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Title: Anarchy and Law
Author: Laurance Labadie
Date: 1967
Language: en
Topics: law, Laurance Labadie, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Murray Rothbard
Source: Retrieved on 6/11/22 from https://c4ss.org/content/56851.
Notes: Written in 1965 and published in the 1967 Vol. 23, No. 3 and 4 edition of the School of Living’s journal A Way Out.

Laurance Labadie

Anarchy and Law

Clarity, definiteness, and specificity are desired for the enhancement

of understanding. But anarchism as a social philosophy suffers from the

handicap of not being an affirmative theory about the activities of

humans. It is rather a negative philosophy in the sense that it tries to

ascertain what is invasive of the maximum amount of liberty for each

individual, as such, and to prescribe such behavior. Moreover, anarchism

contemplates and embraces the largest variety of individual and social

behavior. And further, it is mutable, pertains to change and

development; it is a philosophy of movement as distinguished from a

condition, a conception of society which is dynamic and “open” as

distinguished from a static system of social relations—a road and not a

place.

Unlike various forms of socialism or of any prescribed social order,

anarchism cannot lay down positive specifications and duties for the

individual to perform. Insofar as it does look upon society as an

organism, it sees it as an organism of an especial nature, discrete

rather than concrete, mutable, living, growing, changing, developing,

and the very best it can do in the matter of specification is to provide

the greatest latitude for varied individual action.[1]

Anarchy is thus impossible to conceive as a system in the usual sense of

this term and perhaps its essential feature is that it denies the

feasibility or legitimacy of fitting people to systems. It may be said

that an anarchistic society will be composed of associations, but will

not be an association or organization. Any kind of organization requires

rules and duties, in order to coordinate the activities of the

individuals of which they are composed—else the very aim and purpose of

the organization may be contravened. It is the possibility of seceding

from any cooperative enterprise, and joining others, or reverting to

individual independence, which distinguishes anarchism from all other

social philosophies existing or imaginable. It is the opportunity for

separation which is the key to independence and harmony, according to

the anarchistic view of human affairs, not in any supposed necessity of

combination, such as communism. For all combinations require the use of

the principle of anarchism in order to make the combination workable.[2]

However, as with communism, anarchism does not proscribe any form of

organization, including communistic, for those who voluntarily wish to

resort to whatever measures as might prove to be satisfactory and

workable for voluntary participants.

Thus it may be seen that any plan or scheme or combination proposed by

anyone who deems himself an anarchist, aside from the broader

generalizations which deny the use of coercion as a principle of order,

can only be judged on its merits, or in practice, experience, and usage,

and cannot be deemed to be an essential of anarchism, or anything more

than the opinion of one or some individuals. And thus it becomes rather

difficult for any critic of the anarchist philosophy to make his

criticisms effective, from a general or rational viewpoint. It behooves

him to tread gingerly in attempting to ascribe to all anarchists any

proposal which is peculiar to only some of them.

Having said all this, and it being obvious that real life consists in

affirmations, and not only negations. And anarchists, to be realistic,

are obliged to offer proposals regarding human relations, and

practicality requires them to offer plausible means of changing from any

given situation to one more in conformity with their ideals. On all such

questions there is no such thing as the anarchist position, except of

course those which affirm the liberty of the individual to make his own

choices and take the consequences. But there will be numerous proposals,

more or less tentative, made by different anarchists.

On the question of restraining the incorrigibly invasive, of maintaining

what is commonly called “law and order”, therefore, anarchism may seem

to be highly vulnerable. Anarchists are more concerned with removing the

causes of criminal behavior than of punishing the intolerable. But they

cannot in all reason evade the problem.

Murray Rothbard’s criticism of the “Spooner-Tucker Doctrine” must be

judged within the viewpoint given above. He should realize that the

ideas and proposals of these men are their proposals, and did not

preclude other proposals. This was certainly the attitude of Spooner and

Tucker. And Rothbard should also take more pains than he has of

understanding just what precisely were these men’s ideas. He says that

“There would be no rational or objective body of law which the juries

would in any sense—even morally—be bound to consult”, etc. This is

hardly the fact. More common sense would suggest that any court would be

influenced by experience; and any free-market court or judge would in

the very nature of things have some precedent guiding them in their

instructions to a jury. But since no case is exactly the same, a jury

would have considerable say about the heinousness of the offense in each

case, realizing that circumstances alter cases, and prescribe penalty

accordingly.[3] This appeared to Spooner and Tucker to be a more

flexible and equitable administration of justice possible or feasible,

human beings being what they are. There were numerous questions and

objections to the jury system, as envisioned by Spooner and Tucker, and

indeed as originally contemplated when the jury system was established,

and these were discussed and argued in quite some length in the columns

of Tucker’s Liberty.[4] The point here is that Rothbard was not quite

accurate in his statements about Spooner’s and Tucker’s position. And it

must be recognized and admitted that what is called “the administration

of justice” (which in its broader implications affect every aspect of

social life) is something that can never be perfect, and that men will

simply have to do the best they can.

But when Mr. Rothbard quibbles about the jurisprudential ideas of

Spooner and Tucker, and at the same time upholds presumably in his

courts the very economic evils which are at bottom the very reason for

human contention and conflict, he would seem to be a man who chokes at a

gnat while swallowing a camel. But of these matters I have commented

upon elsewhere.

Due to semantic difficulties caused by the use of a language spawned and

grown in regimes based on organized authority, coercion, and violence,

it becomes well-nigh impossible to articulately explain anarchism in

common vernacular. It becomes doubly difficult, if not impossible, to

explain the philosophy of anarchism to those whose basic assumption is

that humankind would run amok without some kind of authority. It would

be completely outside their frame of reference, which is to say that

such persons have no referents to which one might relate in order to

introduce them to the meaning of liberty. They simply cannot imagine

that human liberty can exist without some authoritarian enforcing

mechanism. Much less can they conceive that such an authoritarian

organization is the very thing that is causing social disorder.

Laurance Labadie

[1] “Discrete” misspelled as “discreet.”

[2] “Anarchism” misspelled as “anarshism.”

[3] “Heinousness” misspelled as “heiniousness.”

[4] “Questions” mistakenly spelled as singular.