Anarchism and Justice

I. Preface

The twentieth century has in many ways seen a reversion to an earlier period of human history. Before the eighteenth century, there existed everywhere in the "civilized" world an identifiable "Old Order", a regime of caste and privilege, of feudalism, monarchism, despotism — of statism, where the ruling castes of each political society governed by the alleged "right" of conquest and divine inspiration, and ruled by means of military might. But in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, for the first time in mankind's history, there arose a number of revolutionary movements designed to overthrow the "Old Order", to abolish the society of status and replace it with the society of contract, to establish a society of liberty, free trade and individualism, where only stagnant regimes had existed before. At the heart of these revolutionary movements was the ideology of classical liberalism, the ancestor of libertarianism. At the heart of the opposition, in defense of the Old Order, was conservatism as a social and political force.

The United States was a product of this early libertarian movement, and the American revolution was the first violent breakaway from Western mercantilism and imperialism in history — to be followed later by a great many others of somewhat lesser libertarian bent. (1)

But for many reasons, which cannot be detailed here, the nineteenth century witnessed the decay and near-death of this libertarian movement, and its replacement by socialism as the key radical movement of the day. Socialism had originated as a confused offshoot of both libertarianism and conservatism. It originally aimed at the libertarian ends of peace, free trade, and prosperity, but attempted to attain them, for the most part, by statist conservative means: centralization and State planning. (2) Socialism was, in addition, an offshoot of classical economics — an economics which attempted to replace the older natural rights analysis of social relationships with a confused doctrine of "utility" to society as being their main standard of social evaluation, dropping the mantle of justice completely, leaving it for the socialists to assume. Unable to provide a rigorous defense of their prenatural rights position against the positivists and utilitarians, and unable to show the justice of such key economic categories as interest, rent and profit (and individual ownership of land), the school of classical liberalism lost title to the banner of true radicalism — which was then assumed by the socialists.

Whatever their faults, and these were indeed many, socialists in the nineteenth century were vitally concerned with upholding the ideal of justice in social relationships, to apply theoretical principles (however wrong) in judging the justice of existing regimes. The result was that socialism became the dominant intellectual movement of the nineteenth century — and that classical liberalism slowly died, first attempting to survive as utilitarianism, then as positivism, then as evolutionism and "Social Darwinism". By the end of the nineteenth century, the former radical battle cry of "laissez-faire!" was heard infrequently, if ever.

Thus it is that we in the twentieth century face a rebirth of the Old Order, in form if not in substance. The twentieth century has seen the rebirth of statism as an alleged ideal; the rebirth of the society of status, of militarism, imperialism, protectionism and war. The twentieth century has witnessed more wars and bloodshed, more deaths at the hands of State armies and weapons, than any other single century in the history of man. Because of the inner contradictions in state socialism, because of the necessarily strong and centralized State which it requires to conceive and implement central planning, of the failure of earlier libertarian attempts to place limitations on the power of the State, and of the rise of fascism and "national socialism", the twentieth century has in fact been the century of the all-powerful State — armed with the technology made possible by the industrial revolution.

Thus, the problem of the State has again become of central concern to political philosophy, a political philosophy, I might add, which has in the twentieth century been all but dead, under the thumb of positivism, analytic philosophy, and "Wertfrei" social sciences in general. (3)

There have been many reactions against the sterility of modern philosophy and social sciences with respect to values. Some reactions, such as Existentialism, have counseled despair. Some people have returned to a more radical Marxism. Others have readopted mysticism, which had faded in the nineteenth century "age of reason and science." And some, in an ultimate union of activism and despair, have turned to nihilism. But few have taken the time to re-examine the premises of the existence of the State and of social organization in general.

It is my purpose in this essay to examine the justifications for the State offered by a number of diverse philosophies. In one short essay, one cannot possibly examine the entire course and history of political theory, so I must limit myself to examining positions immediately relevant to libertarianism — such as legal positivism, traditionalism, limited-government libertarianism, objectivism, and a few others.

My own position is that of free-market anarchism, arrived at from within the philosophical framework of the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean tradition, which is basically the same as the framework of Objectivism. I shall concentrate on a few major issues, and shall attempt to prove that the institution of the State is not justified, and, as a corollary, that anarchism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the establishment of justice in a social context. Since I maintain that justice is a fundamental need of man, my thesis can be stated: anarchy is a necessary condition for man's proper survival in a social context. There are doubtless other needs, but this shall be my focal point.

