Before I begin, I also want to pause very briefly to send my best wishes to David Gordon,
who graciously agreed to comment on the papers, who was unable to attend due to illness, and
so I hope he will be feeling better soon. Feminist social theories hold that history
and society are marked by widespread sex inequality, by systemic privileges for men and systemic
burdens inflicted on women. Radical feminists, in particular, as a tendency, hold that sex
inequality is not only widespread, but that it's deeply rooted in self-sustaining, that
casual sexism, misogynistic double standards, gender gaps in wages and social position,
political assaults on women's sexual freedom and other harms inflicted on women should
all be understood as interlocking components in a system of class power, usually called
either patriarchy or male supremacy. Most radical feminists focus especially closely
on the role that pervasive male violence against women plays as a foundational source and a
Radical feminist theories account for forms of mass violence against women that have been centrally organized and directed by male political authorities, such as lethal abortion laws, the use of rape as a weapon of war, or the mass torture and execution of women during the early modern European witch craze. But they often concentrate especially closely on pervasive but diffuse forms of violence, forms such as rape, domestic violence, harassment and other forms of interpersonal intimidation.
Feminist accounts of these forms of individualized violence have at least three key features in common. First, they characterize the violence as pervasive rather than abnormal, citing, for example, empirical research confirming that one in thirteen men in the
in the U.S. as attempted or committed rape, that one in six women has been raped in her lifetime and that about one in four women has been either raped or physically battered by a husband, boyfriend or date.
Second, they characterize pervasive violence as systematically structured by sex that is overwhelmingly committed by men against women and rarely vice versa.
Third, they argue that systemic male violence must be understood as structural or political in nature.
In addition to the physical and psychological harms that are inflicted on individual victims of violence,
The violence has further powerful ripple effects for all women's social freedom and material
well-being. To insist on this point and to protest the common tendency to write off violence
against women by hiding it in the so-called private sphere as a merely personal problem,
radical feminists often challenge the common dichotomy between the private and public sphere,
so-called, often quoting Carol Hanisch's famous declaration that the personal is political.
Radical feminist theories of sexual violence also have a fourth feature in common. They're
are commonly misunderstood or even wildly distorted by their critics.
For an example of all four points, consider Susan Brown-Miller's Mermudon Theory of
Stranger Rape as presented in her book Against Our Will, a groundbreaking historical and
theoretical discussion of rape as a political force.
At the end of the first chapter, Brown-Miller famously writes that, quote, from prehistoric
times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing
more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state
of fear. In these long block quotes, I'm going to have to skip through a bit so the full
Anti-feminist critics have slammed Brown-Miller for supposedly slandering all men as rapists.
She does not actually say that. The verb in the sentence is not rape, but keep in a state
of fear. Or for advancing either an essentialist or a determinist theory about rape. Either
sort of reading is hard to reconcile with any reading of the text that gets beyond page
15. In chapter 6, the police blot a rapist, Brown-Miller discusses the commonplace criminological
reality behind sensationalistic myths about the stereotypical stranger rapists and the
The effect of his actions on women's daily lives, quote,
Rape is a dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids,
their cousins and older brothers, and yet,
on the shoulders of these unthinking, violence-prone young men,
the rest an age-old burden that amounts to an historic mission,
the perpetuation of male domination over women by force.
The warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants,
the Myrmidons, to do his bidding in battle,
functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror.
Police blotter rapists perform a Myrmidon function
for all men in our society.
Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity,
they function as anonymous agents of terror.
Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, to actual men the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.
A world without rapists would be a world in which women move freely without fear of men.
That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation.
Mermodons to male dominance, police blotter rapists have performed their duty so well that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed.
Rather than aberrants or spoilers of purity, men who commit rape have served in effect as frontline masculine shock troops in the longest sustained battle
the world has ever known.
So, Brown-Miller does not then portray all men as rapists or is biologically driven to rape.
