Today I want to talk about this new edited volume that I edited, Anarchy, State and Public Choice.
And this book is basically a response to two volumes published in the early 1970s by the Center for Public Choice at Virginia Tech.
Explorations in the theory of anarchy and further explanations in the theory of anarchy.
The original volumes contain articles by people like James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and Patrick Gunning.
And this book reprints the major essays from those earlier volumes.
And then it contains new responses to each of the chapters by some of the people who I went to graduate school with at George Mason a few years ago.
and then it contains also some additional commentary by people like Peter Betke and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
So just to give you an idea about the background of the original public choice book,
if you ever step foot on George Mason campus or hear James Buchanan talk, he speaks very highly about the original project.
Winston Bush galvanized our interest in the theory of anarchy, an organizational alternative that had never been seriously analyzed. What were the descriptive features of Hobbesian anarchy? Could something like an anarchistic equilibrium be defined?
Bush was instrumental in organizing a series of weekly workshops in 1972 during which each participation in turn presented papers on differing aspects of the theory of anarchy.
Anarchy. As revised, these papers were published in Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy.
Those weeks were exciting because never before or since have I participated so fully in a
genuinely multiparty ongoing research effort, one that we knew to be relevant in some ultimate
sense. For me, this brief period of research activity was important because it gave me
a new focus on my whole enterprise.
So he credits this project with influencing him
on limits of liberty and also Tullock as well
on some of his later work.
Now that was the good part about the project.
I think it's great that people were studying anarchy.
The bad part, in my opinion, is the original books
had a lot of arguments which I did not find at all convincing and actually some of them
are... Tom, maybe you can back me up. You were at VPI at the time. Some of these arguments
I thought were kind of silly actually. So pretty much all of the original contributors
were very pessimistic about whether cooperation is possible in absence of the government and
And they all conclude that anarchy is not stable and it's going to need to be replaced
by a state.
The general idea by Winston Bush and others is that under anarchy there's going to be
too many prisoners, dilemma situations, cheating, predation would become rampant and then people
then are going to want to agree to have a constitution.
That's their arguments. Me, on the other hand, I had the good fortune of coming after them.
I was born after the original books were published, and I had the good fortune of being able to
read people like Murray Rothbard or Dr. Hoppe or Bruce Benson. And to me, there's a lot
of arguments that needed to be revisited here. At George Mason at the time, however, the
Public choice ideas are basically revered by everybody.
People had to think, yes, this is the right way of doing things.
But since it was not satisfactory to me,
I came up with the idea of creating this new volume.
I said, Murray Rothbard never had a chance
to respond to the explorations in the theory of anarchy.
But luckily, now there's a lot of young people who can do that.
So I basically rounded up the Austrian graduate students
at George Mason, and I said, look, let's smash this book.
And keep in mind that George Mason, for many years, most of the Austrians, all they would
talk about is Lachmann's theory of the market process or Kirzner's theory of the market
process.
And to me, none of that was very interesting, I think it's kind of a waste of time.
So I said, let's do something important, let's write about this.
Kids, make sure you do this at home.
Okay, so I basically got the anarchist grad students and I said,
pick a chapter from the original book and criticize it.
I don't have time and I'm not going to spend time going through all of the arguments in the book,
The first most influential chapter in the original book was by Winston Bush, who also published a version of this in Journal of Economic Theory, if I'm remembering correctly.
And he basically argues that under anarchy, the prisoner's dilemma is going to lead people to predate too much in absence of external government.
Jason Osborne, on the other hand, says, look, even if one-shot prisoner's dilemmas exist, in the real world there's other factors.
There's certain things that people can do to try and get around the prisoner's dilemma situation.
So he basically talks about a model where if you can communicate, not even talk, but just signal with other people whether you're trustworthy, then there's not going to be as much defecting.
Actually there's an interesting study recently. It says that ugly people are more likely to be criminals.
In Gordon Tullock's chapter, he argues similar arguments.
He says that without government, there's only going to be certain types of interaction that can take place,
that for the most part, most trade cannot take place unless you have an external enforcement agency.
Chris Coyne of George Mason, now at Hampton, Sydney, responded to that and he said,
look, it might be true that you might need external enforcement,
but why do we need to assume that that must come from government?
There's many private law enforcement agencies out there that enforce contracts
In the original volume I found particularly puzzling was by Patrick Gunning, he argues, he says, even if trades are expected to be infinitely recurring,
This is actually from Adam Smith. He says there's discipline of continuous dealings.
If you're dealing with someone every day of your life, you're not going to want to cheat,
because if you cheat today, he might not want to deal with you.
But Patrick Gunning says even if trades are expected to be infinitely recurring, there may be no trade.
He gives an example of two individuals. Actually, one is a pygmy and one is a giant.
And he says, they are probably not going to be able to engage in trade unless you have an external agent, and he says, what's the solution?
He says, all they have to do is sign a contract with, and I'm not making this up, with a supergiant who can come in and make sure that everything's right.
That's just a simple, simple, simple solution.
Peter Leeson, now of West Virginia University, has a great response and he points out that there's many contracts in the world today that take place where there's basically no external enforcement at all.
