Law without Big Brother
Lots of people seem to think they need Big Brother to tell them—or, at least, to tell other people—what to do. They have trouble envisioning a peaceful, voluntary society because they assume that someone needs to monopolize the use of force. Otherwise, they’re afraid, life will be (in Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Let the skeptics know that law could be an integral aspect of life in a peaceful, voluntary society and they’re likely to roll their eyes. Any entity, they might say, that does identify and enforce law just is a state. The fact is, though, that you can enforce law without being, or being indistinguishable from, a state.
What makes law without the state different? It’s consensual. In a peaceful, voluntary society, people would be obligated by laws or legal systems to which they had actually consented.
It’s part of the modern state’s legitimating ideology that it rests on “the consent of the governed,” but of course (more…)