One important gear in her theory of how this all works turns on the structural effects that the rapist actions have for men who do not commit rape.
She has to be understood not as asserting that all men rape, but rather that the practice of rape by some men functions to give all men a position of power over women.
Now, clarifying the position is not the same thing as defending it. This corrected understanding may still be challenged.
Many critics point to the alleged motivations of rapists, suggesting, for example, that
most rapists act on no such grandiose plans about upholding patriarchal control, but rather
on concrete personal desires from whatever source. Thus, it makes no sense, it's said,
to claim that they act to further the interests of men as a class. On the other end, critics
frequently accuse Brownmiller of disregarding how far individual men, as well as male-dominated
public institutions, condemn rape, for example, by making and enforcing laws against it, thus
Thus presumably demonstrating that rape, however common and devastating, must be understood
as a private crime disavowed by existing political authority and committed by isolated men for
reasons of their own.
Both approaches respond to Brown-Miller as if she had proposed a sort of conspiracy theory
to explain the pervasiveness of male violence, in which the men sort of all get together
somehow with the anonymous rapist consciously collaborating with the more respectable men
in some kind of shared plan to keep women down.
If that were Brown-Miller's proposal, then certainly it would suffice to show that most
It is not Brown Miller's proposal. She never says anything of the sort, and in fact explicitly states that the role of police blotter rape and maintaining male supremacy has largely gone unnoticed, quote-unquote, including among men.
Such responses reveal a certain kind of exegetical failure. They read into the text a claim that Brown Miller doesn't make.
But more than that, they reveal a conceptual failure, a failure to see what Brown Miller is saying because you haven't yet got the right conceptual lenses with which to see it,
Contrary to canonical misunderstandings of feminist theories of male violence, I will
argue that the central insights of radical feminist analysis can be illuminated by rereading
them in light of a surprising source. By charitably reconstructing Brown-Miller's Mermudon Theory
as an unusual but recognizable application of the concept of spontaneous order
as developed by libertarian social theorists, most notably Friedrich Hayek.
Rearticulating Brown-Miller's theory in Hayekian terms provides a surprising
resource for the radical feminist critique of rape culture.
It may also dialectically clarify and enrich the concept of spontaneous order
in the process of applying it to the concrete problem.
So spontaneous order theories spring from an observation that the vital
underpinnings of human social life include large-scale patterns of
of Interaction, and coordinating structures which seem to emerge without, and indeed beyond
the capacity of, any intelligent designer or designers to construct or manipulate them
to particular ends. So examples of spontaneous orders are familiar and ever-multiplying in
both economics and in libertarian social theory, presumably to most of you in this room, the
adjustment of market prices to relative scarcities under conditions of free exchange, the convergence
on common media of exchange and barter economies, the emergence and maintenance historically
of Networks of Paths and Roads prior to large-scale militaristic road building are all sort of
clear and well-documented examples of spontaneous order. Although closely associated with free
market economics, there's no conceptual reason why the employment of spontaneous order concepts
need be limited to narrowly economic topics. Hayek, for example, viewed the attention to
spontaneous orders as the distinguishing feature of all serious social science and frequently
mentioned as examples the emergence of ongoing evolution, emergence and ongoing evolution
of Human Languages and Writing Systems. He devotes his closest attention in his later
works to the polycentric evolution of customary principles at common law for resolving disputes
peacefully without recourse to blood feuds or to violence or to vendettas. Other examples
of spontaneously developing community norms have ranged from conventions regulating the
use of agricultural commons as explored in the work of the Ostroms to international postal
standards to the evolution of common rules for American baseball. In the hands of Hayek
Hayek and other libertarian social theorists, the concept of spontaneous order is employed
not only to explain how we got many actually existing social goods, but also to counsel
how future goods might be better achieved and maintained without government imposition.