I shall consider, in different contexts, such issues as the justification of the State per se, the legitimacy or source of its specfic authority, its jurisdiction, structure, and financial base. Before these issues are reached, much later on in the essay, I shall consider the necessary ethical base of the discussion.

II. The Nature of Justification

Since we are to consider the issue of the State's justification, let us briefly ask just what is justification. To justify a claim is to offer objective evidence on its behalf to a rational consciousness; to prove something, to make it evident to a human consciousness possessing and exercising the faculty of reason.

The nature of the objective evidence relevant to one question may differ from that relevant to another — thus mathematical proof will differ from historical proof and so forth. Why does anything have to be rationally justified? There are several reasons for this, all of which cannot be detailed here. But first of all, if we do not rest our concepts, values and actions on rational justification or evidence, then there are only two alternatives: acceptance of something on the grounds of authority, or on the grounds of mystical insight. But these are in turn accepted either because of reasons or without reasons. If the former, then the reasons turn out to be the ultimate ground of our belief. If one or the other is accepted without reasons, then the contradictions wrought are insoluable. Brand Blanshard's argument against the appeal to authority is equally devastating against the appeal to mysticism: "...if one person is justified in appealing to authority without reasons, then others are similarly justified. They would even be justified in accepting authorities that said precisely the opposite of what is said by one's own authority. But it is obvious that in this event one or other authority is wrong, and therefore that whatever justified appealing to it must similarly be wrong. In the light of its consequences, the unreasoning appeal to authority is thus self-destructive." (4)

But something will be noticed of all this: in fact it presupposes the very point in question, namely that beliefs have to be justified. The ultimate answer to this question must be, therefore, that beliefs have to be justified because man is not born with knowledge, and thus has to acquire it. The process of justification is the process of connecting man's beliefs to reality, which is necessary so that his values and actions will be in harmony with reality. Beliefs thus must be founded upon objective evidence, which is reality as it is presented to the intellect.

Since our primary thesis involves demonstrating that something is a fundamental need of man's proper survival and well-being, a few things must be said about the concept and nature of needs. (5)

The concept of "need" is not a primary. On the very simplest level, needs have to be defined in terms of purposes or ends. The question which must be raised when "needs" are asserted is: "Necessary to whom and for what?" Now I am maintaining a question which deals with what I have called a fundamental need — and a fundamental need is that upon which other needs depend, which makes them meaningful. If needs are dependent upon purposes, then fundamental needs must be defined in terms of fundamental purposes or ends, the most fundamental of which (the existence of it alone makes all other needs and purposes possible) is life.

From Branden: "The existence of life is conditional; an organism always faces the possibility of death. Its survival depends on the fulfillment of certain conditions. It must generate the biologically appropriate course of action. What course of action is appropriate is determined by the nature of the particular organism. Different species survive in different ways. An organism maintains itself by exercising its capacities in order to satisfy its needs. The actions possible to and characteristic of a given species, are to be understood in terms of its specific needs and capacities. These constitute its basic behavioral context. 'Need' and 'capacity' are used here in their fundamental metaphysical sense....; in this context, 'need' and 'capacity' refer to that which is innate and universal to the species, not to that which is acquired and peculiar to the individual. An organism's needs are those things which the organism, by its nature, requires for its life and well-being — i.e. for its efficacious continuation of the life-process....(my emphasis) 'Need' implies the existence of a goal, result or end: the survival of the organism. Therefore, in order to maintain that something is a physical or psychological need, one must demonstrate that it is a causal condition of the organism's survival and well-being." (6)

This is the concept of a "need" upon which we shall be building. Branden has discussed physical and psychological needs; we are discussing, or emphasizing, political or social needs. What I will have to demonstrate, therefore, is that anarchy, the absence of the State, follows from conditions of existence which are causal conditions of man's survival and well-being, in a social context. (7)

Now if we derive notions of what is right for men from the standard and purpose of life and the causal conditions necessary to sustain it, then we can see that what is right for man, what is moral, and what is "practical" or necessary for man to survive and prosper are all coextensive. Thus, I shall not be discussing the issue of the necessity of the State apart from or without reference to moral principles defining the social needs of man.

