so few that anarchy or minarchy can flourish. Until then, we're stuck with leviathan.
I sympathize with anarchists, and consider myself a moderate libertarian. I'm a moderate libertarian because I don't believe that the bulk of humanity is ready for true self-governance. I'm not always sure that I'm ready for it.
Anarchism is libertarianism reductio ad absurdum. It's a nice model for considering the idea that less government is better than more government, but falls apart very quickly when you look at how real societies function. On the American frontier, for example, where formal governments sometimes did not exist, the resulting anarchy, murder, rape, etc. soon led to the formation of what were effectively governmental bodies.
The South Carolina Regulators of the 1760s, for example, formed because the tidewater government of South Carolina had failed to provide any criminal justice system. Murder, torture, robbery, rape, the kidnapping of little girls for the sexual use of the biggest thugs--all were common. The Regulators were effectively the first government in these counties, created by the victims.
In Gold Rush California, many of the mining camps had no lawful government for many months. The people organized popular tribunals to hear disputes and punish crimes--sometimes with hanging. From all that I have read, they were no worse than the formal courts of the period in their concern with justice and due process. But while they formed spontaneously, governments they were, and they were definitely monopolies on the use of force in a particular area.
I get very frustrated when I see otherwise intelligent people twisting the definitions of "government" so that they can pretend that The Probability Broach is science fiction, not fantasy. The core problem is that human beings are, on average, not brilliant, short-term, and prone to evil. The stupid ones don't think through what the consequences of their actions might be; some are so short-term in their thinking that they don't care that today's cocaine snort may be a lifetime of addiction; and a few are genuinely evil--the kind of person that enjoys torturing people to death.
I think the reason that anarchist ideas are so popular with computer geeks and intellectuals is that it is a population for whom these ideas might actually work: really smart people who are generally long-term planners. Fine. But what about a normal human population? You know, the sorts who take up smoking, and don't even try to stop; the kind who don't use condoms, even when they know that there's a fair number of people carrying HIV, HPV, herpes, etc.; the kind who will not wear seatbelts when they drive a car; the kind who spend the contents of their 401k fund when they change jobs because retirement is decades away.
The only way that this would happen is if "bad people" (in which category I would include the stupid and the short-term thinkers) reproduce more slowly than other people. From all that I have seen, the reverse is true.
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I said it might take "a millennium or two." The human species may be barely recognizable by then, considering technological change.
Anarchy is better in "many" situations, where "many" means this list of gedankenexperiments he has prepared.
I (and most of the other commenters) define government different than "many" people do, where "many" means Prof. Somin himself.
Prof. Somin claims that we're defining anarchy out of existence, but he (along with his purported legions of social scientists) defines government as bad to begin with. Look at the terms he uses: a monopoly of force, financed by coercive taxation.
Force and coercion are here code for "people doing what they don't want to do", which seems bad at first glance. Until you actually think and realize that that's the whole point of collective living. I give up some of my options, you give up some of yours, we all agree to not get our own way some of the time, and we all do better as a result.
Most people grow out of the "No! Mine!" stage around 2 or 3 and realize these things on some level. But evidently not all.
According to his interpretion of this defintion of government, it appears that large swaths of urban America lack a government, as did parts of the South during lynching's heyday. But these examples are somehow less convenient than Caribean pirates and present day Somalia.
Anarchy for thee, but not for me. So in other words, it's of for others to be raped and massacred in the quest for utopia.
North Korea. More African dictatorships than I care to list. Perhaps Cuba.
I agree with almost everything you say, but here you clearly have an excessively high opinion of intellectuals. Examples abound, both real and fictional, which show this is not true. In fiction, you can look at the part Brave New World which described the experiment of having just Alphas live together. It was an abject failure. In reality, you can just look at many academic departments, which while having technically a chair have all important decisions made by the faculty as a whole. It's the same story with the intellectuals as with the non-intellectuals--the strong dominate and impose their ideas on others.
For a fair number of people in our society, long-term thinking isn't, "What do I have to do complete a doctoral program several years from now so that I can get a good job." It is, "Do I have enough milk for breakfast?"
I wonder, though, how we should view this in an evolutionary perspective. Anarchy did exist in the past. Yet, for the most part was driven out. The very most successful nations and empires were the most government oriented.
Can we say that anarchy is simply the weaker species?
Sure the Neanderthal likely had some advantages over the homo sapien but the latter's advantages spurred him into continuing fruition.
In the clean halls of intellectual consideration anarchy might seem better or well-suited. But the lab of history suggests not only otherwise but decisively so. In the survival of the political species anarchy was one of the first to die out.
It might thrive in a controlled setting but not in the wild.
sure-pirates had a great socicety..they did little work and prayed off the goods of the govermental society.
if your going to aruge anarchy did wonders for the pirates...than its equally logical to argue that government did wonders for hitler
hitler ran a GREAT by that logic-his society (the ones in power) prayed off the innocent.
I remember reading, many years ago, a libertarian ode to the virtues of anarchy, recounting how Ireland didn't have a centralized government, and in a sense, not a government at all, which made it so very difficult for the English to defeat them. But the English did eventually defeat the Irish, and at enormous suffering to the Irish.
I fear that in the lab of history, relatively free societies may not do well against the totalitarian ones. Imagine if Hitler had been a run of the mill totalitarian power mad dictator, and hadn't driven Jews out of Germany. We (I mean, those of us who hid our Jewish ancestors well enough to still be alive today), wouldn't remember the success of the Manhattan Project, but perhaps the Heisenberg/Einstein/Fermi/Teller hydrogen bomb project instead.
