[gerard.casey]

You gave Murray Rothbard’s definition of the state: An institution “which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state.”

You wrote: It seems a Homeowners Association established by some kind of perpetual contract (such as a restrictive covenant) that includes some means to collect revenue to pay for common expenses, which also includes the provision of a private contracted security force, could easily meet these criteria.

From the libertarian perspective, the NAP is the foundational principle of any legal order. Within the parameters of the NAP, individuals are free to contract in any way they wish; not to be able to do so would be a limitation on their freedom. One way to exercise their freedom to contract would be to subscribe to a Homeowner’s Association which embodied in its articles a set of restrictive covenants (RCs). It would, of course, be extremely foolish to subscribe to any contract in which the possibility of exiting from it at some stage was not envisaged and the conditions of such an exit set accordingly.

So, take the case of the Homeowner’s Association you mention. Let us suppose that under a RC you are not entitled to keep pets in your home. Now suppose you discover you have an irresistible desire to have a dog – what do you do? Well, you could sublimate this desire and continue to live where you reside or you could go somewhere else. This is the point at which the wisdom of having exit conditions comes in. You should have considered the possibility that no one (at least in the short term) is willing to purchase your home under the existing set of RCs so that would place you in a difficult financial situation. One obvious way to deal with such an eventuality is that the contracts would include a provision that the HOA would purchase your home from you at a pre-agreed price or some other financial mechanism.

You ask: Is there a qualitative difference between such an HOA and a State?

Yes. Using MR’s definition of the state, a HOA either does not acquire its revenue by physical coercion or, if it can do so, its right to use physical coercion to collect revenue results from a contract and so does not violate the NAP. So too, there is no necessity whatsoever that a HOA would have to be a monopoly provider of defence services in respect of the properties under the remit of the HOA. Therefore, HOAs are not states.

You wrote: It would seem that an anarchist society would need to avoid certain kinds of contracts to avoid gradually taking on the characteristics of a State.

Well, yes. Any form of contract that ceded to others a right to help themselves to whatever portion of your income and/or property they deem suitable, from which you cannot exit and which tracks you wherever you go. According to contractarian political philosophers, we are deemed to have entered such contracts tacitly or implicitly. We can’t enter a contract to buy a TV implicitly but we can, it seems, enter a contract implicitly that affects our fundamental rights and freedoms!

You wrote: And these HOA contracts would fall into that category.

The one you described above might do so. Don’t enter such a contract! People sometimes make foolish decisions. There is no mechanism known to man that can rule out completely the operation of human stupidity.

[gerard.casey]

Aristotle remarked in his Nicomachean Ethics (I paraphrase) that we can expect of matters only the degree of certainty that they will bear. We can have absolute certainty in mathematics but in practical matters, this is not possible. Here’s the quote:

“Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature….We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.”

Now, I would argue that the fundamental legal principle of libertarianism (the NAP) is absolutely clear and precise; it’s application, however, requires prudence, which is a form of practical judgement. After the passage I just cited from Aristotle, he goes on to say:

“Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.”

Reasoning in politics and ethics is not a matter of applied mathematics and there is not escaping the need for prudential judgement. Everyone, no matter what his political beliefs, is in the same boat here. Libertarians, having a simple and clear fundamental principle, are better placed than most when it comes to argument.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Let’s hope there aren’t too many typos!

[gerard.casey]

Dear Seraphim,

See my response in the thread “How we come to own ourselves”

[gerard.casey]

Dear Seraphim,

Responding to the point you raise here and in a parallel thread.

I had to read through the entire thread to pick up on where we left off!

When I say that the NAP is foundational, I intend this to be understood in the legal context. (See above where I say “Now, law in any libertarian society would have the NAP at its core.”) If someone were to ask why we should observe the NAP in our relations with others, we would have to say that not to do so would violate the property others have in themselves, which is precisely your point.

You write “To have a consistent logical foundation here, the individual himself or herself must always unilaterally have self-ownership, and does not require anyone else’s permission or consent to assert this. However, this leads to many obvious conundrums described in the thread above.” I agree with you on this point but I don’t think that the boundary conundrums cause us any insuperable problems. Fully adult, articulate, independent human beings are unequivocally self-owners; two year old, babbling, dependent human beings are not.

