Against Authority - Hogeye's new book

[Hogeye]

I recently wrote a short book (or long pamphlet) about anarchism which I have put up on my website. It is called

Against Authority

and contains some basic definitions (state, anarchism, authority, property...) and a short history of anarchist thought. I liberally include quotes from anarchist luminaries to give the flavor of their writings.

I invite comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism.

(Anti-state.com has a discussion of my book here.)

[Hogeye]

Doug> The state IS the society.
Barbara> Society is the state.

All you have to do is look at the definitions to see that is total rubbish. It's statist mythology, like the virgin birth for Xtianity.

state - an organization with an effective monopoly on the legal use of force in a given geographic area.

society - the sum total of all voluntary interactions among humans
or more conventionally
an extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic organization

These are obviously not equivalent. One could say: The state is an organization created by some members of society to exploit others. Even if you love Big Brother, you have to admit that an organization directed by some, with certain roles taken by some, with certain relationships between people involved, is not the same as society. A State, like a church or a corporation, is an organization, not the sum total of voluntary interactions, nor a general extended cultural group. Some States extend control over several cultural groups; others control only distinct subsets of a cultural group. Saying "society is the state" is equivalent to someone from an earlier time saying "society is the church." It is unbecoming for a freethinker to trade authority of the Church for authority of the State. (Cf: my Diderot signature.)

Frankly, I think we've pretty much licked the authority of religion. There's no established religion here; people are not burned at the stake or mutilated or jailed for (lack of) religious beliefs anymore; blasphemy laws are off the books or ignored. The heavy lifting was done in the 19th century by people like Ingersoll, and earlier by people like Voltaire. Today, the dangerous authority over people's minds is statism. Minds of men grovel to their statist master, unable to conceive of law, education, production, or life without its yoke. The medieval submission to Church has been reinstated as mental submission to State. Disgusting!


Another variation of the bromide I hear a lot is "we are the government." Here's Rothbard's classic response in Anatomy of the State:

The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.