Quote of the day
June 10, 2009 – 9:41 pm by JohnFrom Roderick Long’s chapter in Anarchism/Minarchism:
The confused assumption that a legal framework must (or even can) be external to what it constrains tends to make political structure invisible except insofar as it is realised in familiar state-monopoly institutions. And this in turn helps to explain what anarchists often find puzzling: namely, the tendency among non-anarchists to treat a single unsuccessful or undesirable instance of a stateless society as a refutation of anarchism per se—whereas nobody regards a single unsuccessful or undesirable instance of a state as a decisive objection to the state as such. The reason for this puzzling double standard is that while people generally recognise that states can come in a variety of different political structures, so that the failure of one type proves nothing against another, it is implicitly assumed that anarchies are all alike in structural terms—that is, that they are all structureless—and so the failure of one counts against all. But in fact mere statelessness is compatible with a variety of different institutional and cultural arrangements, and one would expect differences in such arrangements to have a significant impact on a stateless society’s viability.
I read this passage at his blag, not in the book. It brings me a little bit closer to buying the book, but it’s still way too expensive for me and I have a long enough reading list that I’m not getting through as it is.