That we cannot draw a sharp dividing line between the two does not call either clear example into question. That’s why I spent some time laying out the sorites. Night is night, and day is day, but in between there is evening, gloaming and dawn.

Thank you for your prayers.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello again, seraphim.

“The consent issue wasn’t really my primary consideration, but it does seem important.”

Did I miss the point?

“Restrictive covenants are the only mechanism with which I am familiar for making collective decisions about property usage (e.g., zoning, Homeowners Associations, apartment complexes with common areas, etc.) in an anarcho-capitalist society. In such a society, I imagine that over time, most properties would have some kind of restrictive covenants attached to them, except maybe in undeveloped areas.”

That’s possible, but I don’t imagine it’s in any way necessary or even likely. Restrictions on alienability of property maximise control but minimise transferability and so, to some extent, value.

“In such a society, if you accept title to a property — or accept a rental agreement — or in general, if you accept the terms of usage of any given property — then you are giving consent to the restrictive covenants associated with those properties. Even if you didn’t read the contractual details, you are still giving implied consent. So if you are born into a developed area and either own property or use property in that area, you are giving consent (explicit or implied) to all the restrictive covenants involved in those properties. Is this correct?”

I would say, again, that property is a bundle of rights to make use of x, not x itself. That being so, when you take title to a specific property, you’re inherently taking over a particular bundle of rights. If those rights are limited in some way, then that’s part of the property.

Historically, restrictive covenants weren’t the only ways to limit the use of land. The entail was a device invented to keep property in a particular family. The holder of the property for the time being was entitled to use in in various ways but not, for example, to waste. An example of waste would have been the cutting down of all the trees on the estate during his tenure, leaving none for his heir. However, and this is important, it was possible to block the entail if agreement could be reached between the holder and his heir and possibly (but I’m not certain) in other ways. Similarly, even if restrictive covenants existed in a libertarian society, it should be possible to set up some way in which they could, with the consent of the interested parties, be circumvented or abolished.

[gerard.casey]

Hello Darren,

Many thanks for the kind message. I hope you find what my publisher, in reference to its weight, called ‘an offensive weapon’ to be worth the read.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

You wrote:“All the problems with they way the U.S. Constitution was peppered with “time bombs” (or had new interpretations created later) as described in the Hamilton episode (#1003) — don’t all the same problems apply to contracts in general? This seems to be a problem especially when people make contracts that are intended to continue even after the original signatories are no longer involved.

“For example, in Episode 932, Tom discussed “zoning” with Ben O’Neill — basically, how could you attach contractual obligations to all future transfers of a given property. The express purpose of such contracts is to bind future property owners to the terms the current property owners want to enforce.”

I think the answer to your question lies in the following considerations. Property isn’t just ‘stuff’; it’s the legal right to make use of that ‘stuff’ in particular ways. So, for example, if you rent a house from someone, you’re entitled to live in it but not to sell it as if it was yours. You’re also probably prohibited from opening a business in that house or sub-letting it. So, to take your example.

“Let’s say you inherit such a property. And let’s say you never particularly agreed to those contractual obligations. Nevertheless, you are lawfully bound to use your property in accordance with the previous contracts, even though you never gave explicit consent to those contracts.”

In law there used to be legal instruments known as restrictive covenants. These were conditions that limited in some way or another the use to which a property could be put, and, in the legal phrase, they ‘ran with the land’, which is to say that they were ad rem rather than ad personam. Someone inheriting such a property inherits it within the scope of the existing covenants – those covenants are part of the property he inherits. If he doesn’t want to take the property under those conditions he can decline the inheritance.

So, there’s no question of ‘never particularly agreeing’ to the contractual obligations. Either you took the property, and with it, the contractual obligations running with it, or you declined the whole bundle. Restrictive covenants used to be quite common but for various reasons (not least the exclusion of certain social groups from residential areas under their terms) they have been either severely circumscribed in their operation or abolished. (You’d need to check the law in your area/state for their precise current status.)