On a fundamental level, there can be no conflict between the moral and the necessary (or "practical") since that would entail a conflict between what is necessary for man's survival and well-being and itself, which is clearly impossible. Furthermore, the only way in which something can be determined to be necessary for man's proper survival and well-being is by reference to principles which will enable us to define such concepts. Another way of stating this is: we cannot determine what is and what is not a necessity of man's survival and well-being without a standard, a criteria, a principle of evaluation.

Thus, I will be concerned with briefly establishing such principles, and then with investigating the various alleged justifications for the State.

III. Justice, Property and Rights

We have established what we meant by a need. Now I want to uphold the thesis that justice, and the recognition of rights, are needs of man in a social context. I will not discuss in any detail all the numerous benefits to man of living in society (the division of labor, trade, etc.). These have been detailed by Mises, Rothbard, Rand and many others. What I want to focus on is the fact that man needs liberty or freedom, in a social context. We have identified the fact that in order to survive and prosper, man's ideas, values and convictions must be tied to reality by a process of thought. To live and benefit himself, to attain his own needs and values, man must use his mind to identify the nature of things in reality, including his own nature. He must identify the relationships between himself and other things in reality such that he develops a scale of preferences, or values.

Men do not in fact "discover" values in the universe any more than they "discover" ideas already existing in extra-mental reality. But this does not mean that knowledge and values are purely arbitrary products of man's consciousness. In truth, both knowledge and real (beneficial) values are constructed by man's consciousness in accordance with an objective, extra-mental foundation, that foundation being the facts of reality. Man's mind integrates data into new mental entities such as concepts and laws. The structure of man's consciousness, its nature, and the nature of reality, will determine the basic principles of epistemology. The structure of man's life, his nature as a living organism, and the nature of reality, will determine the basic principles of ethics. (8)

Since everything which exists in reality is individual and particular, there is no such thing as a collective mind, and no collective qua collective can think about things in reality, make decisions and so forth. This means that if each individual is to survive and prosper, to act to benefit himself, that he must think about those aspects of reality relevant to his own life, make decisions, choose between alternatives, and act to attain rationally-derived ends. Each man, in other words, must retain intellectual independence, checking the values ideas and conclusions of others against his own knowledge. If he does not, then he is in the same position as the person who attempts to evade the necessity for justification per se.

To act to attain values, every man must think about himself and the world, establish what things are of value to him, and then proceed to implement his choices by means of action. In a desert island situation, there is nothing to prevent him from forming concepts and then testing them out to see if he was correct or not, there is nothing to prevent him from acting on the basis of his knowledge and values. If he is right, then he generally succeeds with his plans, if wrong, he may fail. But there is nothing to interfere with the relationship between his decisions and reality, nothing to stop him from attempting to implement his choices through a process of action.

In society, there is. We know of the immense possible benefits of living in a society — of the benefits of trade, the division of labor, comparative advantages, and of voluntary relationships in general. But there is another aspect of social existence which confronts man: the possibility of aggression against him, which does, unlike the case on a desert island, interfere with his implementation of his choices through action. Yet what makes the attainment of every individual's values possible in a social context is precisely this ability to implement one's values, otherwise one cannot benefit oneself (this, however, is no guarantee of success).

Since society is only a group of individuals interacting according to their various purposes and plans, society has no "good" apart from that of the units of which it is composed. This is important to note because it means that the only means by which one can judge what kind of a society is proper to man, right for him, is to determine what individual needs men possess, and to construct an appropriate ethical model on that basis.

I have shown that it is only the possibility of attaining values by individual men in a society which makes society "valuable" to men, and that a precondition of attaining such values is the ability to implement one's values and decisions through actions. Since the only thing in society which could prevent this, literally, is the physical interference of others, we can conclude that freedom from physical interference is a necessary condition of man's acting to attain his values, to implement his choices, in a social context. Since it is only by means of principles that we can define such freedom of action as it is proper and possible for man to have in a social context, we can thus bring in a new concept: the concept of rights. Rights have been defined (by Ayn Rand) as principles defining and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context. (Other statements about rights, such as that they are "conditions of existence necessary for man's proper survival in a social context," (Rand) and that they are "principles which morally prohibit men from using force or any substitute for force against anyone whose behavior is non-coercive," (Tannehills) are true statements about rights, but they are not definitions.) But notice that we have only stated the concepts of rights in the most abstract terms, and that there are no criteria stated for determining whether or not any specific action is an action by right. The way we develop such additional and co-relative principles is by examining what is involved in freedom of action in a social context.

