Proposed: The state is a necessary part of civilised society
By 'state' I mean State (Polity), not divisions like US States.
To expand, it is proposed that it is necessary, at a minimum, within a given territory, for there to be a single group of people who hold the monopoly on force, for interaction with this group to be compulsory (eg through taxation, law), for this group to make, judge and enforce law through some legislative, judiciary and executive processes respectively; and that without such a group, there can be no substantial functioning, organised and civilised society.
Posted Nov 4, 2011, 11:31 PM UTC
2170
I think that history shows us that on the whole, giving a single group of people a monopoly on force results in bloodshed and suffering in fantastic amounts. The bubble of privilege and prosperity people in the Western world enjoy is the result of several genocidal outbursts by European states, namely the mass extermination of aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia (conservative estimate for North America is 93%), the trans-Atlantic slave trade (10 million dead at the very least, not to mention the number of African slaves and descendants murdered in the Americas which is uncounted and uncountable), and all the accompanying imperialism. The Chinese Empire conducted ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang (Uyghurstan). The Russian Empire exterminated most of the indigenous populations in Siberia. The Ottoman Empire exterminated or attempted to exterminate several ethnic groups, most famously the Armenians. The Nazis gassed millions in concentration camps first conceived by the British for use in Boer War. The list is endless, the atrocities are unfathomable, and the subjugation and oppression continue strongly to this day.
It seems that organized states with a monopoly on power tend to commit brutal acts of savagery. It is difficult to imagine how one could imagine such a state of affairs to be 'civilized'; or to put it another way, if that's what civilized means, it doesn't sound like something one should be in favor of.
There are other models of substantial, functioning, organized and 'civilized' society. They are very long.
Also very complicated
EDIT: multiple edits, mostly adding sources
Ultimately every state holds the monopoly on power, that is (one) definition of the state (eg the US Federal Govt holds the monopoly on force within the United States, the UK Govt holds it within the UK, etc), however there are many states which haven't committed such great atrocities as China and the many empires of centuries ago.
A request for clarification: is your point that by giving a group the monopoly on force, they have the capacity to commit atrocities essentially without accountability? A quote from Murray Rothbard comes to mind:
I am not sure if that is his point, but the quarter billion dead people at the hands of people "working for the State (polity)", vis a vis the handful of people that were ever held accountable, seems to confirm that point.
Any argument that says "civilization can only be achieved through X", where X is an idea / entity / group of people that engages in mass murders and domestic violence against peaceful people rather frequently (that's an understatement)... does not understand what "civilization" means.
I think this point must be conceded. However, I think the onus is on your position to show that the lack of a monopoly of force does not lead to even greater bloodshed and suffering. Can you produce examples of large populations living peaceably for an extended period of time without a central authority? You don't need a power monopoly for violence, you only need to forces in opposition. (Neighbor against neighbor or brother against brother will do just fine!)
Can you produce enough to overwhelm the examples of large populations living peaceably for an extended period of time WITH a central authority that I can produce?
Can you counter the suggestion that a central authority is necessary for the kind of cooperation that produces roadways, a common language, a common economy, higher learning, and all of the benefits that these bring?
This is the problem.
You offer examples of brutal acts of savagery committed by power monopolies, but as best as I can tell, none of these cases demonstrate existing stable power monopolies, but struggles to -create- a power monopoly - to take power they didn't already have and bring it under their control. As long as there are individuals who own things that the others don't, or have differences of any kind (especially religious), these kinds of atrocities will occur (and they are atrocities - I'm not trying to excuse them). Once you have a stable, unthreatened state, is when these kind of atrocities tend to fall off. The US committed genocide against Native Americans when they wanted their land, not when they already had it.
We built a very, very bloody bridge to get to the point where we are at now, but now that our states are so much more crystalline and unthreatened than they were historically, we see an equal drop-off in violence.
Iceland (930 -1264)
The "Wild" West
Pennsylvania (1681-1690)
Interesting! Thanks for providing those.