[gerard.casey]

If you come across any material that you think adds something to the discussion that I haven’t covered in my lecture (or the book chapter), do let me know. This is a topic on which people of good will and intelligence are quite likely to disagree.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello Mark,

The connection between natural law and God is a vexed question. Hugo Grotius, notoriously, claimed that law was either natural or positive, based on reason or on will. Natural law (or natural right) he defined as ‘the Rule and Dictate of right Reason, shewing the Moral Deformity or Moral Necessity there is in any Act, according to its Suitableness or Unsuitableness to a reasonable Nature and consequently that such an Act is either forbid or commanded by GOD, the author of Nature.’ [I, i,10,1] The presence of God in this definition is, technically, otiose, because even if there were no God, the law of nature would still be what it is and would still be binding on all. Grotius makes this point clearly in the Prolegomena: ‘What I have just said would be relevant even if we were to suppose…that there is no God, or that human affairs are of no concern to him…’ The law of nature is as freestanding and as independent of human variability as are the laws of mathematics. Acts judged according to this standard are right or wrong considered in themselves and not because they violate the command of any legislator, either divine or human. This natural law or natural right is incapable of change, so that not even God can change it any more than he can (pace Descartes) make a triangle to have four sides. Grotius writes, ‘the Law of Nature is so unalterable that God himself cannot change it. For tho’ the Power of God be infinite, yet we may say, that there are some Things to which this infinite Power does not extend, because they cannot be expressed by Propositions that contain any Sense, but manifestly imply a Contradiction. For Instance then, as God himself cannot effect, that twice two should not be four; so neither can he, that what is intrinsically Evil should not be Evil.

Although it is clear where Grotius comes down on this question, there is another line of thinking which sees natural law as part of an overarching scheme of laws. The more or less standard account of Aquinas.For Aquinas, Eternal Law is God’s design for the whole of creation. It is ‘the ideal of divine wisdom considered as directing all actions and movements’ and all other forms of law ultimately derive from it. Divine Law is, in effect, what is given to us by revelation in Scripture. Natural Law is ‘the participation of the eternal law in a rational creature,’ a reflection of Eternal Law as we see it manifested in creatures.It gives to each kind of thing ends in accordance with its nature. For man, those ends are the preservation of his own life, life in society, the generation and education of children and the search for truth. Human (or Positive) Law is law as it applies specifically to men in their concrete and practical circumstances. It is an ordinance of reason for the common good made and promulgated by those who have charge of the community.

In the 19th century, Cardinal Newman was to base an argument to God on the existence of conscience, conscience testifying to the existence in us of an awareness of some kind of law.[see Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God, at https://www.amazon.com/New-Proofs-Existence-God-Contributions/dp/0802863833%5D

You ask how Rand and Rothbard can accept natural law but deny God? The short answer to you questions is: I don’t know!

[gerard.casey]

Pastor Beane’s remarks on authority are (in my opinion) sensible but, in the context of Romans 13, are not strictly relevant to the way in which this passage has largely been interpreted in the Christian tradition. Verse 1 doesn’t enjoin subjection to authority but to authorities, ἐξουσίαις (see also Ephesians 3:10 and Titus 3:1 where ἐξουσίαις is linked with ἀρχαῖς, rulers).

Since I recorded my lectures, I have revised the material on Christianity. (The expanded and revised material of my lectures on Political Thought will be published on 1st September as Freedom’s Progress?) Here are the concluding paragraphs from the Christianity Chapter. As Pastor Beane is a Lutheran, I also include some material from my book on Luther and his approach to the state. That chapter contains more than is here reproduced but I can’t disentangle it neatly from other material)

[Excerpt from the chapter on Christianity]