Relying on third parties might be a good idea in certain circumstances, but in many circumstances, even in the best court system, relying on a third party is often too costly or impossible.
So people basically have to find ways to make their dealings, their contracts self-enforcing, and he goes into some good examples in there.
James Sucannon, getting back to the original one. He followed Winston Bush and Gordon Tullock. He also argued strictly Hobbesian assumptions. He says, men are bad, and because men are bad, you must have government.
Ben Powell, he and I were on the same flight, now he's passed out in the hotel room.
I'm up here, I don't even know where I am.
He had a great chapter though.
Actually it was a horrible chapter, since he's not here I can say that.
It was a horrible chapter.
He got all the good ideas from me, the few in there.
He says, look, if men are so bad, and this is not unique to him, but if men are so bad, how can we think that government setting up an external monopoly on the use of force, how can we assume that that's going to eliminate the problem?
So, the thing I don't understand about gunning, for example, with the supergiant, right?
If you've got the pygmy and the giant fighting with each other, and you say,
okay, well, let's give all the guns to the supergiant, right?
Well, what's to stop the supergiant from misusing his force?
So, Powell basically accepts, he says, accepting these Hobbesian assumptions, we do not...
He says, I don't see how government is going to solve them.
Now, the most empirical chapter in the original book was by Thomas Hogarty.
And he actually, I do appreciate this, tried to give some case studies of anarchy.
And he tried to show that anarchy could not work by giving some examples.
And the first example he gives of anarchy is brown rats.
Brown rats don't have government, and they bite each other, so therefore we need government.
Second example, Lord of the Flies.
Lord of the Flies, there was no government in Lord of the Flies, and, well, there was chaos, okay? We need government.
And this final example of how anarchism cannot function as a system is Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War.
Now, is this just, is it me? Is this?
Prison is anarchy? Okay, so kind of interesting arguments.
Virgil Storr has a very amusing chapter where he questions how applicable it is for anarchy to look at brown rats removed from their home, how a children's novel or a POW camp are anarchism.
Another interesting chapter in the original volume, and these are all reprinted here too, was by Warren Samuels who basically spent his chapter criticizing Murray Rothbard's view of anarcho-capitalism.
He says that Rothbard is simply replacing government coercion with market coercion.
And if anybody knows, I actually am curious if anybody knows whether Rothbard responded to this, but I haven't seen any evidence that he was able to respond to this.
So Scott Boullier, now of Mercer University, was able to respond and to defend Rothbard's system, saying that Samuel's definition of coercion is so elastic,
It basically, he says, markets, if you trade, one person refuses to trade, he says that's coercionivid.
And Bollier says that it's so elastic that his definition of coercion is pretty much meaningless.
He says the real thing that we need to be concerned about is minimizing coercion,
and the best way to minimize coercion is to not have a centralized government.
And lastly, from the original 1974 volume, Further Exploitations in the Theory of Anarchy,
there was one chapter which actually was supportive of anarchism by Lawrence Moss, and he outlines
how Rothbard's libertarian anarchism has a long history in America, and he talks about
some of the early individualist anarchists like Spooner and Tucker.
Moss does in this chapter have some criticisms of using Rothbard's positive welfare economics
to defend anarchism, which actually I don't think Rothbard attempted to do this.
But anyway, Moss concludes this chapter, pretty good conclusion, he says, property anarchism
is American as apple pie, so, like that.
Now the interesting and good news about all this is I got these manuscripts together and
I gave the entire, the entire first draft of the entire manuscript to Buchanan and Tullock
when I was at George Mason and they both wrote responses which are included in this book
Buchanan's response is my favorite. Does he say, I'm right, you're wrong? Or does he say, no, actually, you guys are right, I admit defeat? Instead, what he says, he says, actually, you guys are misinterpreting your work.
Our work is not about political philosophy. It's not about government.
It was about how during the 1960s and 1970s there was disorder on campuses and colleges.
And so there needs to be more rules on colleges.
So I think this is a good interpretation.
Basically we can now throw out all of constitutional political economy
and call it Campus Economics.
Tullock's response and Jeff Hummel's response to Tullock are also very, very amusing.
Jeff Hummel, just to give you an example of his thing, he says,
Gordon Tullock's rebuttal offers up a model of both profoundly serious and amazingly silly objections to a stateless society.
So he's got some great zingers in there against Tullock.
And Tullock too, he's got, you know Tullock, he's an interesting guy.
He says at the end of his chapter, he says, I anticipate a vigorous but not very well reasoned response.
After that, finally, at the end of the book, after Hummel's response, we have a chapter
written by Peter Betke, George Mason, entitled Anarchism as a Progressive Research Program
in Political Economy, where he says this is a worthwhile endeavor that we should be studying.
And he concludes that governance can be solved, the puzzle of governance can be solved in
a voluntaristic manner, rather than by the coercive nature of the state.
Work along these lines is not only valuable at a fundamental theoretical level, but also
of Practical Significance as well, as we attempt to wrestle with the great social transformations
of our era.
So, this is just a sampling, but for you young George Mason people, I want to see continued
explorations in the theory of anarchy.
Thanks.