Long Roderick T. - Anarchism/minarchism : is a government part of a free country?

ANARCHISM/MINARCHISM

Is a Government Part of a Free Country?

Edited by

RODERICK T. LONG
Auburn University, USA

TIBOR R. MACHAN
Chapman University, USA

ASHGATE

Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

Published by

Ashgate Publishing Limited

Gower House

Croft Road

Aldershot

Hampshire GU11 3HR

England

Ashgate Publishing Company

Suite 420

101 Cherry Street

Burlington, VT 054014405

USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a free country?

1. Political science Philosophy. 2. Anarchism. 3. Libertarianism. I. Long, Roderick T.

II. Machan, Tibor R.

320.11

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anarchism/minarchism : is a government part of a free country? / [edited by]

Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Anarchism. 2. Comparative government. 3. Legitimacy of governments.

I. Long, Roderick T. II. Machan, Tibor R.

HX833.A56943 2007

320.57dc22

2007007971

ISBN: 978-0-7546-6066-8
ISBN: 978-1-4094-8568-1 (ebk-ePUB)

This volume has been printed on acid-free paper

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall,.

Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan

Lester H. Hunt

John Roger Lee

Adam Reed

William R Thomas

Tibor R. Machan

Aeon James Skoble

Jan Narveson

John Hasnas

Roderick T. Long

Charles Johnson

Libertarians seek a society in which people are free to do as they please with their own lives and peacefully acquired property, so long as they do not interfere with the right of others to do likewise with theirs. In such a society, much that governments currently doall the myriad forms of forcible interference with their citizens lives and propertywould be abolished. But what would or should remain?

One libertarian tradition, drawing inspiration from classical liberal thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Frdric Bastiat, and the American Foundersand represented in the past century by, among others, Ludwig von Mises, Isabel Paterson, Ayn Rand, and Robert Nozickcalls for a constitutional government of strictly limited powers, which would be confined to the protection of everyones negative (libertarian) rights. This position has come to be known as minarchism, the advocacy of minimal government. (Although some proponents and opponents of this position describe the government as the state, arguably this latter term carries some baggage no libertarians wish to defend, given its use by such thinkers as Hegel and Marx who meant by it something like an organic society.)

Another libertarian traditioninaugurated in 1849 by the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari, further developed in the 1880s by the American journalist Benjamin Tucker and the circle of writers associated with his periodical Liberty, and represented more recently by Murray Rothbard, Morris and Linda Tannehill, David Friedman (son of economist Milton Friedman), Bruce Benson, Randy Barnett, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, among othersproposes entirely abolishing government, in the Weberian sense of an institution holding a legal monopoly over a given territory, and replacing it with multiple providers of protection services competing on a free market. This position is generally known as market anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, to distinguish it from those forms of anarchism that oppose private property and the market. (Market anarchism is arguably a less controversial designation than anarcho-capitalism, since libertarians disagree amongst themselves as to whether the term capitalism should be used to mean the unregulated free market that libertarians favor, or the pro-corporate regulatory regime that they oppose.) Outside of libertarian circles, the market anarchist position is best known via Robert Nozicks critique of it in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia; ironically, academics unfamiliar with the libertarian tradition often assume (despite Nozicks footnotes) that the idea of competing protection agencies was Nozicks invention.

The purpose of the present volume is to examine the respective merits of minarchism and market anarchism from the perspective of several contemporary libertarian philosophers. The volume has been divided into minarchist and anarchist sections for the readers convenience, although the nuances of particular contributors arguments are such that some papers do not fit neatly into one category rather than another.

John Hasnas is an associate professor at Georgetown Universitys McDonough School of Business, where he teaches courses in ethics and law. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and an associated member of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Professor Hasnas has held previous appointments as an Associate Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law at American University, and Law and Humanities Fellow at Temple University School of Law. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, DC and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Lafayette College, his J.D. and Ph.D. in Legal Philosophy from Duke University, and his LL.M. in Legal Education from Temple Law School. Between 1997 and 1999, Professor Hasnas served as assistant general counsel to Koch Industries, Inc. in Wichita, Kansas. His scholarship concerns ethics and white collar crime, jurisprudence, and legal history and his book Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law is currently available from the Cato Institute.

Lester H. Hunt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and The Johns Hopkins University. He has written extensively on ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, and is the author of Nietzsche and the Origins of Virtue (1990) and Character and Culture (1998). He is currently working on a book on anarchy and justification of the state.

Charles W. Johnson lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is an alumnus of Auburn University, a Research Fellow for the Molinari Institute, and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World IU 640. He writes and maintains the Rad Geek Peoples Daily at < http://radgeek.com/ >, and can be reached through his personal website at < http://charleswjohnson.name/ >.

John Roger Lee (B.A., M.A. SUNY, Albany) (Ph.D. University of Southern California) is a retired professor of philosophy who taught at institutions in the State University of New York, the California State University, and the University of California systems. He lives in Los Angeles, California where he writes on philosophy and on political theory.