Are there other possible interpretations of Romans 13? Yes, of course. It may well be that the passage means more or less what it has appeared to many to mean but is limited in its application to Paul’s immediate circumstances, perhaps because Paul expected the imminent end of the world, a consummation compared to which little else mattered. [see Neufeld passim.] This is the position taken in the sixteenth century by the Franco-Scottish writer, George Buchanan, who insists that this passage in St Paul has no general application and is addressed to the specific time, place and circumstances of its making. The Church Paul addressed was an infant Church composed, as Buchanan remarks, ‘of a promiscuous crowd of plebeians’ for whom it would have been extremely foolish to attract the attention of those in government. What advice, he asks, should today be given to Christians living under Turkish rule?; what, indeed, except the advice Paul gives to the Romans ‘to omit nothing that could help us to conciliate the good will of all men by honest practices.’ [Buchanan 1579, 58] His conclusive argument that Paul’s advice was circumstantial and not general is that ‘though he [Paul] minutely explains the mutual duties of husbands to their wives, of wives to their husbands, of parents to their children, of children to their parents, of masters to their slaves, and of slaves to the masters, he does not, in describing the duty of a magistrate, address, as in the preceding parts, them expressly by name’ Why should he not have done this except that ‘there were neither kings nor other magistrates to whom he could write.’ If Paul were writing now, Buchanan says, and were there to be a prince ‘who thinks that not only human, but also divine laws ought to be subservient to his capricious lusts; who would have not only his decrees, but even his nods, held as laws,’ would not Paul ‘declare him unworthy of being reckoned a magistrate’ and ‘put all Christians under an interdict to abstain from all familiarity, all conversation, and all communion with him.’ [Buchanan 1579, 59]

Even if we take it that the ‘Romans 13 means what just it says’ interpretation in either its limited or global form, it is still possible to ask what ‘to be subject’ means. To be subject isn’t necessarily to endorse or approve. Even if the higher powers are ordained by God, this does not mean that God approves of them any more than he approved of the Israelites’ request for a king. Here, then, apart from Buchanan’s circumstantial interpretation, are four possible interpretations of Romans 13 in order of increasing scope.

First, it requires obedience only to church authorities; second, it requires obedience to any authority to which we have given our consent—but only upon conditions and only for so long as our consent endures; third, it requires unconditional obedience to any ruler, however he may have come to power, but only so long as what he commands is in conformity with his obligation to promote justice or that provide for the regulation of matters that are indifferent but which must be organised in some particular way for the good of the community, or fourth, it requires unconditional obedience to any ruler, however he may have come to power or however he exercises it. The fourth interpretation has been held by some Church leaders from Augustine in the fifth century through to the Reformers in the fifteenth, although, as we shall see, there has been a tendency to move, under pressure, from the fourth interpretation to the third. Neither of these interpretations is acceptable to a libertarian although the third interpretation is clearly less unpalatable than the fourth. The first and perhaps the second interpretations would be acceptable to libertarians generally and even to anarchists, except those who would reject all forms of authority, even authority freely chosen.

As I have already mentioned, there are some other New Testament passages besides Romans 13 that are relevant to our topic. Perhaps the most important of these subsidiary passages is that in the First Letter of Peter. The passage reads: ‘Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God’s sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.’ [1 Peter 2: 13-17] This, again, has acquired an interpretation as counselling obedience or subjection to the secular authorities. But it should be noted that Peter himself did not practise what he preached, if indeed that is what he preached. He defied the Jewish authorities by preaching about Jesus when they commanded him not to and justified his actions by saying that we ought to obey God rather than men. [Acts 5: 29] In any event, Peter counsels subjection to all human creatures, not just kings and governors, and the point of this subjection is that it will silence foolish people; there’s nothing particularly special in subjecting ourselves to kings and governors. Putting it all together, this amounts to saying that we ought to obey all human ordinances except those that conflict with our God-given liberty and the summary commandment of Jesus to do unto others as we would have them do unto us—which is as much as to require us to obey those ordinances that are required by the golden rule and no others! Once again, what appears to be substantive is in fact politically vacuous. In the end, however, it can’t be denied that the fourth, most extensive, interpretation of Romans 13, which takes it as requiring unconditional obedience to any ruler however he may have come to power or however he might exercise it, dominated Christian political thinking for sixteen hundred years and that even today that interpretation hasn’t yet lost its appeal for many Christians.

