Interview with Anthony de Jasay.

• Author: de Wolf, Aschwin
• Position: Interview

1. Once again we have entered an era in which the (unintended) consequences of government regulation and central banking are attributed to "capitalism." What keeps you motivated as a writer?

   The short answer is: allergy. I know well enough that there is little or no use in arguing against populist politicians and pundits who denounce greedy capitalism and insufficiently controlled markets that, they claim, have brought catastrophe and will bring catastrophe again. My allergy against fashionable buzz makes me react willy-nilly. An "insufficiently" regulated economy is tautologically a bad thing. It is the worst of two worlds, halfway between two hypothetical states of the world. One is a set of pure markets that spontaneously generate their standard mode of operation. The other is a set of comprehensive controls that enforce modes of operation that transform and sterilize markets in largely unforeseeable ways. There is no ground for supposing that the second of these states of the world is sensibly preferable to the first or that the hypothesis on which it depends is intellectually more respectable. Because the hybrid solution between the two has given bad results in 1929 and again in 2008, it is preposterous to talk as if history had delivered an "empirical" verdict of "guilty" against capitalism and to issue an imperative call for a "new order" and a "new paradigm" to elucidate it.

2. A small but vocal tradition in political philosophy argues against the state from a contractarian perspective. The American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker and more recently the philosopher Jan Narveson are representatives of this school of thought. Do you think that the contractarian framework can be used against government, or do you think that contractarian thinking is inherently biased toward antiliberal conclusions?

   Any version of contractarianism, from the ferocious Hobbesian variety to the appeasing twentieth-century ones, has a contract at its core. By this contract, people unanimously bind themselves and their descendants to accept collective choices, whatever they may be, if made in accordance with a choice rule (what Kenneth Arrow rightly identified as a "constitution"). This setup establishes what I call the "principle of submission" and legitimizes political obedience. This arrangement is in fact the acceptance of a rule of rule making. The harsh rule of rule making allows a wider discretion ("the dictator decides what he dictates") than a nice one ("the majority may opt only for Pareto-improving alternatives"). The contractarian claim is that a clear gulf stands between the harsh and the nice. However, the rule of rule making is ipso facto also a rule of rule change. By amendment and interpretation, the nice rule will not long remain nice. The mechanism of majority voting works against it, for niceness of the rules would prevent the majority from having its way and extracting resources from the minority.

3. In the Jasay festschrift Ordered Anarchy, Nobel laureate James Buchanan writes that some of your work might even be classified as philosophy of science. Does this remark resonate with you, and do you feel an affinity with a particular tradition in the philosophy of science?

   James Buchanan is overrating my range in suggesting that it reaches to the philosophy of science. My only brush with the philosophy of science is my use of the asymmetry between verification and falsification to place the burden of proof in adversarial situations and hence to show the solid epistemological foundation that supports the great and indeed decisive presumptions of a sane, liberal society: the presumption of freedom, of innocence, and of good title to possessions.

   If I could pretend to affinity based on acquaintance with a school of epistemological thought, it would probably be to [Karl] Popper's critical rationalism. However, I would hold out for induction and subjective probability when setting out the conditions that would render rational an action involving unknown future consequences. The criterion of critical rationality--that a hypothesis be used that has best resisted criticism in the past--is of little help in maximizing an action's expected "utility."

4. In "Is Limited Government Possible?" you write that "enduring limited government is only possible in conjunction with unreasoning acceptance, by significant parts of society, of certain metaphysical propositions." But does the state not derive most of its legitimacy from the uncritical belief in such things as "human rights," "the common good," and...