In fact, Will doesn't seem to be a libertarian in the sense you describe either, or else I, and a more than a few other lurkers, wouldn't even be here.

Do you truly believe I did not begin my argument cannily? When I start with the “impossible” Philosophy of Right, oh I do so for a reason. And it is precisely the reason you articulate to Micha: “any society with sufficient population density establishes something like a sovereign power.”

Like Will, I am more interested in following a decent way towards Sen. I am not particularly interested in cranky railin's 'ginst the goover-mint with the black helicopter folks.

The issue with your argument is that you remain vulnerable to the chain of thought that ends up with the individual as a property of the state if you do not take care to carefully separate government from civil society and ensure that civil society comes first. But likewise after that, we need to ensure that elements of civil society – the family, religion – aren't allowed to enslave the individual either. This is particularly important to me as a skirt.

This is actually why I want Hegel. I want to be able to say, yes, there will be a civil society, with property rights and a market. Afterwards I want to have a state to draw the human person out of the communal obligation into individuality. But it has to be the right kind of state!

This is where Sen becomes interesting; however I am not always sure exactly how we keep the Sen “positive” state from becoming the Berlin problem “positive” state. So I want more carve-outs.

As for the issue of formal justice, or adjudication as you say, I think I actually want some Foucault here. Monkey society – be it gorilla, chimp or what have you – is a power society, where nearly all females are subjugated. I have to admit this fact. If I am not careful, our structures will slide back towards this, as we see in some places today.

Because civil society includes religion, and almost all large religions have a system of religious law and religious courts, which in human history have often run in parallel with ('l'ancien regime) or in place of (Iran) state justice. . .

I want to be able to argue that these courts and legal systems are based solely on power and are oppressive to liberty – I don't want conservatism, I want secular individual human liberty. As a woman, I need to create for myself some protection from ancient structures of civil society, with its monkey roots, and I need some positive “capabilities” from the state to do this.

But I need the right kind, again. There's no doubt the market, that market systems, have been the greatest liberator of women, in so far as capitalism works massive change on traditional civil society. But for that to work for me, again, I need a certain state structure to help me out of religion and the family *first.*

Or at least that's how I'm thinking recently. I'm not married to this yet.

I think that a lot of people – one reason that they’re scared of anarchy is they think that under government it’s as though there’s some kind of guarantee that’s taken away under anarchy. That somehow there’s this firm background we can always fall back on that under anarchy is just gone. But the firm background is just the product of people interacting with the incentives that they have. Likewise, when anarchists say people under anarchy would probably have the incentive to do this or that, and people say, “Well, that’s not good enough! I don’t just want it to be likely that they’ll have the incentive to do this. I want the government to absolutely guarantee that they’ll do it!” But the government is just people. And depending on what the constitutional structure of that government is, it’s likely that they’ll do this or that. You can’t design a constitution that will guarantee that the people in the government will behave in any particular way. You can structure it in such a way so that they’re more likely to do this or less likely to do this. And you can see anarchy as just an extension of checks-and-balances to a broader level.

For example, people say, “What guarantees that the different agencies will resolve things in any particular way?” Well, the U.S. Constitution says nothing about what happens if different branches of the government disagree about how to resolve things. It doesn’t say what happens if the Supreme Court thinks something is unconstitutional but Congress thinks it doesn’t, and wants to go ahead and do it anyway. Famously, it doesn’t say what happens if there’s a dispute between the states and the federal government. The current system where once the Supreme Court declares something unconstitutional, then the Congress and the President don’t try to do it anymore (or at least not quite so much) – that didn’t always exist. Remember when the Court declared what Andrew Jackson was doing unconstitutional, when he was President, he just said, “Well, they’ve made their decision, let them enforce it.” The Constitution doesn’t say whether the way Jackson did it was the right way. The way we do it now is the way that’s emerged through custom. Maybe you’re for it, maybe you’re against it – whatever it is, it was never codified in law.

In short, there is no guarantee under anarchy just as there is no guarantee under a state. There are only systems of incentives and probabilities that these incentives will work the way we intend.

Long also addresses the “if Bill gates stole from me” argument. Lobbying magnifies the power of the rich through access to taxpayer dollars. There is good reason to think that the rich can get away with a lot more under a monopoly legal system than they could under a competitive one.

Finally, you say that “if Ohio attacked Michigan, there'd [be] a soverign power to come and make things right” and this therefore makes both Ohio and Michigan count as civil societies. But what if Canada attacked Mexico? Is there a sovereign power to come and make things right? Does this absence of a world sovereign power mean that neither Canada nor Mexico count as civil societies?

This doesnt negate his point. These systems can only exist due to the social insitutions that govern the exchange of goods and services. If one person in society doesnt go by these rules than the conditions for exchange unravel, so although there isnt govenrment involvement it is still in a sense 'governed'. Contract laws are just the official formulation of such arrangments

It is a legitimate question to ask why there aren't more anarchic societies alive today, but that is separate from your prior question of whether or not “there is a plausible notion of contract, civil right, and law outside or prior to a recognized sovereign power able to enforce that law.”

About monkeys: most chimps are really promiscuous, gibbons are pretty monogamous, and orangutans are basically monogamous but occassionally adulterous, like humans. But the difference is that in human societies, unlike in any ape or monkey society, we don't have to just fight or accept: we can sue. If you don't see a difference between fighting and adjudication, then maybe I ask you to be wary of Foucaldianism!

MIcha: I would only say that if anarchic societies worked, there'd be a lot more of them. At a certain point, any society with sufficient population density establishes something like a sovereign power. I don't argue that complex systems of exchange and social organization exist and have existed absent a governing sovereign power. The point is that until such establishment, there is nothing like civil society in the relevant sense because there is no security in transaction. Now I WOULD argue that, once the political settlement is reached, the point of that settlement both as a theoretical and empirical matter is not restricted in any way towards maintaining the pre-settlement state of affairs.

Yes, you can invalidate whatever reasons a person offers for taking a certain position. You may even change the minds of a few people who used a line of reasoning to form a stance on something.

But most people don't do that. They form opinions and then try to articulate reasons — much as I might decide I like a TV show and then try to tell my wife why.

If my wife points out that my stated reason is factually incorrect, it doesn't mean that I don't actually like the show. It just means that I couldn't accurately say why.

In most cases, the only complete reason for holding any opinion is “because I do” which is why most people think taxes are (or aren't) fair.