On Libertarianism and Statecraft, Part V: Aristocracy, Republicanism, and State
By Insula Qui
Author’s note: The main themes of this series will be further expounded upon in my upcoming book Anarcho-Monarchism, which will be available in April.
Introduction
In Part IV, the logistical question of merging the rule of the aristocracy with the absolute property held by each person was considered. To concede that individual sovereignty is invalid would effectively defeat all libertarian values. To concede that central sovereignty is invalid would defeat the purpose and role of statecraft. To resolve this, one must look to the nature of contracts. When multiple people sign a contract, they do so for a simple sociological reason. Reduced to economic terms, this reason is a desire to benefit from signing that contract. Whenever people sign contracts, they do so with the expectation of improving their own lives. From this, we can derive a theory of sovereignty that can remain valid without disproving either individual sovereignty or central sovereignty.
The Aristocracy and the Common Man
Other than personal profit, a common reason for establishing contracts is to reconcile multiple interests within society, the contract is the only institution that can make conflict into collaboration. This has two important implications. First, in a low-trust society, contracts ensure that the society is not in perpetual chaos, as they channel conflict into production. Second, it means that when people are already prone to collaboration, contracts become mostly redundant because interests are already synthesized.
If the interests of people are in a significant degree of conflict, the end result will be antagonism which will result in mutual violence. This has the potential to cause the destruction of a society. It may result in less destruction than nation-states have caused, but destruction should be avoided if possible. If nothing else, it provides a pressing need to reconsider libertarian assumptions and to provide a mechanism by which this type of destruction can be avoided.
However, this does not mean that libertarianism is only attainable when there is high trust. With proper use of contracts, even a society with conflicting interests can function. But this requires introducing a degree of central sovereignty into libertarianism. A contract must synthesize the individually sovereign owners of property into a larger managerial government. The government will assume managerial duties since the absolute owners of property wish to maintain a peaceful co-existence. The government must then sign a bilateral contract with the property owner to allow him the ability to ensure that any inherent conflict in society does not result in widespread chaos.
Aristocracy and State
Contrary to the contractual society, the state removes the most qualified and socially adept from governance. In essence, the aristocracy cannot govern, as there is no requirement for the state to synthesize the interests within society. The state retains its rule even when it does not properly manage the territory it controls. When the state does not need to exercise proper statecraft, the result will be an abolition of any proper monarchy and aristocracy. The natural aristocrats are the direct enemy of the democratic state, and it must suppress those who are fit to govern.
The only way to ensure that those who are fit to govern will do so is to abolish the state. Proper statecraft can only occur if the state does not put up an artificial barrier for the sake of devastating the upper class. When the capable aristocrats can assume the social role of harmonizing interests, they can ensure that society is maintained. If the state prevents the function of the aristocracy, this will be impossible. This has happened throughout history; aristocracies are upheld until they succumb to a violent revolution. The new aristocracies then devolve to be even worse than the previous aristocracy until they are similarly overthrown. The state creates a perpetual inflationary system of aristocracy where accumulating value in aristocracy becomes impossible.
This can also be viewed as preventing the tragedy of the commons. If one views society itself as a form of property, one will see that each person motivated by self-interest will try to exhaust the property of the society for his own gain. In this view, proper aristocrats are those who can functionally privatize the commons of the society to ensure that no parasitism is tolerated. The tragedy of the commons can only be solved by eliminating the commons, and the only way to do so is with a proper aristocracy. The economic errors of communism also apply to the social realm, and are as devastating to society as they are to economics.
Instating an aristocracy may seem counter-intuitive to a libertarian who sees little disutility in owning property. Why would anyone willingly give up absolute control over their property? Even if society as property needs to be protected to prevent internal conflict, is forsaking absolute property worth the gain from increased cohesion? Is full ownership of property not the ideal of a society?
Property and the State
It is important to avoid thinking within a purely statist frame of reference. It is true that giving up one’s property within the frame of a state is a suicidal mode of action. However, this ignores the fact that trust plays an important role within governance. People cannot trust the state because relations with the state are not reciprocal. Without monopolized violence, relationships between the property owners and managers become reciprocal.
The ideal of the confederation is that the lower, more decentralized actors unite with a central agent to reconcile conflicting interests. This collaborative system becomes a confederation of absolute sovereigns led by the first among equals, a man among men. This is the ideal of libertarian statecraft: the management of property without the state in such a way that benefits each person. It is unnecessary to forsake individual self-ownership or absolute control over property. We only need to integrate social systems into libertarianism.
Aristocracy and Republicanism
This leads us to two options. We can have low-trust monarchic individualism or high-trust republican communalism. There is no sustainable option for a stateless society that is both individualistic and republican. This monarchic individualism has a counter-balance to prevent any possible tyranny, in that the aristocracy in itself adds a sort of confederacy. If the aristocrats are those who are the most invested into society, any anti-social action by the monarch will lead to action against the monarch by the aristocracy. Thus, the libertarian confederation will be more perfect, as it combines two degrees of limitation upon sovereignty to prevent anti-social action. The monarch needs the testimony of the aristocracy and is thus accountable to the entire class of those most invested into society. The aristocracy then needs the testimony of the society they invested into to remain in power. A libertarian society creates a market for a libertarian aristocracy. Libertarian aristocracy, in turn, creates a market for libertarian monarchy.
