[Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory by Crispin Sartwell (SUNY Press, 2008; 123pp.)]
This book arrives at similar political conclusions—or better, anti-political conclusions—as another book with the same title, Lew Rockwell’s Against the State, but it is written from a different standpoint. Sartwell is a left anarchist, while Rockwell is, of course, a Rothbardian. (By the way, Against the State is my favorite of all Rockwell’s books, and I urge you to read this fount of wisdom, if you haven’t already done so).
Sartwell is a trained analytic philosopher, but—unlike most of his colleagues—he is anything but dull. He expresses himself with great passion and often with humor as well. Though many of his points will be familiar to most of my readers, his distinctive way of looking at things is well worth your attention.
The book is divided into three parts: Part I consists of an Introduction and some definitions; Part II, the bulk of the book, discusses arguments for the legitimacy for the state. These include social contract justifications of state power, utilitarian justifications of state power, and what he calls “justicial” justifications of state power. By this word, which he assures us, “sounds like a pidgin coinage but it’s in the OED,” he means attempts to argue for the state which are based on a theory of social justice; John Rawls’s theory is of course the prime instance. As we’ll see, Sartwell, who enjoys attacking the philosophical mainstream, assails Rawls full blast. A brief Part III, “Toward Something Else,” offers a “silhouette of an anarchism.”
In the introduction, Sartwell says that even if you think there is no path to anarchism, it still has critical value, and he gives as an example the anarchist attack on Soviet Communism:
The first and sharpest leftist critiques of the Soviet system were made by anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Nestor Mahkno, both of whom bearded Lenin in his lair even as American leftists like John Reed were wandering the Russian countryside enthusing about the deletion of class enemies. Indeed, it is partly the decline of anarchism as a conceptual alternative that explains the credulity with which American and European leftists endorsed Stalin’s regime long after its monstrousness was obvious.
In his chapter on definitions, Sartwell argues for a “presumption of voluntariness”; unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary, a voluntary arrangement between people is always better than coercion. Unfortunately, he accepts a definition of coercion, following the bad precedent of Friedrich Hayek, as involving limiting somebody’s alternatives, the “option set” as mainstream neoclassical economists call it, rather than the Rothbardian position that coercion is force or the threat of force. But he very insightfully says that a principal source of the state’s power over us is thinking of the state as an abstract entity. It is always people who act:
A number of students, including classically, the great libertarian Randolph Bourne and, more recently, the military historian Martin Creveld, have characterized the state as “abstract”. . . It is easy, but for all that necessary, to ridicule these pretensions, for they are ridiculous, and I will baste them in their own juice in what follows.
Owing to space limitations, I’ll skip almost all the justifications of the state, except for the brilliant attack on Rawls. First, though, I will treat readers to his invective against Rousseau and Hegel. Unlike Hobbes and Locke, they aren’t worth arguing with, Sartwell avers, because they preach obvious nonsense:
When I turn now to Rousseau and Hegel, I will forgo refutation entirely, resting content primarily with ridicule. Rousseau’s account of the social contract and state is riddled with ambivalences or outright contradictions overlain with a layer of obscurities. Hegel has a way of absorbing refutations like a sort of goo; any objection one might make will just be caught up in the process from which the structure of thought is already emerging.
Moreover, it is dangerous nonsense:
I read both Rousseau and Hegel as outright totalitarians. . . And it’s not that Rousseau and Hegel didn’t pay tribute elaborately to human freedom. . . It’s just that what they actually prescribe practically entails a totalitarian state. One might also mention that their notion of freedom is, shall we say, disturbing.
For example, Hegel said in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, “Everything that man is he owes to the state; only in it can he find his essence. All value that a man has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the state.” And “in Rousseau we experience the emergence of the totalitarian left, the obscure premonition of Mao and Stalin, whose status as embodiments of the general will force millions to be free of the shackles of life itself.”
And now to Rawls. As everybody knows, Rawls was an egalitarian who thought that deviations from equality are allowable only to the extent that they are to the advantage of the least well-off class in a state. But voluntary arrangements need not result in this outcome. It’s in fact almost certain that they won’t, a state of affairs that Sartwell—who is not an anarcho-capitalist—worries about. To get to equality, a powerful state is necessary. But this leads to a dilemma:
In fact, one way to articulate the dilemma is as a tension between Rawls’s two principles of justice: the freedom he values will be vulnerable to the power required to perform and endorse the distribution he recommends. One sees precisely the same tension in his account of state legitimacy; he needs to rest it on voluntary acts in order to preserve even minimal liberty and to make any wave in the direction of human autonomy before state power. But the bottom line is that he must have state power, either with your enthusiastic participation or over your objections or attempts to withdraw.
Indeed, we can press the dilemma further. If Rawls is concerned with equality, he
…ought to consider powers, along with wealth and freedoms, as objects of distribution in a Rawlsian-style scheme of justice. Rawls does not explicitly do this, but it’s a hard line to avoid, once it occurs to you, since power is intimately connected with the other social goods, and since the pursuit of power appears to be a feature of rational contractors: it is the kind of thing one would seek to assure oneself in an original position.
But any egalitarian distribution of wealth and income requires state administrators who have more power than anybody else. In short, we are left with what Nietzsche calls “that coldest of all cold monsters, the state.”