Hayek invoked spontaneous order to argue, contrary to Marxist and Fabian worries about
the so-called social anarchy of production, that positive social order can emerge without
deliberate social regulation, and that market processes without centralized control were
neither blind, destructive, nor chaotic, that they could actually do these things far better
than any central planning could.
Another increasingly popular example these days, especially in popular
literature, but also someone in scholarship,
is the success of knowledge and communication systems of the internet
in general and of the explosive growth refinement and success of Wikipedia
in particular,
which has become within a decade the world's largest and most successful
encyclopedia even though,
or rather precisely because,
it's driven by the social anarchy of decentralized contributions
for millions of volunteer reader editors without any prior screening
or Direction by Any Central Authority.
A careful re-reading of the Mermedon passage from Brown Miller with these Hayekian lessons
in mind ought to bring out a number of features in her analysis of rape culture that are reminiscent
of common characteristics of spontaneous order. Brown Miller holds that rape culture involves
some conscious centrally coordinated campaigns like the use of rape as a weapon of war in
conflicts between male governed nation states. But her understanding of rape culture crucially
really depends on the structural effects of widely dispersed actions, which are carried
out by, quote, a swarm of men acting in anonymity, rather than by governments or organized bodies
of men acting on some kind of centrally directed plan. This ought to suggest a very clear and
direct parallel to Hayek's characterizations of spontaneous order as polycentric order,
more akin to organism than to organization. The undirected but systematic actions of the
swarm of Mermudan rapists have profound effects, but because of their very anonymity, police
These water rapists have performed their duties so well that the true meaning of their act
has largely gone unnoticed. Just as Hayek characterizes spontaneous orders in such terms
as the unintended and often uncomprehended results of the separate and interrelated actions
of men in society.
Now, yet there are, of course, other ways in which the sexual politics of a rape culture
are more reminiscent of constructed order and governmental politics than they are of
paradigmatic spontaneous orders. Crucially, the dispersed acts that we are discussing
are, after all, not free exchanges or willing negotiations but acts of force. And so any
Any social order emerging from them must be seen as a social order imposed on women against
their will, just as the economic or social plans of government are imposed on the governed
without genuine individual consent.
Both the similarities and the differences from our paradigmatic cases may help reveal
two important and interrelated points I'd like to make.
Both points are easily missed and often are missed in extant writing, in part because
normative work the concept does in libertarian arguments for freeing economic exchange from
As valuable and insightful as that normative employment may be, attempting to apply Hayekian categories to Brown-Miller's account of a rape culture may help to highlight the fact that market exchange and government intervention considered as systems of interpersonal coordination differ from each other along more than one dimension. I would in fact argue that a notion of spontaneous order, as employed in libertarian writing, is systematically ambiguous. The term may evoke at least three different sorts of distinctions, depending on the precise sense of the critical term, spontaneous.
Spontaneous order means a macroscale pattern of social coordination which is, on the one hand, consensual rather than coercive. This is when spontaneous means something like uncoerced.
It can refer to an order which is polycentric rather than directive, when spontaneous means something like unprompted.
Or it can refer to an order which is emergent rather than consciously designed, when spontaneous means not planned in advance.
When spontaneous order means consensual rather than coercive order, coordination is achieved through free actions and agreements of many different people,
are contrasted with coordination imposed by using force to compel the participation of unwilling parties,
as always happens in government programs.
When spontaneous order means polycentric rather than directive order,
coordination comes about through the converging micro-actions of many players acting independently
rather than deferring to designated supervisors or authoritative decision-makers, plans and instructions.
So in directive orders, coordination happens vertically as players act on the bidding of recognized authority.
In polycentric orders, the order depends on participatory or entrepreneurial action.
There's no recognized final authority. Action is guided by impersonal norms rather than personal deference.
Individual actors coordinate horizontally among themselves, determine for themselves how to pursue their chosen goals and so on.
When spontaneous order means emergent order, contrasted with conscious design, forms of social coordination
emerge from the actions of many different people who are acting on motives separate
from any conscious desire to affect that form of social coordination.
