Charles sent me this essay a few months ago. I love it.
The Obviousness of Anarchy
by John Hasnas
“You see, but you do not observe.”
Sherlock Holmes to Dr. John Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia
Introduction
In this chapter, I have been asked to present an argument for anarchy. This is an absurdly easy thing to do. In fact, it is a task that can be discharged in two words – look around. However, because most of us, like Dr. Watson, see without observing the significance of what we see, some commentary is required.
Anarchy refers to a society without a central political authority. But it is also used to refer to disorder or chaos. This constitutes a textbook example of Orwellian newspeak in which assigning the same name to two different concepts effectively narrows the range of thought. For if lack of government is identified with the lack of order, no one will ask whether lack of government actually results in a lack of order. And this uninquisitive mental attitude is absolutely essential to the case for the state. For if people were ever to seriously question whether government is really productive of order, popular support for government would almost instantly collapse.
The identification of anarchy with disorder is not a trivial matter. The power of our conceptions to blind us to the facts of the world around us cannot be gainsaid. I myself have had the experience of eating lunch just outside Temple University’s law school in North Philadelphia with a brilliant law professor who was declaiming upon the absolute necessity of the state provision of police services. He did this just as one of Temple’s uniformed private armed guards passed by escorting a female student to the Metro stop in this crime-ridden neighborhood that is vastly underserved by the Philadelphia police force.
A wise man once told me that the best way to prove that something is possible is to show that it exists. This is the strategy I shall adopt in this chapter. I intend to show that a stable, successful society without government can exist by showing that it has, and to a large extent, still does.
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