Freedom of action, being a species of action per se, must involve things to act on. All actions are the actions of entities. Man is a specific entity, and he must use other entities in action, including such things as land for standing room. THERE CAN BE NO ACTION WITHOUT A THING ACTING, OR A THING ACTED UPON. When we speak of freedom of action in a social context, therefore, we automatically speak of the areas which are subsumed by the concepts of ownership, of property, of justice and of rights. These words all overlap in meaning, deriving their meanings from our identifications of real and possible relations between men and things.

Ownership involves the relation between a person and anything (including his own body) subject to use, control and disposal. A property is any entity which is actually owned. A right is a principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. Justice is a code of principles which defines what is due to a man, what he deserves, what he is legitimately entitled to.

My conclusion at this point is that since man needs freedom of action in a social context, and since it is the principle of rights which defines and sanctions man's freedom of action in such a social context, that every man needs to have his rights respected. (Thus rights are the fundamental means of making the transition from individual ethics to ethics in a social context. Rights are the means of applying the concept of rational self-interest to society — they are a function of rational self-interest in a social context, the means of identifying what is fundamentally to man's benefit in society. But this shall be discussed further below.)

Now since actions involve things, or entities, freedom of action will necessarily involve claims to the entities involved in the action, i.e., we cannot discuss freedom of action or rights without reference to property and ownership. And the widest principle of all is the principle of human social relationships — the principle of justice. It is the philosophy of justice alone which will enable us to fill in the skeleton, so to speak, of the remaining principles.

In other words, to fill in the meaning of the concept of freedom of action, which has been shown to be a condition necessary for man's survival and well-being in a social context, we must consider the issues of property, rights, ownership and justice.

Ownership and property can be referred to in three senses: what a man actually does to exercise the power of control over (praxeological ownership), what some group (such as the State) that claims a man should exercise control over (juristic ownership), and what a man actually has a legitimate claim to, as defined by the principles of justice (moral ownership). These can overlap, but for the time being we will be considering the third category alone, since that will enable us to make sense out of all the rest, and which we shall use as a standard to judge, criticize and evaluate both the status quo — what actually exists — and other theories as well.

I have explained that all actions involve entities. Therefore, every claim to freedom of action must include as part of its meaning a claim to use the entities which must of necessity be involved. All rights (justified claims to freedom of action) must refer to actions over such entities. Since we have called these entities in such relations to men property, we can conclude that all rights are so-extensive with property rights. In other words: CLAIMS TO RIGHTS ARE TRANSLATABLE (CONCEPTUALLY) INTO CLAIMS TO OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY OR A DERIVATIVE (SUCH AS A JUSTIFIED PERMISSION). To claim that one possesses a right to something without simultaneously claiming a legitimate title (derivative of just ownership) is a contradiction in terms.

Thus, the fundamental need of man in society is freedom of action, which means: recognition of his rights to actions over property which he morally owns, i.e. has a justifiable claim to, which means: JUSTICE.

This is the fundamental need of man, and this is the framework from which we shall evaluate the arguments and alternatives offered by various theories.

Now some people might maintain that while I have shown that every man has an objective need for justice, for his rights to be respected, for his property to remain inviolable — I have not shown that he must therefore respect the rights or property of other men, i.e., that he should act justly towards them. While a full answer to this problem cannot be given here, I can sketch one answer to this objection: namely, that consistency demands that each man respect the rights of others.

Note first of all that the only way in which any given person can maintain that he has an objective need for justice, to have his rights respected, is by reference to abstract principles which enable him to define what is right for man, what conditions of existence and actions on their part are necessary for them to maintain and sustain their lives as rational beings, to further and promote their own objective well-being. It is these principles which enable him to define and establish the fact that he needs justice, to have his rights respected, to have his property remain inviolable. Therefore, it is only by reference to these principles that he can assert such rights, and such entitlements to justice. But if these principles are to define and sanction the sphere of freedom of action proper for him, by the very nature of the method by which such a principle was derived, they must also apply equally to other people.

Therefore, he cannot consistently claim that the principles apply to him but not to others, for they were derived by reference to the kind of organism which he is, by reference to his identity or nature which other people also possess. (9) Thus to claim the sanction of the principles for himself but not to allow and recognize their application to others constitutes an inconsistency in his arguments for and recognition of his own needs in a social context.

