Hey everyone,
I would like to share with you some thoughts that came to me the other day. I was basically wondering what is really meant by the maximisation of freedom and where does this limit actually lie. At what point can we say that freedom is maximised? Is it only a matter of individual freedom or the maximisation of freedom for society as a whole?
I believe that this maximum is somewhere on the spectrum between absolute individual freedom and absolute community coordination. Salop said somewhere between anarchism and communism or a dictatorship.
In the one extreme, each individual has maximum freedom to do what he or she wants, there are no common tasks or competences, because for that you would have to give up some of your own competences. At the other end, however, there is a totalitarian state in which the individual no longer has any power but is defined solely by the collective or the ruler to whom he surrenders all his powers.
Most political theories are somewhere in between and approach each other from the left or the right. Libertarianism clearly does this from the liberal left side. In contrast to anarchism, there are public institutions, facilities and places to which one surrenders a minimal part of one’s authority. In my opinion, this is formed spontaneously because we humans naturally organise ourselves into groups and the resulting specialisation helps us to perform more complex tasks more quickly.
But where is this minimum level of competence at which society can develop optimally and the individual still has the maximum possible freedom? What do you think?
An anarchist society likely would have courts. Read Bruce L. Benson’s The Enterprise of Law. There are plenty of ways to have a privately-operated system of justice.
But then you effectively give the courts some kind of competence over you. Even if it is absolutely minimal. And thats what I’m talking about: How much is justifiable?
What is this notion of “competence?” If you mean authority, it is an inaccurate description. All participation in the justice system in an anarchist society would obviously be voluntary because there would be no state to coerce people to participate. Nevertheless, there are numerous incentives that would entice people to peaceably cooperate with one another, including on matters of respecting life and liberty that would be handled via a justice system.
But why should I abide to the decisions of said justice system if it is voluntary? What if I build up my own totalitarian state and start forcing people to obey me? Of course the others can organize themselves to a militia and start building their communities to better defend themselves and cooperate with each other. But who will be leading this militia? And isn’t that already the beginning of a state?
I can try to answer some of this, but I found that books like Benson’s The Enterprise of Law and David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom do a great job.
Basically, cooperation is incentivized by the manifest economic benefits. War is extremely expensive, and it’s much more profitable to trade with others than to fight them.
As to compliance with voluntary judicial decisions, most of that will be in the context of mutual aid societies and private protection organizations, all of which will know that all-out armed conflict is not profitable for them. They will thus be incentivized to put compliance with judicial decisions as a term in their membership agreements. There you have an enforceable contract which will push people toward peaceful compliance with judicial decisions.
Since a state is a monopoly on violence, the existence of many different private protection agencies (ipso facto not a monopoly) does not approach a state.
Thanks!