Political Philosophy, Clearly: Essays on Freedom and Fairness, Property and Equalities.

• Author: Chartier, Gary
• Position: Book review

* Political Philosophy, Clearly: Essays on Freedom and Fairness, Property and Equalities

By Anthony de Jasay

Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2010.

Pp. xii, 348. $24.00 cloth, $14.50 paperback.

Anthony de Jasay's work always repays reading. Working at the intersection of economics and political theory, Jasay has patiently articulated a measured critique of the state and a qualified defense of the notion that social order is possible without Leviathan. His writing is not only concise, but also witty and elegant. More important, Political Philosophy, Clearly, like his other work, bristles with provocative and interesting ideas.

Denying that the emergence of order requires either a social contract or positive legislation, Jasay argues that baseline conventions securing social order can, in principle, be self-enforcing (for example, pp. 5-7). The state is thus inessential. However, the temptation to create an entity with a monopoly of force is sufficiently appealing--because of its capacity to yield plunder for the favored--that "ordered anarchy" always runs the serious risk of being replaced by the state (p. 173).

Jasay seeks consistently to avoid reliance on the nondescriptive and nonascertainable. He opts for something like Hume's noncognitivist reading of foundational moral judgments as embodying reactive attitudes rather than truth-evaluable propositions. Because people's basic attitudes may differ extensively and persistently, deep-seated moral disagreements cannot be resolved by using narrowly moral arguments. However, like Ludwig yon Mises, Jasay maintains that reason can still play a role in undermining the appeal of some possibilities by showing that the goals people putatively want to achieve simply cannot be reached by using particular means. Some policies are indefensible because, whatever we make of their presumed objectives, they are incapable of achieving those objectives. Some goals cannot be reached by using any set of deliberately chosen means. Realizing some goals carries costs that almost no one is willing to pay. And recognizing the existence of stable, self-enforcing conventions serves to limit our moral options: indeed, finding such conventions is the only way to identify "the Archimedean fixed point of metaethics" (p. 198).

Among the most deeply rooted of such conventions are those securing the property of first possessors, protecting the freedom of owners to transfer their property by contract, and ensuring the...