Intentional orders affect social coordination through people acting for
the sake of a shared purpose, whatever that purpose may be.
In undesigned orders, participants may know nothing about the macroscale
pattern that's emerging from their interlocking microscale actions,
or they may be aware of it but consider it only a side effect, even if a pleasant
one
of pursuing a different private purpose. So, for example, in the discussion of
for rhetorical simplicity, these three dimensions of spontaneity and non-spontaneity are presented
here as they usually are elsewhere in the literature as if they were simple dichotomies.
The distinction between polycentric and directive orders, and also that between emergent and
intentional orders, does have to be understood as really a difference of degree. Participants
can exercise greater or lesser degrees of autonomy in selecting and vetting their courses
of action. The gap between microscale intentions and macroscale patterns that emerge from them,
if there is such a gap, may be more or less wide of a gap.
It's important to understand that each of these three distinctions are interrelated
but analytically distinct pairs of categories. They tend to coincide, in fact, often enough
and the fact that they might be mistaken as indistinguishable in concept.
Notably, when libertarians contrast open networks of market exchange with economic planning and allocation by governments,
they're contrasting socioeconomic orders that differ along all three of our dimensions.
Governmental allocation is legally enforced, it's coordinated by requirements from a designated authority,
the government or the regulatory agency in charge,
and it's consciously designed to achieve some particular predetermined set of policy goals.
whereas free markets, on the other hand, produce organic structures which are the product of consensual agreements between buyers and sellers which are participatory in character without any fixed center of authority, there's no one person in charge of the market,
and develop an emergent structure that the parties to the exchange did not necessarily consciously set out to create.
The question then is which of these three differences we should treat as definitive of spontaneous order.
Hayek himself was fairly consistent when he attempted to give a formal definition of spontaneous order in his work.
As we've seen above, in some quotes I clipped actually,
when he tried to give formal definitions of it,
he defined it in terms of emergent coordination with a noticeable gap between micro intentions and macro patterns.
He often recurred to Adam Ferguson's results of human action but not human design to describe it.
But Hayek also constantly equates spontaneous orders with polycentric orders,
which are not made by anybody by contrast with directive orders which have been made by somebody
His application of the concept also, in discussing free market processes, consistently contrasted their healthy, unimpeded ordering processes with purposeful interference or intervention, paradigmatically backed by the coercive power of government, and so closely linked it with cases where the consensuality is really one of the most important features of the relationship. In any case, both later Hayekian scholars and popular writing have repeatedly used spontaneous order indifferently to refer to orders that are spontaneous in any of our
by Three Senses, or to all of them, or they've just equivocated between different senses
of spontaneous from one statement to the next. And so in the paper, I discuss some passages
from John Hasnes and also a long passage from Anthony de Gesse, where Gesse uses spontaneous
and three different senses within the space of two paragraphs, and you can see it on the
handout or in the paper. Although each of these arguments from de Gesse depends on a
distinct sense of spontaneity, he uses the term spontaneous order throughout without
not noting that each argument turns on a different characteristic or that social orders may be
spontaneous in any of these senses with or without being spontaneous in the others. But
of course they can. These are simply three different distinctions and while many examples
overlap the features may come apart even in some of the paradigmatic cases of spontaneous
orders. Orders may be consensual for example while being voluntarily directive and orders
may be polycentric while being designed to some substantial extent designed. So for example
For example, the development of Wikipedia, which gets mentioned pretty constantly these
days, is a clear example of a consensual and a participatory order. So, you know, nobody's
forced to contribute to Wikipedia, thank God. The editing process is wide open to anyone
who wants to jump in without waiting for instructions. It's not a strong example of an emergent
order. Typically, people who edit Wikipedia edit it at least in part with the intention
of improving the breadth and accuracy of information on Wikipedia. That is, the micro-scale success
The second high level point to be made about the notion of spontaneous order here is related to the point we've made about the equivocal meaning of spontaneity.