[Excerpt from the chapter on the Reformation]

Without the invention of printing, it is difficult to see how the Protestant Reformation could ever have taken place. ‘The advent of printing was an important precondition for the Protestant Reformation taken as a whole,’ writes Elizabeth Eisenstein, ‘for without it one could not implement a “priesthood of all believers.”’ [Eisenstein, 171] Seldom has a single technological invention had such a major cultural impact, enabling ‘an obscure theologian in Wittenberg’ to ‘shake Saint Peter’s throne’ and turning what would otherwise have been a storm in a teacup into the precipitating event in an international revolt that was to shatter Christendom. ‘Sixteenth-century heresy and schism shattered Christendom so completely that even after religious warfare had ended, ecumenical movements led by men of good will could not put all the pieces together again.’ [Eisenstein, 171, 172]

The core of Luther’s theological revolution was the doctrine of salvation by faith alone—sola fide. The theological implications of this doctrine aren’t the concern of a history of political thought but its social and political implications are. Of these, the religiously grounded obligation of subjects to obey their secular authorities could hardly have been more emphatic. It hardly needs to be said that Luther takes as the ultimate scriptural justification of this doctrine, the opening verses of chapter 13 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. As we have seen already, in this notorious passage, Paul appears to require Christians to give their allegiance to the de facto secular authorities and Augustine, at a later date, would go on to use this passage to justify requiring the submission by Christians even to pagan rulers. Luther places himself firmly in the Pauline and Augustinian traditions. If one wanted to find a central example of a resolute and robust defender of the religious obligation to obey secular authority one would have to go very far before one would find someone to trump Luther. As Ellen Meiksins Wood puts it, ‘there hardly exists in the Western canon a more uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority; and this…belongs to the essence of Lutheran doctrine.’ [Wood 2012, 59]

Given that he began his religious life as an Augustinian, it is hardly surprising that Luther takes what is effectively the Augustinian position that the power of the sword is given to secular authorities to control and limit evil. ‘If all the world were true Christians, that is, if everyone truly believed, there would be neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the Sword or law.’ Alas, the world isn’t made up of true Christians so that if there were no law and government ‘people would devour each other and no one would be able to support his wife and children, feed himself and serve God. The world would become a desert.’ We shall see that a similar bleak view of the consequences of an unrestrained human nature will emerge a century later in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. So then, Luther, as everyone else in the Christian world, takes the words of St Paul in Romans 13 to mandate Christians to be obedient to their secular rulers. This may be relatively unproblematic where what one’s rulers are obliging one to do is in conformity with one’s conscience; where it is not, however, there are going to be problems. The Reformers dealt with these problems in different and distinctive ways. Luther’s tract, On Secular Authority, was an early attempt by him to specify the rights and duties of secular rulers. It doesn’t represent his last word on the subject for his beliefs in this area were to shift as the political and religious consequences of the Reformation became more apparent. Nevertheless, at this early stage, his judgement on the merits of secular rulers is often very negative, indeed sometimes surprisingly hostile. ‘God Almighty,’ he says, ‘has driven our princes mad: they really think they can command their subjects whatever they like and do with them as they please. And their subjects are just as deluded, and believe (wrongly) that they must obey them in all things.’ According to Luther in this document, all that the secular rulers of the present do is to ‘poll and fleece, heap one tax on another, let loose a bear here, a wolf there. There is no good faith or honesty to be found amongst them; thieves and villains behave better than they do…’ This isn’t an isolated or rash judgement. A little later in the same work, he comments, ‘As a rule, princes are the greatest fools or the worst criminals on earth, and the worst is always to be expected, and little good hoped for, from them, especially in what regards God and the salvation of souls.’ Thus, the opinion of the early Luther. Later, as we shall see, his evaluation of secular rulers would become considerably more positive.
For Luther, human beings are irreducibly sinful yet, while still sinful, they can be justified by divine grace. In respect of their ultimate destiny, all men stand on the same horizontal footing but, in a neo-Augustinian moment, Luther argues that the sinfulness of man demands the vertical relationship of ruler and ruled, the existence and operation of secular authorities to whom, as instituted by God, all Christians owe obedience and respect. At the same time as he gives his support to the right of secular governments to demand and receive obedience from the people, Luther attacks the Church’s right to exercise any jurisdiction in the external forum—for example, to punish sins or to excommunicate. For him, the Church has no legitimate temporal jurisdiction. Luther’s view of the Church in On Secular Authority is that it is a free and voluntary association of believers. Such a view of the Church isn’t without its political consequences, not least of which is that it is inconsistent with the idea that the membership of the Church is necessarily co-extensive with any given polity.

