Anarchy, State, and Public Choice.

• Author: Rozeff, Michael S.
• Position: Book review

* Anarchy, State, and Public Choice

Edited by Edward Stringham

Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2005.

Pp. vi, 229. $110.00.

Including the introduction by Edward Stringham, Anarchy, State, and Public Choice contains eighteen essays. Five of them--by Winston Bush, Gordon Tulloch, J. Patrick Gunning, James Buchanan, and Thomas Hogarty--are from the volume Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, edited by Gordon Tulloch (Blacksburg, Va.: Center for the Study of Public Choice, 1972). Two more reprints in the book are essays by Thomas Hogarty and Laurence Moss from the volume Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, edited by Gordon Tulloch (Blacksburg, Va.: Center for the Study of Public Choice, 1974). The current volume also contains original work in response to six of these articles (with the exception of the article by Moss, which reviews the history of private-property anarchism in the United States) and four other original articles. Sixteen of the articles are nonmathematical. Each original article is followed by an extended rejoinder. The volume concludes with four capstone articles.

Winston Bush's article leads off. In his model of anarchy (seen as a completely opportunistic jungle), there is no production. Two stateless individuals battle over their dally manna, the cost being their efforts. With no cooperation, they reach a first-stage equilibrium in which each expends effort in taking from the other and defending what he has. Cooperation allows a second-stage Pareto-superior equilibrium to be reached. Jason Osborne extends Bush's model to a case in which the actors pay an enforcement agency to reduce the effectiveness of their mutual theft. If the two individuals are identical, they are better off without the enforcement agency. If they differ, they may be better off or worse off. Osborne then examines a prisoner's dilemma model with signaling, a form of cooperation. Introducing an external enforcement agent into this model, one finds that the individuals again may be better or worse off. Osborne correctly points out that these findings are limited by the exogeneity or lack of utility function of the enforcement agency. The exogenous enforcement agency is cooperation by another name. In all of these models, the actors have incentives to find their way out of the jungle through one form of cooperation or another.

Gordon Tulloch views the state as an equilibrium outcome. He outlines broadly how states arise from the Hobbesian jungle...