What is wrong with this idyllic picture of life without the state? One major problem is that it relies on small, tight-knit communities as the basis for social order, and although in the past this might have been a reasonable assumption to make, it no longer is today. We live in societies that are highly mobile, both in the sense that people can move around physically quite easily, and in the sense that there is a ready supply of new people to collaborate with, and also, unfortunately, to take advantage of. The anarchist picture is not nonsense, but it works on the assumption that we will interact over time with the same group of people, so that the way we behave becomes common knowledge in the group. It also assumes that the possibility of being excluded from the group is a powerful deterrent to antisocial behaviour. But in a large, mobile society that assumption does not hold. We need, therefore, a legal system that will track down and punish people who injure others, and that allows us to make binding agreements with one another that carry a penalty if we default.
Cooperation between communities is also less straightforward than the anarchist picture supposes. For loyalty to your own community frequently goes along with a fairly intense distrust of others, and agreements may therefore collapse because we over here are not convinced that you over there are contributing your fair share to the project we are supposed to be working on together. And we may disagree about what fairness requires in the first place. Suppose we want to build a society-wide rail network in the absence of a central authority. What share of resources should each community contribute? Should it be so much per head, or should richer communities put in proportionally more? If my community is situated in a remote area that costs much more to connect to the network, should it alone cover the extra cost, or should that cost be shared equally by all communities? There are no easy answers to these questions, and no reason to think that it would be possible for many local communities to come to a voluntary agreement about them. The state, by contrast, can impose a solution: it can require each person or each community to contribute a certain amount, say through taxation.
Now let us consider the other anarchist alternative to political authority and the state, the one that relies on the economic market. This certainly goes with the grain of the modern world, in so far as the market has proved to be a formidable instrument for allowing people to work together in large numbers. It already supplies us with most of the goods and services we need and want. But could it replace the state?
Market anarchists — sometimes called libertarians — claim that we could contract and pay individually for the services that the state now provides, including crucially for personal protection. In the absence of the state, firms would offer to protect clients and their property, and this would include retrieving property that had been stolen, enforcing contracts, and obtaining compensation for personal injury. So if my neighbour steals something that is mine, instead of calling the (public) police, I would call my protective agency, and they would take action on my behalf against the troublesome neighbour.
But what if the neighbour disputes my claim and calls his agency, which may of course be different from mine? If the two agencies cannot agree, libertarians claim, they may refer the case to an arbitrator, who again would charge for her services. After all it is not in the interest of either agency to get into a fight. So there would be a primary market for protective services, and then a secondary market for arbitration services to deal with disputes — unless of course everyone chose to sign up with the same agency (but why would that happen?). And the other services that the state now provides would also be handed over to the market — people would take out health insurance, pay to have their children educated, pay to use toll roads, and so on.
Does this system really do away with political authority? The protective agencies would need to use force to protect their clients’ rights. If my neighbour does not hand back the property when it has been established that it rightfully belongs to me, then my agency will send round its heavies to retrieve it. But still, there is no authority proper, because my neighbour is not obliged to recognize my agency — he can always fight back — and I too can change agencies if I dislike the way mine is behaving. So this is genuinely an anarchist alternative to the state. But is it a good alternative?
It might look attractive if we thought that the various agencies would all agree to implement the same set of rules to govern property disputes and so forth, and would all consent to independent arbitration in case of dispute. But why should they do this? An agency might hope to win customers by promising to fight on their behalf no matter what — i.e. even if they appeared to be in the wrong by the standards that most people accepted. Once a few agencies like this enter the market, the others would have to respond by taking an equally aggressive line themselves. And this would mean that increasingly disputes would have to be settled by physical force, with the risk to ordinary people of being caught in the cross-fire. We would be slipping back into Hobbes’s condition of ‘Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man’, and in this condition the only rational decision for each person is to sign up with the agency that is likely to win the most fights. But the result would be to create a body with the power and authority to impose the same body of rules on everyone — in other words we would (inadvertently) have recreated the state.
There is another problem with relying on the market to carry out all the functions that states now perform. One of these functions is the provision of what are called ‘public goods’ — benefits that everyone enjoys and that no one can be excluded from enjoying. These come in many and varied forms — clean air and water, for example, defence against external aggression, access to roads, parks, cultural amenities, media of communication, and so on. These goods are created either by imposing restrictions on people — for example when governments require manufacturers to curb the release of toxic gases into the atmosphere — or by raising taxes and using the revenue to pay for public broadcasting, transport systems, environmental protection, and the like. Could these goods be provided through an economic market? A market operates on the basis that people pay for the goods and services they want to use, and the problem with public goods is precisely that they are provided for everyone whether they pay or not. Of course it is possible that people might contribute voluntarily if they saw the value of the good being provided: old churches that are costly to maintain rely to some extent on visitors who enjoy looking round the church putting money in the box by the door. But it is very tempting to free ride, and in the case of many public goods we may enjoy them almost without realizing it (we don’t think, as we get up in the morning, how lucky we are to have breathable air and protection against foreign invasion; we take these things for granted until something goes wrong). So it seems that we need political authority with the power to compel in order to ensure that these goods are provided.
There isn’t space here to consider all the ingenious arguments that libertarian anarchists have come up with to show how public goods could be provided through the market, or else by people banding together and agreeing to contribute to their production: in political philosophy there are always more arguments to make. But I hope I have said enough to suggest why neither communities nor markets — important as these are in many areas of human life — can replace political authority and its modern embodiment, the state.