There are, then, for Luther, two governments in the world: one, spiritual, which addresses itself to the constitution of true and faithful Christians and another, secular, ‘which holds the unchristian and wicked in check and forces them to keep the peace outwardly and be still, like it or not.’ Would it not suffice to preach the Gospel to such wicked and evil men and by such means bring them to order? Well, yes, but in the meantime, he notes that there are ‘always many more of the wicked than there are of the just. And so to try to rule a whole country or the world by means of the Gospel is like herding together wolves, lions, eagles and sheep in the same pen, letting them mix freely, and saying to them: feed, and be just and peaceable; the stable isn’t locked, there’s plenty of pasture, and you have no dogs or cudgels to be afraid of.’
But if one’s rulers are Christian, as they should be, how can they be justified in using coercive power over other Christians, seeing that Christ has told us to turn the other cheek? The distinction Luther draws to solve this problem is between what one does for oneself and what one does for others. ‘As far as you and your possessions are concerned,’ he writes, ‘you keep to the Gospel and act according to Christ’s word,’ but the coercive actions of secular authority are for the good of others and are, Luther thinks, positively enjoined by Romans 13. You are, it would seem, obliged to turn your own cheek but not, if you are a magistrate, your neighbour’s.

Luther has already hinted that rulers cannot command us in everything and in certain matters we are not bound to obey them. How are the parameters of obedience to be determined? Rulers who act ultra vires are, in that respect at least, no longer rulers and need not be obeyed: Romans 13 applies only to rulers and if they act ultra vires and are as a result not rulers, it doesn’t apply to them. As already mentioned, for Luther, belief cannot be and ought not to be commanded and so if any ruler were to exert his power in this respect, he would have exceeded his authority and become a tyrant. Not only is it the case that obedience in such matters isn’t required, Luther thinks that failure to resist would be tantamount to a denial of God! What is the position of a Christian who is instructed to obey an order that, in his judgement, is in conflict with the requirements of Scripture? According to Luther, he may disobey the order but then he has to be prepared to accept the consequences of such disobedience. Even more to the point, the issuance of such orders does not constitute any grounds for resistance or rebellion. Doesn’t this contradict what Luther had previously stated in his tract? Not quite. The illegitimacy of resistance applies only to the individual Christian acting in a private capacity. Subsidiary rulers may be justified in resisting the commands of their superiors so that princes might not only have a right but even a duty to resist the emperor or, more generally, inferior magistrates, their superiors.

Luther’s character drew him towards freedom. Coercive force is to be applied, if at all, only to bringing about outward conformity to right action but what a person believes ‘is a matter for each individual’s conscience.’ Coercion must not be used in matters of belief because ‘Faith is free, and no one can be compelled to believe…no one can or ought to be forced to believe anything against his will.’ But Luther couldn’t shake off the age-old conviction that heresy must be suppressed, a task which, if not done or not capable of being done by the Church, must be undertaken by the civil power. [see Plamenatz, 54] In undertaking such suppression, kings were ‘bishops by necessity’. The upshot of all this, of course, was that secular governments became agents of reform and eventually the arbiters of what reform would take place. As John Plamenatz remarks, ‘To us it seems odd that Luther should not have seen that whoever appoints to the ministry and provides for it will in fact decide what it shall teach. How can the Church depend on the secular power in matters of discipline and organization, and yet retain its spiritual independence?’ [Plamenatz, 55] This reliance on secular authorities led to the emergence of national churches, something that no one had foreseen and that was hardly immediately comprehensible to anyone on either side of the theological and political disputes, all of whom clung to the core belief that there could only be one true Church until eventually reduced to a position of hostile mutual toleration by war, destruction and death. Whatever Luther’s intentions may have been, the result of his efforts and that of the other reformers was the emergence of national churches dominated by their secular rulers.

