I shall come back to anarchist alternatives to the state later in the chapter, but first I am going to defend political authority, as others have before me, by asking the reader to imagine life in society without it — with the police, the army, the legal system, the civil service, and the other branches of the state all taken away. What would happen then?
Perhaps the most famous thought-experiment along these lines can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, had experienced the partial breakdown of political authority brought about by the English Civil War, and the picture he painted of life in its absence was unremittingly bleak. He described the ‘natural condition of mankind’ without political rule as one of ferocious competition for the necessities of life, leaving people in constant fear in case they should be robbed or attacked, and constantly inclined, therefore, to strike at others first. The result was summed up in a much-quoted passage:
In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
It is sometimes said that Hobbes reaches this pessimistic conclusion because of a belief that people are naturally selfish or greedy, and will therefore try to grab as much for themselves as they can when unrestrained by political authority. But this misses Hobbes’s real point, which is that cooperation between people is impossible in the absence of trust, and that trust will be lacking where there is no superior power to enforce the law. Those things that Hobbes describes as missing in the ‘natural condition’ are above all things that require numbers of people to work together in the expectation that others will do their part, and in the absence of political authority it is not safe to have any such expectation. If I make an agreement with someone, why should I expect him to keep it, if there is no law to enforce the agreement? And even if he is inclined to keep the agreement, he may wonder the same about me, and decide that it is too risky to do so. In this situation, Hobbes argues, it is only prudent to assume the worst, and take every step you can to secure yourself against the threat of death; and the way to do that, in turn, is to amass as much power relative to other people as you can. At base it is fear of others, born of mistrust, that turns life without political authority into ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’.
Was Hobbes’s pessimism justified? His critics point out that if we look around us we can find ample evidence of people trusting one another, cooperating with one another, even helping each other with nothing expected in return, without any involvement by the state or any of its branches. A group of neighbours, for instance, may decide together to repair a derelict children’s playground, form a team, and divide up the work, each relying on the others to do their bit, without any legal agreement or other means of enforcement. Human nature is not as Hobbes portrayed it. But in a way this misses the point. Although Hobbes probably did have a rather low opinion of human nature (he was once caught out giving money to a beggar, and had to explain that he only did it to relieve his own discomfort at the sight of the beggar), his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right.
We need political authority, then, because it gives us the security that allows us to trust other people, and in a climate of trust people are able to cooperate to produce all those benefits that Hobbes listed as signally lacking in the ‘natural condition’. But how can we create authority where it does not exist? Hobbes envisaged everyone gathering together and covenanting with one another to establish a sovereign who would rule them from that day forward; alternatively, they might submit themselves individually to a powerful man, a conquering general for instance. He thought it mattered little who had authority, so long as the authority was unrestricted and undivided. Here we may part company with him. But before looking more closely at how authority should be constituted, we should pause to see whether there is any other way to escape the ‘natural condition’. Despite all that Hobbes says, might social cooperation be possible in the absence of political authority?
3. Thomas Hobbes, defender of political authority.
Anarchists believe that it is indeed possible, and although anarchist voices have always been in a small minority, we should listen to them: as political philosophers we are duty bound to put conventional wisdom to the test, and so we cannot take political authority for granted without exploring the alternatives to it. There are two different directions we might take here: anarchists themselves fall broadly into two camps. One points towards community, the other towards the market.
The communitarian alternative to political authority takes face-to-face communities as the building blocks that make trust and cooperation between people possible. In a small community where people interact with one another on a daily basis and everyone knows who is a member and who isn’t, it is comparatively easy to maintain social order. Anybody who attacks another person, takes their possessions, or refuses to perform his fair share of the community’s work, faces some obvious penalties. As news of his behaviour spreads, other people will reprimand him and may refuse to work with him in future. At community meetings he will be denounced and he may even be asked to leave altogether. All this can happen without the malefactor being forced to do anything or being formally punished — that is why we can describe this as an alternative to political authority rather than a form of it. One of the most important human motives is a desire to be accepted and respected by those around you, and in the setting of a small community this makes cooperation possible even if people are not saints.
Communitarian anarchists argue that, in a society made up of communities like this, cooperation will be possible on a much larger scale. Essentially communities will agree to exchange services with one another — they may specialize in producing different kinds of goods for instance — and they will collaborate on projects that need to be carried out on a larger scale, for instance, creating a transport system or a postal service. It is in each community’s interest to make these agreements, and the penalty for breaking them is that no one will be willing to cooperate with your community in the future if it proves to be untrustworthy. So once again there is no need for a central authority to tell people what to do, and no need to use coercive force to compel communities to cooperate — the system will effectively be self-policing.