There's a certain level of pragmatism that has to be applied to some of the decisions we make. It would be a bad thing indeed to end up in a permanent authoritarian police state as the cost of beating Islamofascism. But it would be a worse thing to end up in the America disturbingly portrayed in Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin.
It seems the vast majority of your audience is completely ignorant of the wealth of literature on this subject in political science, economics, and (at least since Nozick revived it three decades ago) political philosophy. None of them have even shown a glimmer of awareness of fellow Conspirator Randy Barnett's tome, The Structure of Lberty, which has an entire chapter devoted in some detail to the workings of a "polycentric legal order," (if I correctly recall his euphemism for anarchy).
Much of this discussion is at the level of a cocktail party conversation: "Ohhh...anarchy! That's very bad, isn't it?"
Not as much "That's very bad, isn't it?" as much as "Yes, but how has it actually worked out?"
(BTW, Leeson's unpublished study is pretty weak, since he seems to be cherry picking data from whichever source tells the best story for a given indicator. WHO's available before-and-after data actually tells a different story.)
I'd say the criticism is on a higher level than the advocacy. Pirate ships, Somalia, trade credit arrangements. This is sophomoric.
It seems to me that however things might be in an ideal world, we imperfect human beings are stuck with this type of organization and are going to have to deal with it one way or the other. If we don't continue to have a different organization we call "the government" powerful enough to keep it in check, it will be happy to move in and take over.
Best case: I agree with the idea that human beings are naturally social animals, naturally organized into societies, and that government of some kind is a necessity. Ideally society has many levers other than force to deal with problems -- government by law is far from the best approach since law is ultimately based on force -- but some problem admit to no other approach.
That being said, Ilya's, and Leeson's definition of anarchy, that it is practically any system of governance that does not fit the rigid centralized property based systems that developed in Europe over the last thousand years or so (and maybe existed during the Roman Empire to a lesser extent) is so vague as to be meaningless. His shocking ignorance of pre-Columbian societies and the very complex, ordered and hierachecal structures they developed often without ever developing the concept of private property to any meaningful extent demonstrates that he simply does not want his beautiful theory destroyed by inconvenient facts.
He even contends that mass slaughter is impossible without a highly organized government. Again he simply ignores history to make this wildly inaccuarrate statement. I doubt there is a history of a single civilization that does not involve the slaughter of a neighboring rival to the last man, woman and child at some point in their history.
Or perhaps you don't understand the libertarian anarchist position. I find it intellectually satisfying, but completely irrelevant to human beings. It makes great science fiction, but the real world is another matter.
Both anarchist socialism and anarchist capitalism contain arguments that have a little bit of merit. These arguments are valuable for understanding how our society works, but are completely absurd for a real society.
Anarchist socialists argue that without a government to protect private property rights, no one would have more property than they could personally protect. The correct part of the claim is that governments do socialize the cost of protecting property. If Bill Gates didn't have a government to protect Microsoft's copyrights, and Bill Gates' house, he would have to hire private security firms to do so.
This is fine, until you discover that you have to hire more guards to watch the first set of guards. (I worked at a company that never had a theft problem--until we hired security guards, who stole the microwave oven, a typewriter, and other miscellaneous stuff the very first weekend!) At a certain point, it becomes cheaper to create a government to protect your stuff than to hire people yourself.
Billionaires definitely benefit from having governments around to protect their property, as do the majority of Americans, who own a house, one or two cars, their personal effects, and some monetary assets. But the billionaires get more benefit than the average American, while paying only a bit more in taxes. This, plus the manner in which liberal government redistributes wealth upwards, is doubtless why billionaires are overwhelmingly on the left side of the political spectrum--they know who big government benefits.
The area where anarchist socialism falls down is that there are people who are physically strong enough to take whatever they want, or who are sufficiently charismatic that they can sway others to follow them in taking what they want. If you confront a gang of 40 strong men who want your car, your house, and your wife, the chances of successfully defeating them are small.
For all the fantasies that libertarian and socialist anarchists have of people banding together to fight off such a gang, in practice, it doesn't work. In many big cities, where police forces are so weak as to be meaningless, gangs (including the Mafia and its protection rackets) run the streets, and decent people live in fear. It was like this before police departments became common in places like New York City, and it is true today.
Another area of failure with both socialist and capitalist theories of anarchy is that government provides substantial personal protection for those who are too weak to protect themselves individually or collectively: the elderly; children; the retarded; the mentally ill; minorities of various sorts; and those who are believed to be criminals.
A person who is accused of raping a child, in an anarchy, probably won't make it to trial (unless he flees--yet another area where governments work and anarchy doesn't). Much of the time, this isn't a big problem, because such people are often guilty of the crime of which they are accused. But sometimes they are innocent, and without some government (or a collective that operates effectively as a government), the innocents will be killed without trial, too.
Discuss.
Although governments might have a tragic history, this isn't necessarily the case. Iceland has the world's oldest parliament, and has been entirely peaceful. ditto little Andorra. Costa Rica seems a pretty nice place to live. Ditto the Scan countries.
It seems that the small powerless countries that are not too wealthy are the most peaceable and treat their citizens the most kindly. So perhaps we should break up all the big countries into small states?