Because the paradigms for applying the concept have generally been cases where a social order is participatory or unplanned and also consensual,
what libertarians have tended to see in spontaneous order is almost always a macroscale pattern that is freely chosen and where all involved find some mutual benefit from the proceedings.
You don't need top-down command and control to get many important things that libertarians like to use, like language, or money, or roads, or Wikipedia.
So, in libertarian vocabulary, spontaneous order is almost always employed to praise benign orders,
especially benign orders that spontaneously accomplish something that government planners cannot do as well or cannot do at all.
Now, it's remarkable and wonderful that bottom-up forms of social cooperation can so often produce unplanned, large-scale social outcomes
outcomes, better than could be managed through comprehensive consciously designed political
schemes for social coordination. But nothing conceptually requires that emergent orders
need be benign orders. If widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue or
prudence can add up through many individual self-interested actions into a benign, undesigned
order, there's no reason why widely distributed forms of ignorance, prejudice, folly or vice
might not add up through many individual self-interested actions into an unintended malign order.
show also my widely distributed micro-level patterns of violence.
As libertarians, the possibility that our threefold distinction raises of an emergent
but non-consensual order must surely give us pause.
So I'd like then to return to Brown-Miller in an attempt to charitably reconstruct what
it is that she's arguing in her Myrmidon theory.
As I understand Brown-Miller, her hypothesis that stranger rapists serve a Myrmidon function
for male supremacy, with benefits that were down not only to practicing rapists themselves
to all men is best understood as arguing that the pervasive fact of rape and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all women produces an emergent but coercive order in which non-consensual micro-scale actions inflicted by unrelated, anonymous stranger rapists end up reinforcing a macro-scale pattern of male dominance over women and the cultural and institutional superstructure of patriarchy. Feminists highlight the far-reaching significance of the everyday fact that the threat of rape constrains women's range of free action. These constraints operate through felt danger
Paternalistic double binds often narrow the range to a vanishing point. Don't leave a late-night event without a man to walk you back. Don't leave with a man unless you intend to invite him in, or you'll give him the wrong idea and who knows what could happen then.
Women are warned about the dangers of crowded public spaces, like subways, parties or rock concerts, while simultaneously being warned about the dangers of empty, secluded or private spaces, like parking garages, alleys, empty country or man's house or car.
The double binds construct both public space and private space, being either alone or accompanied, as pervaded with lesser or greater degree of danger.
Ultimately, the only space constructed as safe is male-protected space.
and the reliability of male protection is closely linked to the personal connections with men
within a limited set of very specific structured relations, usually either paternal authority on the one hand
or heterosexual availability on the other.
These restrictions on women's everyday life, their use or exploration of public space, what they feel they can safely do or say, especially in the presence of men,
simply mean that women's freedom is systematically constrained by the fear of men as a ripple effect of the danger of the widespread, intense random,
Danger of widespread intense random male violence and the practical need to solicit the aid of seemingly safe men for protection against the threat that other men create.
As Bram Miller says, a world without rapists would be a world in which women move freely without fear of men,
but here in this world that some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation.
It's important to pause for a moment to note that just as Hayek writes that in spontaneous orders much of the structure of social life
Life is determined by rules that are understood through tacit understanding and know-how rather
than through an explicit rulebook or the conscious application of explicit general principles.
In Brown-Miller's discussion here, some of the intimidation that she describes is expressed
in self-conscious feelings of danger and explicit warnings and sort of episodes of felt fear.
But a lot of it is tacitly inscribed just into everyday relationships, simply incorporated
into an intensification of the sort of small-scale subconscious acts of vigilance and self-protection
that we all carry out as a daily routine or as an expression of felt anxiety.