The Church thus fragmented could offer little or no resistance to the emerging sovereignty of the secular princes. This was true as much in Catholic countries as in Protestant. ‘The disruption of the universal church, the suppression of its monastic institutions and ecclesiastical corporations, and the abrogation of the Canon law,’ writes George Sabine, ‘removed the strong check upon secular power that had existed in the Middle Ages.’ [Sabine, 362] Commenting upon this passage from Sabine, Frank Furedi remarks that ‘Arguably, the immediate impact of the Reformation was to strengthen absolutist forms of power’ and he goes on to note that P. W. Gray ‘blames the Reformation and Luther in particular for subordinating the Church to the state.’ [Furedi, 163]

It is worth noting the prevalence of a popular but mistaken belief that the Protestant Reformers, in contrast to the repressive Catholic Church, were the apostles of liberty. Even Richard King, in his otherwise excellent On Offence writes, ‘The clamour for religious liberty that grew out of the Spanish Inquisition and the countless [sic!] horrors perpetrated in its name led eventually to the Protestant Reformation which, though it spawned its own atrocities, contained the seeds of a revolution “aiming for liberty in the kingdom of the mind”.’ [King, 33-34] The Reformation was many things but by no stretch of the imagination was it the result of a clamour for religious liberty or, indeed, for liberty more broadly construed. John Plamenatz remarks, ‘The Catholics, the Lutherans, the Anglicans, the Calvinists, all had this in common: they believed that there could be only one true Church….Luther and Calvin…did not believe that men could receive the Word and be saved outside the Church, or that there could be several Churches, each interpreting the word differently from the other, and yet all equally acceptable to God. Luther and Calvin, no less than the Catholics and Anglicans, believed in uniformity of faith and worship.’ [Plamenatz, 62] ‘The sixteenth century,’ writes Perez Zagorin, ‘which witnessed the Reformation and the beginning and spread of Protestantism, was probably the most intolerant period in Christian history….When Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other outstanding religious reformers undertook their successful revolt against the Catholic Church and established their own Protestant churches, the latter showed themselves to be no less intolerant of heretics and dissenting Christians than was the Catholic Church.’ [Zagorin, 2] And, in respect of the broader social and cultural issues, Hilary Gatti notes that, ‘Just as Protestant dogmatism and oppression were often in the period studied here as merciless and unrelenting as those of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church, so the rich texture of Catholic culture produced voices raised in the name of liberty as eloquent and forward-looking as those of Protestant derivation.’ [Gatti, 176]

[gerard.casey]

You are welcome! And thank you for the prayers!

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Mark,

First, I must apologise for taking an unconscionably long time to reply to your email. I can only plead in excuse that we have had some traumatic family problems in the last few months which have occupied all my attention and only now have I been able to return to my responsibilities.

If the child were 25 and perfectly capable of taking care of himself and living away from home, would you think that the action of his parents in forcibly forcing him home would be defensible from a libertarian point of view? No? Then what about a 20 year old in similar circumstances? No? I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Age is irrelevant except insofar as it constitutes prima facie evidence of inability to care for oneself. So long as you grant the (counter-intuitive) point about the 12 year old being able to take perfectly good care of himself, you cannot justify, on libertarian principles, the (understandable but indefensible) actions of his parents in forcibly moving him home.

I suspect that in a real-life situation, most parents would do as you suggest and take their chances in a libertarian court of establishing the real point at issue which is whether or not, in fact, a 12 year old is perfectly capable of taking care of himself for the rest of his life.

Once again, apologies for the delay in responding to your query.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

You’re welcome!

[gerard.casey]

Sorry for the delay in responding to your very interesting question!

The short answer is that there is nothing to prevent an ego from doing anything, even something as absurd (from a Stirnerite perspective) as setting up a state. But even on Stirner’s muddled views, such an attempt would be incoherent. As I note in the lectures, ‘Each ego is a law unto itself. There are no rights, no duties, no immutable moral laws. The ego or self does not demand any right, nor does it recognise any.’ And while ‘Egos can associate in Stirner’s world but they do so spontaneously and only for as long as and to the extent that they wish to do so. A bizarre form of association, indeed!’

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[Author]

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