From: pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Subject: Booklist + What is Anarchy (long)
Reply-To: pmetzger@shearson.com
Organization: Lehman Brothers
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1992 18:41:43 GMT


[I start by answering Carrie Johnson's question, and then later on go
into my personal booklist. You might want to skip straight to the
booklist.]

cjohnson@lars.acc-admin.stolaf.edu (Carrie L Johnson) writes:

>I'd love to hear what all of your definitions of anarchy are....

>it's interesting to hea (publically) what people's individual 
>definitions of anarchy are.....no one has the same one....

I think there are pretty much agreed to definitions; I just think that
there are lots of different subtypes of anarchist.

Anarchism is best defined as the belief that it would be best if
society were structured without a large organization claiming a
monopoly on the legitimate use of force ("The Government"). How
precisely such a society would function is, however, a matter of
dispute, and thus there are lots of different types of anarchist.

For instance, I'm a propertarian anarchist (read, anarchocapitalist,
free market anarchist, voluntarist, or whatever). I'm basically what
is now called a libertarian (different from what the old meaning of
the word was, as it used to just mean "anarchist"), desiring to see a
society in which anyone can do anything they like that does not
involve the initiation of violence against others. This would include
a free market economy (not what we have now, which is a government
controlled and regulated "mixed economy"), with people purchasing
security forces on the open market in lieu of having publically funded
police and defense forces.

There are other anarchists who are socialists of various stripes. As
an example, some are syndicalists -- they are basically
anarchocommunists who would structure society around syndics,
basically (if I might rudely oversimplify) anarchically run labor
unions and guilds. There are various other flavors of
anarchocommunists and socialists, although there are really a myriad
of types.

Many calling themselves anarchists are anti-statist but have very
little or no coherent ideas of what they would like the future post
state world to look like.

My personal feeling is that propertarian anarchists like myself have a
more coherent vision of what an anarchist society would really look
like than most of the flavors of socialist anarchist, but this might
just be predjudice. I will note that for the most part when I've
pressed anarchosocialists for answers to questions like "how would
goods and services be produced and distributed" and "who would manage
and maintain things like roadways" I've gotten weak or evasive
answers, but that may simply be because the anarchosocialists I've
talked to aren't as knowledgable as others are -- certainly the
absense of an answer having been given to me shouldn't be taken as the
absense of an answer existing.

As a number of people have named a lot of socialist anarchist books
already, I thought I'd recommend some books with a propertarian
vision.

Fiction:

"Across Realtime" by Vernor Vinge especially the short story
interlude "The Ungoverned". Vinge's book presents in "The Ungoverned"
(and, to a lesser extent, in the later section "Marooned in Realtime")
a coherent vision of an anarchocapitalist society. "The Ungoverned"
is, specifically, about a war between a group of security companies
and an invading state, with both sides, amusingly, viewing each other
in radically different terms, the security companies seeing the state
as a very large gang to be fought off, and the statists seeing the
country they are invading as somehow being "opressed" by the
protection agencies. In its few pages, "The Ungoverned" gives one of
the best glimpses I've ever seen into an anarchocapitalist world.

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's book is
about a revolution on the moon, which has been turned by the
government of the earth into a giant penal colony. The colonists are
nominally run by a warden and his police, but in practice they only
control imports and exports and are otherwise powerless. The
colonists/prisoners, free to do whatever they want other than
establish a government, live in a well ordered anarchocapitalist
society, but one not quite as realistically depicted as the one in
"Across Realtime". Strikingly, the rebellion, regardless of what
happens later, is really over what are essentially import/export
taxes, strikingly similar to the root causes of the American
Revolution.

"Snow Crash" is a current cyberpunkish science fiction novel that
reportedly has something of an anarchist flavor in that society has
been totally privatized with franchise governments covering very small
bits of territory, but I haven't read the book myself and can't really
comment on its value.

Nonfiction:

"The Machinery of Freedom", by David Friedman. Try to get the second
edition if you can. This is a big time classic of propertarian
anarchism. David Friedman, who is, by the way, Milton Friedman's son,
is a professor of economics at U. Chicago. Friedman discusses a wide
variety of anarchocapitalist topics, including law and contract
enforcement and educational systems. The book isn't especially
convincing if you are a statist looking for a book that has arguments
for anarchocapitalism.

"The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State" by Bruce Benson.
Benson is a a professor of economics at Florida State and a research
fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. The book is EXTREMELY
thoroughly researched scholarly work -- its not light afternoon
reading. Benson systematically explores what he calls "customary"
legal systems and private law enforcement, going extensively into case
studies and economic analysis. He's produced a masterwork here -- his
evidence is fairly conclusive, and he argues for a fully civil legal
system based on a customary basis, much as Friedman does.

"The Theory of Free Banking" by George Selgin. Selgin is now a
professor of economics in Hong Kong (seem to have a lot of economics
professors on this list!)  The book in question is a reworking of
Selgin's PhD thesis. In it, Selgin systematically explores the
question of how a stable monetary system could be function in a
completely non-governmental setting. Although not anarchist explictly,
Selgin's work argues very well for how one segment of an anarchist
society could function, and as usual much better than a statist
society could.

"The Evolution of Cooperation" by Axelrod. A work that isn't about
anarchism or even politics, this book is an outgrowth of experiments
conducted on computer models of the so-called "prisoner's diliema".
Axelrod produced very convincing evidence that it is in the self
interest of all parties involved in a transaction to cooperate
provided there will be future interactions between the parties.
Axelrod's work is one of the core bases from which I derive a lot of
my personal ideas about the evolution of morality and why a free
market economic system works as well as it does.

"Extropy", a magazine published by the Extropy Institute (contact me
if you want subscription information). "Extropy" is not specifically
anarchist; it covers a wide variety of ideas, including propertarian
anarchism, nanotechology, cryonics, and a bunch of other things. Its
hard to define what an "extropian" is, but people who like the
magazine often report that the topics somehow "click" together.

I would also highly recommend general books on libertarian (meaning
the modern, not the old, sense of the word) politics, as they give you
some of the flavor of the econmic arguments anarchocapitalists tend to
use and also give a better picture of anarchocapitalist concerns in
the realm of personal freedoms like free speech, reproductive rights,
etc, which are generally neglected in the literature above, perhaps
because they are considered so "obvious" that they aren't deemed
worthy of mention. Don't get the idea capitalist anarchists are
republicans who don't want a government -- things like getting rid of
intrusion into people's sex lives, reading materials, and lifestyles
is a big concern to people of my stripe.

A good place to get lots of general books on libertarian thought is
Laissez Faire Books, which has a free catalog and an 800 number --
800-326-0996.

Anyway, enough for now -- the above should be more than enough for
someone to start with.
--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
Laissez faire, laissez passer. Le monde va de lui meme.
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy