Anarcho-capitalists (ancaps) don’t understand anarchy. Don’t be offended, I’m horrendously guilty of this, too. I built my online presence by not understanding it. I am not saying by this that they actually aren’t, or can’t be, anarchists - or even that any of their theories are wrong. I used to be an anarchist, despite not properly understanding it; but now that I do, I am not anymore.
Words mean things and what they mean is extremely important. The study of the meaning of words is semantics, often a term used synonymously with ‘subjective’, ‘inconsequential’, and ‘unimportant’. But it’s not. It’s crucially important. A semantic disagreement is not something to be disregarded. They matter, they are concerned with reality, and in a semantic disagreement one party has to be wrong and the other at least more right.
Everything is relative. Not to say subjective, but that everything in reality relates to something else in reality. Language is the first step in any discussion; the words we use are both related to real concepts and are the very vehicle by which we observe and communicate these relations. This is to say that words matter - a lot.
an = no
archy = rulers
Anarchy was originally a leftist concept. Some ancaps have tried to claim Pierre Proudhon, the first substantial anarchist and a mutualist, as one of their own. This is the equivalent of drinking cyanide to one-up your friend at the pub who just knocked back a shot of absinthe. You get to show off for 30 seconds, and maybe you look really imposing and impressive in that time, but once it settles in your stomach you realise what you’ve tried to do in order to impress an idiot, and are done for. If you leave the door ajar even the tiniest bit and leftism comes knocking, it will get it’s claws in to wrench it all the way open, claim your house for the proletariat, and hang you and your family from the ceiling fan.
As leftists are in a permanent revolt against nature by their own nature, and as Rothbard gets at in that very essay: if you concede foundational points to their worldview - which is completely detached from every aspect of reality - you’re handing a psychopath a knife and then turning your back to them. The revolt against nature is, of course, egalitarianism, from which they derive a keystone of anarchy as “the abolition of hierarchy”. Now, I’m not going to say that they’re right and that’s what anarchy means, but it’s not all that far off. Anarchy means no rulers. If you want natural hierarchy, as ancaps claim to, but no natural rulers, fine - want that. But then you don’t actually want natural hierarchy, and you’re handing the left that knife by conceding the tip of the iceberg. It’s rusty and a bit blunt, but it can do a lot of damage.
Continuing with the ever-important semantics - what is a ruler? An ancap may or may not give you a long-winded answer, but it boils down to “an aggressor”. This I find to be a wholly inadequate answer, as it loads an entire jumbo jet’s load of baggage into the word. If we’re not being deliberately obtuse, the only definition of ruler I find to make mature sense is:
a political leader
or, in longer form:
a person who makes collective political decisions
As every concept relates to another concept, a leader is the person in charge of a group of followers. There are many kinds of leaders and many kinds of followers. A businessowner is the leader of a private enterprise and their followers are employees. An officer is a military leader and his followers are soldiers. A ruler is the leader of a polity and his followers are subjects. Their relationship is exactly the same, but due to what their relationship is itself in relation to, they have different names to go with their differing operations and responsibilities.
A businessowner is not aggressor in relation to his employees, as they consent to follow his leadership for a wage. An officer is not an aggressor in relation to his soldiers, as they consent to follow him (excepting conscripts), even if he may be an aggressor toward his opponents. And, if voluntary political leadership is possible (which it is), a ruler is not by necessity an aggressor upon his subjects. Ancaps will say that a political leader is not the definition of a ruler, to which I can see no valid argument. This is categorically leftist behaviour where you redefine words at will to suit your liking; the liking here being the desire to use the term anarchist. Why you’d want so desperately to use this term that you’d petulantly misuse language, I can no longer fathom.
This mentioned voluntary leadership is indeed possible, and as far as I can tell, it is indistinguishable from an ancap concept, that espoused by Hans Hermann Hoppe: covenant communities. If you know all about that then skip this paragraph, but for readers who don’t, a covenant community is similar to a Home-Owners Association. A community would set up shop somewhere on land they rightly own and sell parts of this land to outsiders, to build on or with a building already present, provided that at the point of sale these newcomers agree, as part of their contract, that they will obey the rules set by the community - the laws of the covenant - under pain of exile if they later disobey (what Hoppe calls physical removal). This is completely in accordance with libertarian legal theory, as people being private owners of their own person aswell as their justly derived property, can establish contracts for transfer of title of goods with conditional clauses. If these clauses are broken then the contract becomes void and the property must be returned to the original seller or their descendant. This is how you can have rules without rulers, and how anarcho-capitalism is not a contradiction.
Anarcho-capitalists are not wrong, as in, the name is not a contradiction in terms as leftist anarchists like to say. But it is a disordered and disjointed desire.
So why am I not an ancap, if it’s not a contradiction? Simply put, I desire to live, and desire that everyone else voluntarily chooses to live, in a covenant community with a ruler - that being, one political leader. Egalitarianism is nonsense because humans are hierarchical creatures, and our systems of organisation need leaders. We are also political animals as per Aristotle’s correct prescription, meaning, that we organise social action in groups. This is no less than an indisputable fact and I won’t entertain any arguments to the contrary, if you’re an ancap they shouldn’t even cross your mind. But, in order to not desire a ruler - one person at the top of the political hierarchy - your hierarchy must plateau like this:
Why on earth would you desire that? What possible reason could there be in desiring a hierarchy which looks like it went to a barbershop on the wrong side of the tracks, suspiciously close to a house with boarded up windows and an all-black G Wagon on the driveway? Whatever the natural order may be, it would not look like that. The obvious correct depiction is:
This is real hierarchy, with a leader being the final slice at the top. If that was the hierarchy of a business then that slice is the owner/CEO, and if the hierarchy is of a political community - you guessed it - it’s the ruler. If that political community is a voluntary one, bound by what you could call an ACTUAL social contract, a.k.a. the terms of a covenant, then a ruler is not, as ancaps claim, necessarily an aggressor. If you don’t want a ruler and instead want that scuffed hierarchy, then so be it. You’re an ancap. But the reasons for why you’d not want to take the correct hierarchy are either quite insane, or you haven’t as of yet deeply and seriously visualised how a healthy society following your principles would have to order itself - that is, the natural order.
Again, anarcho-capitalists are not wrong, as in, the name is not a contradiction in terms as leftist anarchists say. But they hold a disordered and disjointed desire.
If you haven’t undertaken that deep, serious visualisation of optimal social structure, which is absolutely critical yet ancaps often neglect, I will give you some homework. Read about Galt’s Gulch and the Holy Roman Empire.
Galt’s Gulch is a fictional community in Ayn Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged, where all residents moved there driven by their shared values to live together. The Gulch had a ruler so, no, ancap Rand fans reading this, it is not an anarchist covenant community - but it is a voluntary covenant community.
The Holy Roman Empire, different from the older Roman Empire, lasted over a thousand years and was essentially a confederation of states with ever-changing borders; it included what is now Germany, Austria, half of Czechia, Switzerland, eastern parts of Poland, even at times large parts of northern Italy, and still much more. Tiny kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and even rep*blics left and joined this confederation constantly. Despite having an arch-ruler, unsurprisingly called the Emperor, this office was extremely decentralised and very rarely got involved in provincial affairs, even when neighbouring nations under his jurisdiction went to war against each other. This is, without a doubt in my mind, the most brilliant example of the natural political order we have seen in the real world - even if it lacked the critical voluntary ingredient. That’s how good the other ingredients were, that they make the rancid taste of state aggression rather tolerable.
I imagine you can already see the synthesis between these examples in my proposed natural order. Covenant communities with voluntary kings, princes, or dukes, choosing to be either independent or part of a larger confederation of similar communities. When you move into one of them you sign on the dotted line saying you’ll love it or leave it, and if you don’t love it, you’ll be surrounded by competing voluntary-micro-monarchies to take your pick from.
Once you’re done with that homework, do yourself an enormous favour and read up on elite theory - starting with The Populist Delusion. This will prime you to deal with political realism and engrain the necessity of rulership, along with how it actually works, solidly in your mind.
Lang lebe König Galt!
For awhile now I have considered myself a libertarian without going much further in explaining. I have never found a sub-ideology to ascribe myself to, however, I have always been a bit weary of anarcho-capitalism. Maybe this is because of constant leftism critism or maybe because it is so "extreme" if you will. However, I am quite interested in learning about your critiques on anarcho-capitalism.
What would be the role of these leaders? You mentioned the leader might not partake in much of anything, and if so, how are they still a leader?
This is just an attempt of trying to fully understand and wrap my brain around the concept put forth. I'm going to go do my *homework* now!
Here's one quibble I have: Aristotle (Joe Sachs translation only) himself prefers the hierarchy with a plateau. In the Politics, he explicitly labels his preferred regime as a combination of two "bad" types: Oligarchy and Democracy, to form a good type: either Aristocracy, if slanted towards the elite, or Timocracy, if slanted towards the ruled.
He touches on the possibility of having a monarch on top of the Aristocracy in a long discussion about anacyclosis (changes between regimes), but it was really the Medieval Scholastics who innovated by including a king in the preferred regime.