The death last month of the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff is a fitting occasion to call to the attention of libertarians, and particularly libertarian anarchists, his short book In Defense of Anarchism, originally published in 1970 and issued in a revised edition in 1976. In the book, Wolff argues that the state is illegitimate.
To understand his argument, we first need to know what he means by a state. He holds that “the state is a group of persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a given territory.” This at once raises another question, and this is crucial to the book’s main argument: what is authority? Wolff’s answer is that authority is the moral right to command. If some person (or group of people) can tell you what to do, and you obey just because he tells you, then you are acknowledging his authority over you.
And this definition of authority gives rise to the fundamental argument for anarchism in the book. This is that each person capable of rational thought is properly the judge of what he ought morally to do. By no means does Wolff mean that morality is subjective, in the sense that it is up to the individual to do whatever he wants. On the contrary, Wolff believes that people have rights which can be shown to exist by argument. (In this contention, he agrees with Murray Rothbard, although his way of arguing for these rights, and their content, differs from Rothbard’s approach to these issues.) Rather, Wolff means that each person must be the final judge of what he ought to do, if he is to remain autonomous. You can cede your autonomy by deciding to accept the command of the state as sufficient reason to do something or refrain from doing it, but in that case, you have failed to respect yourself as an autonomous human being.
If autonomy and authority are genuinely incompatible, only two courses are open to us. Either we must embrace philosophical anarchism or treat all governments as non-legitimate bodies whose commands must be judged and evaluated in each instance before they are obeyed.
But what if people do cede their autonomy to the state? If people promise to obey the state, then “there is no universal or a priori reason for binding ourselves to a democratic government rather than to any other sort.” People cannot properly claim that they are at least partially retaining their autonomy, since decisions will be made unanimously, or at least by the majority. Again, like Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Wolff is a firm critic of democracy, and in this connection, he makes a number of useful points. For one thing, the candidates and issues that people vote on must first be presented to them for choice, and if so, people might not get the opportunity to vote on what they would most prefer.
Suppose, for example, that people can choose between a foreign policy that aims to promote a woke agenda abroad and a policy that aims at imperial expansion, but in fact they would most like a policy of complete non-intervention. In that case, democracy will be, at best, a matter of choice between two inferior outcomes. This argument, as Wolff notes, applies even in case of unanimous preference for one of the two options.
Matters become even worse if the choice is between candidates for office rather than issues. A candidate will almost always campaign on several different issues, and voters might never get the opportunity to vote for a candidate who supports the position on all the issues that they most want. Suppose, for example, that in a two-person race, you want free trade, tax cuts, and burning fossil fuels, but you have a choice between one candidate who wants tariffs, tax cuts, and burning fossil fuels and another candidate who wants free trade, tax increases, and banning fossil fuels. You will not get what you would most prefer, and—given a sufficiently large number of positions in a candidate’s platform—you will almost never get to vote for a candidate who embraces your position on them all.
Even if states, including democratic states, are inconsistent with the moral autonomy of the individual, can’t a state at least partly rectify this inconsistency by limiting its own claims of jurisdiction? Many states, for example, recognize the right of conscientious objection to military service and also recognize the right of self-defense.
Wolff counters that this sort of recognition does not offer any mitigation of the autonomy problem, because these limits are defined by the state and not by the individuals who seek to exercise these rights:
I [Wolff] want once again to emphasize the absoluteness of the typical state claim to authority... But the state claims the right to decide what shall be accepted as a conscientious objection and in which contexts the appeal to consequences shall be allowed… The law also permits private citizens to use force in self-defense, but the state claims the right to decide when force may be used, against whom, for what purpose, and with what limits.
The challenge to the state that Wolff advances can be made even stronger when one takes account of the fact that the free market can supply the services often assumed to require a state, such as defense and settlement of legal disputes. Sad to say, Wolff is opposed to the free market, at least if it extends over substantial distances. His opposition to the market is based on a point that Friedrich Hayek and others consider one of its strong points, namely, that the market gives rise to an order that is not planned by the participants but instead depends on economic laws that are independent of their will.
Unlike the laws of physics, Wolff avers, this is not so for economic laws; and those who claim that it indeed is so are “reifying” what is subject to human control. Unfortunately for his argument, Wolff offers no reason to think that economic laws are subject to human control. A study of praxeology will show that they are not, but though he was to some extent familiar with Austrian economics, he—to his own cost—rejected it. Despite this weakness, Wolff’s book deserves our respect, which must, of course, be autonomously accorded.