The Icelandic model is particularly impressive, but even anarchic apologists admit that the only reason it worked was because of Iceland's isolation from outside invasion, and the difficulty of subsistence farming there. Where resources are scarce, more effort must be expended to collect them. In places like Greece, where resources are more abundant, there is more free time for everyone (more unoccupied adult males), which seems to lead regularly to violence.
The Wild West is another interesting example. I tried to poke around elsewhere on the web for confirming evidence and found "The Myth of Violence in the Old West" by Roger D. McGrath referenced frequently. I was only able to find the free preview available, but one of things noted was that while violent crime in general was lower than the national averages (and much lower than big cities) in the modern US, the murder rate in the town he studied in the old west was much, much higher.
What all three examples you offer do show, though, is where an anarcho-capitalist society may thrive - on the fringes - on the edges of expansion, where available land exceeds desire for land, and where resources are not yet concentrated, and are available for the scrounging, but not for the plucking.
Still, despite my equivocating, I think you've answered the question fairly, and well done. What do you think about the other questions:
How about modern Iceland, which is definitely a state? How about Portugal, New Zealand, Canada, and the Scandanavian nations?
All three of the examples you gave were "splinter" groups - they brought with them the products of the states they left.
All societies fail, so I wouldn't expect the fact that these three failed to be evidence of anything in particular, but why did they fail? Would you agree that the primary reasons the succeeded for as long as they did was due to isolation and not requiring a defensive stance against invaders? How would we propose to adapt anarcho-capitalism to accommodate non-isolated areas that do have to adopt a defensive stance?
I'm not quite sure if the following answers this question, but here it goes: I don't think central authorities have either the incentives or the ability to help large populations cooperate.
Centralization of political authority often leads to tyranny because rulers of large populations (and geographical areas) have little to fear from loosing citizens to free surrounding polities. I prefer decentralization to centralization because it leads to a sort of competition between Governments which results in more human freedom. Many historians partially credit the decentralized political order in Europe following the fall of Rome with the rise of an advanced Western Civilization.
See more here
Moreover, when decision making for a large group of people is centralized, the decisions coming from the top usually fail to take into account the practical facts of the situations in which they're applied. Austrian economists refer to this as the economic calculation problem. It was mainly applied to the Socialists, but it applies to basically any centralized group making decisions. I remember hearing my father who worked for Pfizer (a large pharmaceutical corporation) always complaining about his bosses. Listening to him, you'd think Pfizer made it's best efforts to pick the least qualified people for management positions. However this wasn't the case. The reality was that because decision making at Pfizer was centralized, the decisions made by the management made no sense to those further down the line because the management didn't have the ability to take into account all the details that should have been considered in making their decisions. The same principles illustrated above apply both to large corporations and to governments, this is why so many people find Dilbert to be a funny comic.
As much as I'd like to claim to be an expert on these countries and their current economic and political climates, I simply do not know much about them, so I'd recommend asking someone else.
With regard to the public goods problem which you allude to in this question, I recommend this video which basically explains that public goods do not have to be funded via governmental compulsion. Roderick T. Long (the guy who wrote the essay read in the video) states that there are other methods, such as appealing to the conscience of people who use the good (he gives the example of church goers), packaging the public good with private goods, and a few others. Regarding language, I don't believe any State can be credited with the creation of a language. From skimming this wikipedia entry it appears that the exact origins are unknown, but that it was developed organically as people evolved and cooperated with one another. Regarding a common economy, all an economy is is the sum total of transactions among a large group of people. Since the division of labor arises naturally, it should surprise no one that an economy will follow. From my limited knowledge of history, it seems that the role of states has generally been to limit the economy by raising tariffs on foreign goods to protect politically connected producers in their respective polities.
