Category: Social and Political Philosophy

Notes on Anarchism I: R. P. Wolff on Authority

Top o' the Stack. One of my better efforts. First in a series.

Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual person such as Wolff. Single quotation marks are employed for scaring, sneering, and mentioning. I am punctilious to the point of pedantry about the use-mention distinction. Numerals in parentheses denote pages in Wolff's text. 'W' abbreviates 'Wolff.'

1. Overview. W's thesis is that "the concept of a de jure legitimate state" is "vacuous" and that "philosophical anarchism" is "the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man." (19) W. proceeds by first explaining the concepts of authority and autonomy and then arguing that they are irreconcilable. The upshot is that the state lacks moral justification. This entry is about authority. It will be followed by two more, one on autonomy, and one on their conflict.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

More on the Politics of Abortion: Ron Paul and Subsidiarity

Ron Paul. M.  D.:

I strongly believe that the more difficult the issue is, the more local should be its solution. That is the real success of the Dobbs decision, because abortion should have never been a federal issue in the first place. Overturning Roe v Wade returned us to where we belonged, with state and local laws governing all issues not Constitutionally reserved for the Federal Government.

Bigger problems are best decided closest to home. Look for example at what happened when parents started going to school board meetings and demanding accountability on everything from Covid restrictions to transgenders in school bathrooms. Parents were extremely effective because they only had to travel to the local school board meeting to demand – and get – results. Does anyone think they would have been able to get the same results at the Department of Education in Washington DC?

Similarly, immigration is much better handled by those closer to the action. Ideally it would be a property rights issue, but at the least states like Texas should be taking an active role in preventing a foreign invasion into its borders rather than waiting for Washington to make a move.

Ron Paul is urging something very much like the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity. David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest drift of recent Democrat administrations, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Democrats.  'Federalism' is  one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose the Left.  The argument is this:

1. The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2. Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3. If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose  the Left (and the Democrat Party which is now hard-leftist to the core.)

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Frédéric Bastiat on the Law

To gain historical perspective and philosophical insight as we slide into the abyss, you must read Bastiat among others. Our current situation is nothing new and what the Frenchman writes is directly relevant to our decline. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. It's twilight time. Can we turn things around? I don't know. It may be too late. As a citizen I lament, as a philosopher I rejoice in the opportunity to learn something. Everything below is reproduced from this source.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author.

The Law

The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!

If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.

What Is Law?

What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your attitudes and values into others.

Leader of the Stack. Excerpts:

We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes that dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name— can get your irenic self killed.

Coexist sticker
 
[. . .]
 

There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, one-sidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or be cancelled in one’s livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

An Interview with Michael Walzer

Liberal Commitments.  Excerpt:

Liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. 

Walzer is an old man living in the past, and what he says is true of the liberals of yesteryear. It has little or nothing to do with the 'liberals' of the present day.

Walzer is the author of an important post-9/11 article, Can There be a Decent Left?

“All Men are Created Equal”

I have claimed against certain alt-rightists that the above famous declaration in the Declaration of Independence is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors. For if "All men are created equal" is an empirical claim about the powers and properties of human animals, then it is manifestly false. A second reason why it is not a false empirical claim is because it is not an empirical claim at all. For if all men are created equal, and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," then they have a meta-physical origin, and the claim in question is a metaphysical claim. 

Jacques poses a formidable challenge:

. . . let's agree it's a normative claim to the effect that all 'persons' have certain 'rights'.  What then entitles all of them to these rights?  A normative fact like that doesn't float free from all empirical facts.  There's got to be some reason why all normal human adults have these rights but chickens or pencils don't, some empirical property of these beings only that generates or confers certain rights.  Is it the shared property of being a person?  Or the shared property of being human?  Something else?  I suspect that any of the candidate properties will be either morally irrelevant, even by liberal-leftist standards, or else relevant but distributed so unequally that it will be hard to understand how it could be the basis for 'equal' rights.

For example, on some interpretations the property of being a person is binary and almost every human being has it–including people with fairly severe mental deficits that would disqualify them from the usual list of ('equal') rights.  On other interpretations, the property is very complex and comes in degrees.  If it involves rationality, some people are plainly far more rational than others.  If it involves moral judgment (or what Rawls calls 'moral personality') then that too is a matter of degree.  We can probably find lots of pairs such that one human person has this complex property only in some weak rudimentary way while the other one is a person in a much more profound and morally significant sense.  Why the same rights for both?  I realize these arguments aren't decisive, but I think they put the burden of proof on egalitarians.  Why should we think there is any suitable empirical basis for the normative claim that 'all men are equal' or that such normative claims could be true regardless of any empirical facts?

I will grant Jacques that the normative does not "float free" of the non-normative.  The normative needs ontological backing. 'Ought' needs grounding in 'is.'  But I distinguish between the empirically non-normative and the metaphysically non-normative. And so I do not grant to Jacques that the normative can only be grounded in empirical facts, facts accessible to observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions. They can be grounded in metaphysical facts.

A theist can say that the divine will is the non-normative ground of the normative.  God made man in his image and likeness; he did not make chickens in his image and likeness. That is why Joe Biden has rights but his dog doesn't.   

But what explains why rights are the same for all humans? Biden is a lowly specimen of humanity, physically feeble, mentally incompetent, and morally corrupt.  Why does he have the same rights as RFK, Jr. who is Biden's physical, mental, and moral superior? Because from the infinitely lofty point of view of God, the differences between human beings are vanishingly small. All bear within them the 'divine spark.' You heard Nancy Pelosi say it, and on this point at least, she stepped out of her normal role as dingbat and dumbbell.  An MS-13 gangbanger, George Floyd, John Fetterman, Einstein, Mother Teresa — all equal in the eyes of God. All sons and daughters of the same Father. All sinners and all with a supernatural destiny.

But suppose there is no God. Then what? Then I think Jacques' challenge is unanswerable.  Setting aside the chickens and the pencils, we humans are obviously not equal, either as individuals or as groups, in respect of empirically measurable attributes and performances.  So why should we have equal political and other rights?  Why isn't a form of chattel slavery justified that treats slaves humanely? Is the current belief in the equality and universality of rights simply a holdover from a dying Judeo-Christian worldview?  How can you kick away the theological support and continue to hold to the equality and universality of rights? Is there an alternative form of support along Rawlsian lines, say?  Can a metaphysical naturalist who rejects God and the soul have a principled basis for rejecting the Calliclean "Might makes Right"?