The only way, the only means by which, an individual can attain, sustain and promote his own life and well-being as a rational being (and that is the only way that he can act to gain and keep what is fundamentally in his self-interest in a social context) is to act to attain, maintain and sustain a social system proper to man. It is thus only by recognizing the rights of others, by acting justly towards them, that a man can consistently claim rights and justice for himself, without contradicting reality. I conclude, then, that the recognition of the rights of others is a key aspect of authentic concern for one's own rational well-being in a social context. It is on these grounds (among others) that I maintain that consistency demands the recognition of rights of others on the part of each and every member of a society. Not to recognize the rights of others is to refuse to manifest an authentic rational, reality-based concern with one's own needs as a rational being. (10)

IV. Justice in Property Titles

I have shown, briefly, why justice, ownership and property rights are necessary for man's prosperity, survival and well-being in society. This might be called a proof of the abstract justification for the institution of property rights. Now we will cover a corollary issue: the principles by which we can define specific legitimate property titles. (It should be noted that this distinction between the justification of the institution and the legitimacy of any specific title is very close to a distinction which will later be brought up with regard to the State: a distinction between the justification of the State per se, and the means of determining the legitimacy of the specific authority which a State possesses.)

What we have done so far is to sketch out the basic form which a valid theory of ownership would have to take. Here I will consider the content of such a theory of justice. What principles shall we apply in determining what a man justly owns?

A large body of libertarian and other authors maintains that the reason that the State is necessary is to provide a means of defining property titles and establishing a code of justice in titles. Thus, the Friedmanites, utilitarians in general, followers of "wertfrei" economist Ludwig von Mises (as well as innumerable others) do not have a theory of property titles. In effect, they claim that we must have some means of determining what a man justly owns, but that it may be any means; whereupon they rely very heavily upon the State to do such defining.

Now while it is admitted that we must have some means of defining actual property rights, it does not follow that it may legitimately be any means which we arbitrarily choose. Indeed, I maintain that this approach is profoundly anti-libertarian. For if it is to be left up to the State to define property titles, then cannot the State simply divide up the land surface of a given territory among several privileged lackeys, or institute the practice of slavery, simply by handing over the title of one man to another? (11) But if this is not acceptable, then it is clear that we need a standard by which to judge what is and what is not a man's legitimate property. And this standard must indeed be anterior to the State's decisions, an outside standard by which one can judge both the State and its traditions. Again, this is really nothing but the approach of natural law theory, as against the positivist tradition in legal theory which denies the existence of rational standards by which to judge the legitimacy of laws which the State enforces.

One test which we shall apply in building up our theory of property titles is its applicability in principle to all men. This is because a code of moral principles is derived from the nature of the kind of organism that we are talking about, and hence will apply to every organism of that kind. If it cannot be applied to all men, then it is not, by that fact alone, a set of moral principles.

Since man is the organism and entity which we are concerned with, we can state our first principle of justice and social philosophy thus: every man owns himself. This is a meaningful statement, and the opposite is possible, e.g., slavery can exist. Thus we can also state it this way: no man owns the body of any other man. Not only is this universal in applicability, it is the only conceivable and practical statement of its kind.

It is the only universal and practical statement and principle of its type simply because ownership implied decision-making power. Now if we attempted to look at the principles which are logical alternatives to this, we would find ourselves trapped in countless webs and mazes. For example, the principle that "All men own the bodies of every other man", if we can even conceive of it as being meaningful, would lead us into an infinite regress in decision-making, with each person needing someone else's permission before he could make any decision whatever, or else every person would need everybody else's permission before making a decision. But then how could these others give their permission without permission from someone else?...ad infinitum.

(Thus, as an aside, only this ethic of non-aggression does not split men into camps: the rulers and the ruled, and thus only libertarianism is truly consistent with a classless society, politically speaking.)

One can also show, by using the same sort of approach, that each man has an unlimited right to acquire unowned natural resources, by making use of them, for the only principle which could limit one's freedom of action in such a situation would be someone else's rights. But, ex hypothesi, since no one owns those resources in question, no one's rights are violated when a man makes use of them. (12)

One can deduce from this the entire body of the principles of justice in property titles. One can deduce an immediate implication in the right of exchange of property titles, of giving people gifts of one's justly acquired property, the right of rent (the unit hire of a good or service), the right of contract (exchange of property titles over a period of time), of interest, of profit from voluntary exchange, and so forth. The right of wages is derived from one's right to hire out one's own labor services. All in all, this process can be continued until we have deduced the entire corpus or structure of the principles of justice in property titles. (This is not meant to imply that all existing titles are justified; that must be determined by applying these principles to specific contexts by means of reason).

