Community, Anarchy and Liberty

192 Pages·1982·3.61 MB·English

by  Michael Taylor

Community, anarchy and liberty

Community,
Anarchy and Liberty
MICHAEL TAYLOR
Reader in Government
University of Essex
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211 USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1982
First published 1982
Reprinted 1983, 1985, 1989, 1995
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 82-1173
British Library cataloguing in publication data
Taylor, Michael
Community, anarchy and liberty.
1. Anarchism and anarchists
I. Title
335\83 HX833
ISBN 0 521 24621 0 hard covers
ISBN 0 521 27014 6 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2000
Selections have been used from the following works:
Anarchy and Cooperation by M. Taylor. Copyright ©1976 John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Anarchy,State and Utopiaby Robert Nozick. Copyright ©1974 by Basic Books Inc.
By permission of Basic Books Inc., Publishers, New York, and Basil Black well,
Oxford.
Philosophy, Science and Method, by S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes and M.White. By
permission of St Martins Press Inc.
Contents
Acknowledgements page vii
1 Anarchy and community 1
1.1 Introduction: the scope of the book 1
1.2 Anarchy: what it is 4
1.3 Power, authority and what anarchy is not 10
1.4 Community 25
1.5 Anarchic communities 33
2 Social order without the state 39
2.1 Social order and public goods 39
2.2 Social order and the state 53
2.3 Social order on the market 59
2.4 Social order in stateless societies 65
2.5 Community and stateless social order 90
3 Equality in anarchy 95
3.1 Is equality unstable in anarchy? 95
3.2 The control of inequality in stateless societies 104
3.3 The birth of the state 129
4 Community and liberty 140
4.1 Pure negative freedom, freedom from coercion,
and autonomy 142
4.2 Are community and liberty incompatible? 150
5 Epilogue: the future of community and anarchy 166
Bibliography 172
Index 181

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of parts of this book were presented at the
conferences on' Anarchism and Law' at the Erasmus University
of Rotterdam and on 'The Theory of a Free Society' at Oxford
in 1979, and at the ECPR workshop on 'Liberty' at Florence in
1980. Conversations with participants in these meetings and
their criticisms of my contributions have been helpful and are
gratefully acknowledged. I should also like to thank those
friends who have discussed the ideas of this book with me and
the readers for Cambridge University Press for their helpful
comments on the manuscript. The bulk of the book was
written during a year's leave of absence from the University of
Essex when I was financially supported by an SSRC Personal
Research Grant, for which I am most grateful.

1
Anarchy and community
1.1 Introduction: the scope of the book
I set out in the studies which have resulted in this book to
discover whether anarchy - doing without the state - is viable
and, if so, what sort of anarchy that would be and whether it was
compatible with certain fundamental ideals of communitarian
anarchists and other socialists, notably those of liberty and
equality.
It seemed to me that the critical test of the viability of
anarchy was whether its members could maintain social order,
in the basic sense of security of persons and their property
(however much or little property there is). Most writers in the
communitarian anarchist tradition do not recognise this as a
problem for the anarchies they desire or predict for the future,
where it would be solved or obviated by a transformed human
nature, appropriately socialised. But the maintenance of social
order has always been a problem, in every kind of society, even
in those where private property or possession is limited to the
barest, easily replaceable goods; and there are no grounds for
the anarchists' optimism that the problem would resolve itself
as effortlessly as they suppose even in societies of the sort they
envisage. When I speak of it as a problem, I mean that
individuals will not voluntarily refrain from doing those things
which threaten social order. The reason for this (as I argue in
Section 2.1) is that there is an important element of social order
which is a 'public good', that is to say a good which (roughly
BO
2 COMMUNITY, ANARCHY AND LIBERTY
speaking) benefits every member of the public regardless of
whether he contributes in any way to its provision. If a good is
public in this sense an individual may be tempted to be a 'free
rider', to benefit from whatever amount of the good others
provide without contributing himself; and if many people
attempt to be free riders little or none of the public good will be
provided.
It is this problem about the provision of the public good of
social order which justifies the state, in the view of many
people. Of course, only a minimal state is justified, a 'night-
watchman' state whose only functions are the maintenance of
internal order and external defence (which is also a public
good). In an earlier work, Anarchy and Cooperation, I argued that
this way of justifying the state, even a minimal state, is
fundamentally flawed. Here (in Section 2.2) I summarise very
briefly the parts of that argument which are relevant to my
present argument.1
Without the state, how is social order to be maintained? One
answer is that the goods and services which go to make up social
order can and should be provided by private firms competing in
the marketplace. This 'libertarian' or anarcho-capitalist approach
is currently enjoying a revival, especially in the United States.
In Section 2.3 I shall contend that social order cannot satisfac-
torily be put on the market, and in the remainder of Chapter 2
I shall argue instead that in the absence of the state social order
can be maintained only if relations between people are those
characteristic of community.
Community has largely been ignored in recent political
theory. It is a horribly 'open-textured' concept, that is to say
there is not and there cannot be an exhaustive specification of
the conditions for its correct use. But there are what we might
This brief section and a few pages on public goods in Section 2.1 are the only
areas of overlap between the earlier book and the present one.