The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society.

• Author: Seoble, Aeon J.
• Position: Book review

The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say

Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society

By Gary Chartier

Apple Valley, Calif.: Cobden Press, 2011.

Pp. x, 118. $16.95.

The word anarchist is made up of the denying prefix a- or an-, the root archon, meaning "king" or "ruler," and the suffix -ist, referring to a proponent of a theory. So the anarchist is someone who thinks there should be no ruler. This claim is not identical with the claim that there should be no order, no authority relations, no rules, no logic, or no sociality. However, because the word is sometimes used in these senses, it inevitably causes some confusion. The subtitle of Gary Chartier's new book makes perfectly clear what he means and what he does not mean: "society" is desirable, but "the state" is not. For most people, the idea of society without the state is counterintuitive, so it is important to make this distinction and to be able to explain it.

Libertarians' and in general classical liberals' basic approach to government runs as follows. It is good for people to have liberty (a premise defended variously on consequentialist, deontological, and teleological grounds). The state--centralized political authority--is necessarily coercive and hence represents a negation of liberty. Therefore, the state should be as small in scope as possible in order to allow the maximum amount of liberty--hence, the expression minimal state. For critics of this approach to government, anarchism aims at a reductio ad absurdum: the libertarian argument will inevitably lead one to the conclusion that there should be no state at all. For a reductio to be effective, the conclusion has to be contradictory or at least selfevidently silly. But what if it's not silly to argue that there should be no state? Anarchists accept the claim that the libertarian approach to thinking about the state leads to the conclusion that the state is not justified, but they claim that this result is not absurd. The anarchist ironically must defend this conclusion against both minimal-state libertarians and nonlibertarian proponents of expansive states. Doing so requires the anarchist to show that on balance the state exacerbates the problems it is supposed to solve. Gary Chartier has put a great deal of thought into such problems and does a thorough job of making this showing.

Chartier tells us at the outset that his book is not "a narrowly academic work in philosophy or economics or political science...