Now another natural consequence of the danger created by police blotter rapists is for the
men who don't rape and who sincerely care about the safety of individual women. Such
men are in a material and emotional position where they easily see themselves as needing
to protect the women that they care about from the threat of male violence and where
The desire to protect others from violence is in itself a personal virtue, it's not a social problem, but the danger is how tempting and how easy, and also how corrupting, it is for men to take the psychological step of going from an attitude of human solidarity to a fantasy of male rescue, of coming to see themselves as defined by their identity as protector, with capital P, in contrast to frail womanhood, and of coming to see women as uniquely dependent by nature, rather than uniquely threatened
Due to the Chosen Actions of Other Men.
And to go even further, to try and make sure that women seek and depend on and stay within
the scope of a man's protection, whether or not they really need it or want it.
So use intimidating and restrictive warnings and other means of sort of keeping women socially
confined within the stiflingly close boundaries of a certain list of safety tips.
That kind of imposed dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for
for Women. And that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative
in men as any other form of structural dependence and power can. Libertarians and anarchists
who so readily see this dynamic when it comes to the government police and military protection
of an unwilling and disarmed populace shouldn't have any trouble seeing it if they're willing
to see it when it comes to male protection of women.
All of this can happen quite naturally when a large enough minority of men choose to commit
Widespread Intense Random Acts of Violence Against a Large Enough Number of Women, and
it can happen quite naturally without the male rapists or the male protectors or the
women in the society ever intending to bring about any particular macro-scale socio-political
outcome. What does happen, noticed or not, is that women's social being, how women appear
and act as women in public, will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed, and the amount
of time and effort they need to spend keeping supposedly protective men around and pleased
will be increased while men's everyday material leverage over women will be reinforced and their identities as men systematically channeled into more patriarchal expressions through the defused decentralized threat of violence and the natural but unintended consequences of many small self-interested actions carried out by women and men reacting to the unequal positions that this threat constructs. Now, I should say that I've talked about the specific topic of random stranger rape all this time because that's Brown Miller's topic in her book,
Brown-Miller's theory is a good case study in the kind of analytical point that I'm trying to make about the application of spontaneous order concepts outside of their normal domain.
But similar remarks with different but importantly related consequences could be made for other forms of violence that are directed against women, such as, for example, harassment in public spaces or battery or sexual assault in intimate relationships, which Brown-Miller's theory does not encompass.
It's just not a significant part of her book.
In fact, I think that what feminist researchers have learned about rape in the decades since the publication of Brown-Miller's book is published in 1975, I believe.
In particular, the fact that actually the overwhelming majority of rape is not committed by strangers but by intimates and acquaintances
calls for some significant revisions to Brown-Miller's theory about the function of stranger rape,
although what will remain after the revision is still a feminist theory importantly akin to Brown-Miller's.
But, whether Brown-Miller's theory is true, or something else in the neighborhood is, the different roles that the different forms of violence play in shaping the violent, undesigned order of a rape culture is best understood when they're seen as different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.
Now, a carefully articulated and fully radicalized concept of spontaneous order presents both a crisis and an opportunity for radical feminists.
Given the analysis of rape culture as a maligned form of non-consensual, spontaneous order,
it might seem tempting to suppose that that offers feminists reasons for general skepticism
of spontaneous orders and a challenge to anything like libertarianism, which proposes to transfer
vast spaces of social life from government control to spontaneous orders within civil
society. If that's the kind of thing you can get out of spontaneous orders, why should
If the distinctions I've traced help illuminate the radical feminist understanding of rape culture, I also believe they can help illuminate how the genuine need for a systematic and comprehensive response to oppression need not entail a governmental response.
Spontaneity is, as Hayek pointed out, not chaos, and resistance can be systematic and comprehensive while remaining decentralized and bottom-up.
Abandoning government solutions to oppressive political systems, like patriarchal violence, hardly means that you'll just sort of trust and an anonymous civil society will come up with a solution, somehow.