It should be noted at this point that all we have done is to sketch out the basic principles of ownership, property, rights and justice, in order to lay the foundation for a discussion of the nature and justification of the State. One further important conclusion should be drawn here. Many libertarians in actuality attempt to justify the free market, perhaps unwittingly, by reference to utilitarian principles such as "the public good," "social utility" and so forth. This, I believe, is a grievous error, and can produce no limit to the confusions wrought (as classical liberalism witnessed in the last century.)

The correct approach to the proof of the legitimacy of the free market (its morality as a kind of social organization) would be as follows. The free market is a network of exchanges, a system of human cooperation according to the principles of justice in property titles and voluntary exchange of such legitimate titles. The legitimacy, justice or morality of the free market must be derived from the nature of its units, and its units are acts of exchange. The legitimacy of acts of exchange, and of any particular act of exchange, is in turn derived from the legitimacy of the property titles which are being exchanged. And this is judged by reason, in accordance with contextually objective evidence, and with the principles of justice, of the philosophy of ownership, as a guide. This is the means of establishing the justice of the free market.

Note that exchange of unjust property titles are not units of the free market. When one stops a thief from trading his stolen loot with another, one is not infringing on the free market, one is stopping a man from multiplying the effects of injustice. (13)

Secondly, let us bring up another concern at this point. The basic libertarian social principle has often been stated as: "No man or group of men may initiate the use of force against others." Ayn Rand, in her essay on "Man's Rights," states that "to violate a man's rights means to compel him to act against his own judgement, or to expropriate his values." Neither of these is adequate — for one can stop a murderer from acting according to his judgement, and one can expropriate a value from a thief without violating the rights of either. What is true is that one violates the rights of another, i.e., one uses aggression against him, or initiates force against him, when one compels him to act against his judgement in a respect in which he was entitled to act thus, and to expropriate a value to which he was entitled. In short, one can have no concept of what it is to violate the rights of others, nor can one even make the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, without having an implicit concept of justice, a code of principles which defines what a man is entitled to, and in what sphere he is entitled to act according to his judgement. In short, the very distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, between invasive and retaliatory violence depends upon and presupposes a theory of justice in property titles. Only once such a theory has been established can one define aggression, namely as any use or threat of violence against another's just property claims (and thus justified freedom of action).

Much of this is presented now not only to lay the foundation for a discussion of the legitimacy of the State, but to anticipate points which will be brought up later in our discussion of conservative and libertarian-oriented writers.

V. The Epistemological Status of the Issue

A few comments on the epistemological status of the discussion are in order. What is anarchism, anyway? Anarchism is the doctrine (as theoretician Benjamin R. Tucker has stated it) that the State should be abolished, and that all the affairs of men should be handled by individuals or voluntary associations. Anarchism is thus the opposition to and denial of the legitimacy of a positive belief; namely, that the State is moral and necessary. It is alleged that anarchism is a need of man only in the sense that the absence of a specific disease is a need of man, or a precondition to health. (This should only be taken as a metaphor.)

It is important to note, in other words, that epistemologically anarchism is a negative proposition, not concerned per se with advocating positive institutions. Like atheism, it need prove nothing positive. All that it has to do is to consider the doctrines and arguments of the advocates of a State, and attempt to prove them to be invalid. If it succeeds in this attempt, then it has itself been established.

What is the basis of this claim? As Nathaniel Branden has said in "What is the Objectivist View of Agnosticism?" (OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER, April 1963): "Rational demonstration, an appeal to facts, is necessary to support even the claim that a thing is possible. It is a breach of logic to assert that that which has not been proved to be impossible is, therefore, possible...When a person makes an assertion for which no rational grounds are given, his statement is — epistemologically — without cognitive content. It is as though nothing had been said."