The sort of stateless republicanism that most libertarians want is only possible within a high-trust society. The word ‘republicanism’ may seem inaccurate to describe the libertarian system. However, a market for defense and law is dangerously close to the republican ideals of popular governance and general will. Interests first need to be shared across the entirety of a society for private law and defense to work.
When interests are already shared, a sort of liberal capitalism becomes borderline impossible. The purpose of adopting a capitalist system is to alleviate various conflicts through the market system of supply and demand. If all members of a society share interests and motivations, they will not be driven towards capitalism as a system since it becomes redundant. Thus, the free market can effectively abandon liberal capitalism provided that trust is sufficiently high. This means that when one benefits from other members of the society gaining wealth, communal economies will be proper strategies insofar as they are efficient.
The church and the community will increasingly socialize wealth in a high-trust society. Even if the church were to be abandoned and if the entirety of mankind became atheistic, there would still be a social institution that acts as a center of society. This new institution would still have the incentives to socialize prosperity to prevent undue misery. This is simply a facet of healthy human empathy and compassion towards the in-group.
This is not a bad thing from an outside perspective. Any strategy of production has to change with a change in society. Free markets will lead to social markets if a high-trust society is established. This is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable; it only serves as a fundamental extension of the amoral calculus of the free market. Though this may appear to go against the free market or support socialism, it simply results from people deriving personal profit from ending human misery as a community if the interests of people are tied to their communities.
Statism and Harmony
Having considered the options for property management available in a libertarian society, it is now necessary to critique the state beyond the fact that it removes aristocrats from their rightful station. First, states have expanded far beyond their optimal size and are bloated beyond all reason. The modern state encompasses land areas far beyond what any singular agency could manage.
This by itself is a death-blow to the state, at least on a theoretical level. States will eventually be unable to expand enough to sustain themselves and will collapse. Unless the forces of liberalization could somehow manage to create enough prosperity to pay off all accumulated debts, the current world order must collapse in some form or another. The liberal state must give way to some future order, and it is in our interest that it is not tyrannical socialism or a return to feudalism in the modern age. This is not to say that feudalism is inherently bad; when confronted with foreign aggression, it can be advantageous to organize along arbitrary lines of territory and protection. However, the feudal economy and the arbitrary nature of feudal land titles is unfit for the modern age.
Second, the state provides neither harmonizing aristocracy nor liberating republicanism. The state can only serve as a tyrant and as a detriment to society. Third, the state cannot offer mechanical markets or socially accountable property. What the state can do is to create a system in which irrational and selfish actions of the state are hallowed, which it does because all actions that the state takes when acting as an economic and social agent are irrational. The actions of the state may be correct at times and the state can produce good results even while lacking reason, but this is not due to rational decision-making. The irrational interests of the state can produce desirable outcomes insofar as they conform to the rational interests of the society itself. This is inconsistent but not unlikely. The interest of the state is to create an empire and centralize power. Any other considerations are secondary at best since they do not directly support the interests of the state.
Since the statist system tends to be exceedingly low-trust due to the complete lack of accountability, centralization within the state tends to be inefficient. The state cannot provide social trust or reconcile interests, so it must always bring political organization into the realm of conflict. Because it offers violence on the market, the state will always be the nexus of various conflicts in society. This will further deteriorate trust and increase the necessity for an aristocracy that the state cannot provide.
The Market for Violence
When the state offers aggressive violence for less cost than private actors while suppressing those private actors through its monopoly on criminal punishment, it incentivizes the purchase of violence through the state. The purpose of this may be to achieve favorable legislation, occupational licensing, no-bid contracts, or war profiteering. When the state sells violence, the actors who buy that violence will profit. Since state violence is a scarce commodity, all factions within a society must compete to avoid being victimized by state violence.
Because the state does not have to be reciprocal, it retains its position as the manager of property no matter how much destruction it causes. A corollary of this is that the state will be able to auction off the property of those who live within its territory. By paying enough into the state, one can usurp the property of others through eminent domain. In practice, all ownership becomes a lease from the state. The state can profit from the ability of selling the property of its citizens. Thus, it is firmly in the interest of the state to exercise this ability. The best anyone can do within the state is to fight in the state’s courts against their property being sold out from under them.
Conclusion
The aforementioned problems do not occur within a system that holds all parties to a real contract, and absolute property is not liable to be sold without one’s consent. But here we find more problems. How does authority interact with liberty? How can we ensure that libertarian authority will not become a state? How can we prevent the follies of the state within a libertarian system? How do we ensure that our property is not liable for sale once we hand over the management of that property? These questions will be dealt with in Part VI.
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