Isolation certainly helps anarchic societies evade states. I recently read a great book on this topic found on amazon which theorizes that the indigenous tribes in Southeast Asia formed their social structures in such a way as to avoid being enslaved and expropriated by the States that existed in the valleys. For example, they preferred to grow root plants which are easy to hide and maintain, as opposed to rice, which is difficult to hide from tax collectors and difficult to maintain. So yes, isolation and the "friction of the terrain" make it easier to avoid State power. Although the author doubts this applies as much in our modern era with all weather roads and aircraft.
With regard to the issues of defense in non-isolated areas, I think the best strategy is to have a well-armed populace which is more difficult to conquer, as well as private security agencies that pose enough of an inconvenience to invaders that the invasion would be too expensive to the invaders. An An-Cap economist, Bob Murphy wrote a couple of essays on this topic found here that deals with this issue (as well as law) in more detail.
I believe many Native Americans would disagree with classifying the Wild West as a time where large populations lived peacefully.
Peacefully with respect to whom? Certainly the U.S. military had an atrocious policy of exterminating and subjugating the Native Americans. The European settlers on the other hand, generally lived peacefully with one another, and with the natives.
Read the wild west article before jumping to the topic of aboriginals. Conflicts with aboriginals were almost always state-supported.
It's only been 65 years since the end of World War II. The Great Leap Forward and the Khemer Rouge were 40-50 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in historical terms.
Start reading up on anthropology. The state is a very recent invention (about 5000 years old) and has waxed and waned a good deal since. Focus on Native Americans, groups in Papua New Guinea, Pacific Islanders. Look into the literature on conflict resolution, tribes, and the huge literature on non-state societies. Of course, anthropologists show up with the colonists, so you have to remember that all of their initial accounts are looking through shit hitting the fan...
-I had an archaeology prof who saw a group of tribesmen organize the maintenance on a 50-mile long irrigation canal in the 1950s.
-Language existed long before states
-"The Economy" is an invention of the state (or as Timothy Mitchell argues in Rule of Experts it is the state's attempt to understand itself). Obviously, long-distance trade and the provision of a broad range of goods predates the state as well
-Islam has a system of higher learning based on the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student that has persisted in times when states weren't present and (of course) emerged before the Islamic state in the Arabian peninsula
Of course it is. And we're still committing atrocities today - using drones to kill civilians overseas, etc. But the fact that there is violence does not mean that the violence isn't measurably less. Far fewer things now are a capital offense than before. We don't have frequent border wars with Canada and Mexico, nor are France and Spain at each others throats. It is considered a failure of diplomacy, not a first step, when two states go to war.
Ahh! Since you are a student of anthropology, as I was, you will recall what a large portion of exhumed skeletons show signs of violence - long, long before any formal state which is a fairly recent adaptation, as you say. You do not need to try very hard to find studies describing the historical decline of violence: 1 2 3 4 These are from the first page of a google search on "the historical decline of violence".
And of course you must recognize that we have a very advanced system of non-violent conflict resolution we in the US call the Justice system. As the concept of the state has matured, so has the concept of justice, rendering it more and more non-violent.
What evidence do you have for this? Can you produce examples of language without a state? What do you consider a state? Do tribal governments not qualify as a state? What about a simple chiefdom?
There were states in the region long preceding the advent of Islam. What are you using as an example of someone who lived without a state in the region? The Bedouins, perhaps?
Can you define a border case for a state and a non-state, so I can tell where your idea of acceptable and non-acceptable government delineates? Can you demonstrate for me that those acceptable governments are inherently less violent?
See, the problem you will run into is that people, under a government or not, are inherently violent. All anthropology shows that. There are various ways to tame this - religion, complex tribal organization giving everyone a sense of interrelatedness, and the state. None of these are non-violent, but in the order they are presented above, they become successively more-so, because of the way they restrict non-sanctioned violence.
Violence will always be among us. But if the state can claim a monopoly on violence, then at least we can reduce the interpersonal, interfamilial, and interreligious violence that has made the past so very bloody.