If distinguishing consensual from unplanned from participatory orders allows us to better understand feminist understandings of the problem,
it may also help us to better understand the radical impulse behind many feminist solutions,
such as women-led social movements to counter the effects of diffuse male violence outside or beyond the sphere of government and conventional political lobbying.
CR groups, speak-outs, culture-jamming, building grassroots networks of institutions like battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers and other kinds of feminist spaces
all originally had little if any connection to hierarchical power politics or to the male-dominated state
And all could productively be understood as voluntarily coordinated, polycentric, but consciously organized political resistance to a polycentric emergent coercive order of violent oppression.
It's turning one form of spontaneity against another.
But libertarian social theorists face their own crisis and their own opportunity as well, given the central role that pervasive violence against women plays in upholding patriarchy, if this kind of theory is correct.
The way in which a pervasive, diffuse threat of coercive force constrains the liberty of women in everyday life to move and act and live as they want, libertarians must recognize patriarchy as a system of violent political oppression even older, just as invasive and no less powerful than the violence of invasive government and state command and control.
But unlike the kinds of state violence which male libertarians have been accustomed to discuss—violent restrictions of freedom, handed down as explicit policies, ratified through political processes, promulgated from the center and consciously carried out by official agents of the state—patriarchy expresses itself in attitudes, behaviors, and coercive restrictions that are largely produced by bottom-up, decentralized forms of violence. Committed independently by countless unrelated men, freelance terrorists who commit violence of their own accord
Now, it's vital for libertarians to recognize that the coercive social orders that arise from this kind of diffuse gender violence, both as direct consequence and as social, psychological, or economic
are no less important, no less political, and no less evil for being undesigned, for battering women into the social position they occupy as if by an invisible fist.
Here, as elsewhere, the insights of libertarian theory are genuine and they are essential, but to apply them for all human beings they must be radicalized and applied everywhere that systemic coercion limits freedom.
That includes invasions of liberty by the state, but it also includes radically different forms of invasive violence coordinated through wholly different means and calling for different sorts of response.
Spontaneous order in civil society on a properly rich and well-delineated conception of both can be a space for hard-driving, conscious grassroots activism, at least as much as conventional governmental politics can.
Spontaneous Order Theory is vital as a tool both for analyzing the workings of non-governmental forms of oppression and also for more clearly understanding the unique non-governmental forms of solidarity and resistance that radical feminists have employed, which have in fact often, over the past 40 years, done a much more effective job at changing social attitudes toward violence against women and at providing life-saving help to women who need it than any comparable government program. When feminists challenge the dichotomy of pervasive private crimes from public
Public Policy, and insists that the personal is political, their critics often react to this move by treating it as an attempt to extend our existing conception of politics out to some new cases, which we had formerly classified as personal, as an attempt to interpret private violence as parts of a consciously coordinated social policy aimed at some defined common end and directed towards that end by policies handed down from the patriarchy as some recognizable central authority with an underground layer somewhere. But the aim in declaring the personal
Conventional to be political is not simply to extend pre-existing conventional notions
of political coordination to new cases, formerly considered private. Rather, it was to challenge
the conventional understanding of politics and to call for a more supple understanding
to encompass other kinds of social structures and relationships of power that involve so-called
private interactions without any conscious coordination or recognizable center of authority,
but which also share the pervasive, systematic and far-reaching characteristics of more
or conventionally political social structures. If, as I argue, spontaneous order theory can
provide a rich conceptual resource for articulating this new conception of political order and
political resistance, then a forward development and application of spontaneous order theories
to an agenda set by the needs of women's freedom as well as men's may provide a vital
point of reconciliation between feminist and libertarian insights by further radicalizing
libertarianism and by liberating radical feminism and by helping to highlight possibilities
is for more effective radical activism than state politics could ever allow for.
Spontaneous order theory so often pilloried by statists as a tool of political quietism
or conservative defenses of the socioeconomic status quo, can and should be defended as
a vital tool for radical politics and transformative social critique.