Thus, the burden of proof is always on the proponent of any position. If a man makes a claim about the existence of something, then it is up to him to make out his case. This is true for any hypothesis, whether scientific or moral. If I disagree with him, then my intellectual opposition to his position will take the form of refuting his evidence. Likewise with anarchism: the burden of proof is always on the advocate of a State. Surely this is not only true by epistemological law, but especially true and relevant in this case, in this historical period, with States threatening man's very existence.

Since every State which has ever existed (and thus every existential referent of the concept State) has used aggression to exist and function, those advocating a similar institution have to show and prove that theirs is fundamentally different. This cannot merely be asserted. It must be argued for with objective evidence.

Thus we must start out as anarchists, and have the advocates of the State make out their case. Surely with a historical context to look at we must be skeptics concerning the alleged need for such an institution. And since mankind must have started out without a State, it had to be created historically as well. Thus on every ground, we must start out as anarchists to begin with!

Furthermore, since man is not omniscient, he can deal only with the specific arguments given for any specific positive assertion. An anarchist cannot be required to refute arguments which don't exist, which have been propounded by no one. What this means is that I need only prove the defenses of the State which exist to be inadequate. In this essay, I shall also be attempting to show that the concept of the State held by many theoreticians is an invalid one.

Since I have already stated my thesis (that anarchy is a necessary condition of man's proper survival in a social context) my premises, and my method, I will now go on to consider the positions held by advocates of a State.

(to be continued next issue)

Footnotes

1. On this point, see Arthur A. Ekirch, The Decline of American Liberalism (New York, 1969) Chapters 1–4; Murray N. Rothbard, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," in Left and Right, Vol I, No. 1; and Part One, "Revolutionary Origins of Capitalist Democracy," in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, by Barington Moore, Jr. (Boston, 1966).
2. I have not included various phases of the voluntarist socialist movements here.
3. The "Wertfrei" social sciences are those which claim to be 'scientific' and therefore completely divorced from any concern with value-judgements. It is an interesting side-note that if we look closely at these supposedly "value-free" and "scientific" practitioners of value-free social sciences that we find them often acting as advisors to the States which are engaging in domestic regulation, foreign imperialism, and war.
4. Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, Vol. 2, p. 217. See also the whole of Chapter XXV, as well as: Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; Peter Coffey, Epistemology and The Science of Logic, for treatments of human knowledge.
5. In this, I shall be drawing heavily on Nathaniel Branden's The Psychology of Self-Esteem, (Los Angeles, Nash Publishing Co., 1969).
6. Ibid., pp. 15–16, 18.
7. One of the minimum qualities which something must have in order to be considered a "social context" is the absence of conditions (such as those of the much-heralded "lifeboat" case) which make it metaphysically impossible for two or more persons to simultaneously survive. I do not consider the so-called "lifeboat" situations to be a proper part of any social philosophy.
8. For a more detailed presentation of this view, see Ayn Rand, Introduction, etc., and Francisco Suarez, On Formal and Universal Unity. Suarez was a highly original philosopher of the 16th and 17th centuries, following in the Scholastic tradition, whose views on this and other important topics have been unfortunately neglected.
9. This is substantially the same approach to ethics as the natural law position of the Aristotelians and Thomists. See, e.g., A. P. d'Entreaves, Natural Law.
10. In a strange way those denying that one ought to respect the rights of others are committing the reverse fallacy of the fallacy of self-exclusion which characterizes arguments for determinism and the like. It might be termed the fallacy of other-exclusion, and consists in refusing to recognize the application of principles to others when one has claimed their application to oneself.
11. I owe this insight, and indeed much of my approach to property, to Murray N. Rothbard, especially his unpublished manuscript The Ethics of Liberty.
12. This is discussed in a great deal of libertarian literature. See: Lysander Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property (Vol. III, Collected Works, M & S Press, 1971); Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, Chapter 2, Section 11–13 (Van Nostrand, 1962); "Eric Dalton", "Private Property and Collective Ownership", in Left and Right, Vol. II, No. 3; See also lengthy discussions by by innumerable Scholastic philosophers. For somewhat different views, see Morris and Linda Tannehill's The Market for Liberty; Robert LeFevre, The Philosophy of Ownership, and an essay by Jarret Wollstein, "Intellectual Property Rights and Social Action" in The Rational Individualist, April 1969.
13. I acknowledge the suggestions of Ronn Neff for clarifying this point.

R. A. Childs, Jr., is a contributing editor to this publication. His exploration of Objectivist and libertarian philosophy has raised a storm of comment over the last several years.