I was suspicious. These are all links talking about a book by Steven Pinker. He's actually not an anthropologist. It seemed like the kind of overly-broad statement that no reputable anthropologist would make: what kinds of violence? Hunting accidents? Falling down? So let's limit it to what seems like axe and arrow injuries: How would you even begin to differentiate in a sufficiently efficient manner that you could collect a large enough sample while controlling for other variables given widespread restrictions on the handling of mortuary remains and various forms of selection bias in the archaeological record itself?
The article seems like a bunch of cheerleading for European colonialism to me: I mean really: the enlightenment (the beginning of the Atlantic Slave trade) is the beginning of a golden age for human rights? That's just offensive. There's also a reason why they all portray Pinker as fighting against the orthodoxy: he is.
As long as you're white, male and middle-upper class. Otherwise, hello jailhouse rape for having a baggie of mind-altering substance in your pocket.
Both of those are not states. I generally mean a bureaucracy when I talk about a state, but even at the level of band-type societies, people have language. All people have language and even the most conservative estimates of the emergence of language are tens of thousands of years before Uruk and the Mesopotamian city states.
Yes. For example. While the first states emerged in Iraq, pre-Islamic Arabia was supposedly defined by warring tribes (each with its own God) that all considered Mecca a holy city where no warfare was allowed.
I don't buy this and all anthropology doesn't show that. Even one of your links cites a bunch of exceptions:
Basically, I think you've bought into an incorrect view of the past that is based on a sort of Western cultural chauvinism which is ultimately self defeating.
Don't fool yourself, now. Humans are an extremely recent biological invention, yet we're undeniably the king of the coop. If you shift your perspective to the modern state being the most evolved form of oranization, I think you'd be seeing something a bit closer to reality.
One prof., one group of tribesman, in the 50's, after outside influence. And it was a canal. He's talking trends, you're giving data points. Pick one "koombaya" singin' group that the world would actually pay attention to if they bothered to speak out. Oh, and by pay attention to, I mean pick them over a few billion in profitable resources...I'll wait. Language is a red herring, economy as well. They have fuck-all to do with which direction the herd stampedes, so to speak. What matters is the ability for one group to turn another group's collective heads to mush. Or to convert them, I suppose.
p.s. yes, I write in a combative tone. No, I don't think you're an idiot. I'm having fun here, play along.
Evolution is non-teleological. Ask the dinosaurs. Ask the cockroaches if we nuke each other into extinction.
Fair enough. I was just talking off the top of my head. To expand on the prof's point, archaeologists tend to assume that anything big and monumental was built by a state. This can become quite tautological.
Another separate point is that big, monumental forms of infrastructure might actually be a stupid idea in the first place. They could be liabilities that inherently involve the kinds of corrosive power relations that lead to civilizational collapse. Maybe the whole discipline of archaeology is focused on the dumb cultures: the ones that didn't heed the advice to "leave no trace."
Anyway, if you want to talk "trends," I'll simply point out that, due to IMF/World Bank "Structural Adjustment" the state is in retreat anyway and yet infrastructure is still getting built. In the first world, this is often done through private companies (Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism covers this well). In many other parts of the world, this is increasingly falling on kin networks and other forms of non-state mutual aid. The literature on this hasn't really been written yet, but I think a lot of it will start coming out from behind the pay-walls on academic journals in the next 5-10 years.
Well, I get where you're coming from. However, some of us look at aggression and authoritarian tendencies as a sort of virulent infection that has to be allowed to run its course. Just preserve the traditions of a just society while you dutifully fill out forms every now and then (whatever you do: don't raise the red flag) and wait til that violent mentality consumes itself (see Ibn Khaldun's theory that states are like people which move from youthful vigor to senile dissolution in about five generations).
It wouldn't bother me if you did
I think this point presents a false dichotomy in that you are stating that because X has / has not been tried successfully in the past, Y can / cannot work in the present or future.
It would be similar to asking during the 1600's, "provide an example of a civilization that has prospered without slavery". Advancements by their very definition are forward-looking.
That's a fair rejoinder.