[gerard.casey]

Dear Pacopasa,

That’s quite a bit of reading you’ve got in front of you! But if your experience is anything like mine, it’s well worth the effort. Best of luck with your study.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Pacopasa,

I am delighted to hear that you are finding the material on political thought satisfactory. You would be surprised to learn how few times writers or broadcasters get positive reactions to their work (or, indeed, any reaction) so positive feedback such as yours is very welcome.

I have written up the material in the lectures, added some new chapters, and included a lot more material in some other chapters, including the one on Marx. This will be published in the very near future under the title Liberty’s Progress? Also, if you’re interested in anarcho-capitalism, there are many good books available to take you further in your investigations, including my own modest effort, Libertarian Anarchy which you can get, post-free, from the Book Depository.

Some years ago, three students came to me and asked me if I would moderate a reading group they were going to set up on Austrian Economics. I agreed, and asked them what they wanted to read. To my astonishment (and delight!) they plumped for Man, Economy and State. We spent a happy year reading it together.

[gerard.casey]

Hello again, Darren,

My manuscript has just been edited and as soon as we make progress on the typesetting front, I hope to have positive news about publication.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello Darren,

Good to hear from you, and thank you for the kind comments on the course.

Here, including the Porter book, are some references to material on war. Some of this I may have included in the recommended reading but just in case…..

I’ve been doing a lot of work on a history of political thought based on the lectures and the whole will come out soon as a book called Liberty’s Progress? I’ve included quite a bit more material than I managed to cover in the lectures and I’ve and expanded some of the material already there. The manuscript is being edited right now (I hope to have it back tonight!) and then it’s the inevitable wait for the publisher to come through.

Davie, Maurice R. (1929 [2003]) The Evolution of War: A Study of its Role in Early Societies. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Ferguson, Niall. (1998 [1999]) The Pity of War. London: Penguin.
Gat, Azar. (2006) War in Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanson, Victor Davis. (2010) The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Hochschild, Adam. 2012 [2011]) To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War. London: Pan Books.
Keegan, John. (1994) A History of Warfare. New York: Vintage.
Keeley, Lawrence H. (1999) War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Porter, Bruce D. (1994) War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics. New York: The Free Press.
Walzer, Michael. (1977 [2006]) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. New York: Basic Books.

All of these books, including Porter’s, have something to contribute to political philosophy, but Porter specifically addresses the connection between war and the state. A list of his chapter titles will give you an idea of what he discusses:

The Paradox of War
The Mirror Image of War
War and the Passing of the Medieval Age
The Military Revolution and the Early Modern State
War and the Rise of the Nation State
Total War and the Rise of the Collectivist State
War and the Totalitarian State
War and the American Government
The Paradox of the State

I recommend Bruce Porter’s book, not that I agree with everything Porter has to say—in fact, I disagree strongly with his optimistic evaluation of the virtues and strength of democracy—but the overall thrust of his book, especially its demonstration of the intimate connection between war and the state, is undeniably correct.

Here are some passages from the book that I use in Liberty’s Progress?

*****

Something else died on the green fields of France. ‘European liberalism,’ writes Bruce Porter, ‘finally perished on the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme.’ [Porter, 161]

*****

‘The machinery of the modern state,’ writes Bruce Porter, ‘is derived historically from the organizational demands of warfare, and states as we know them today trace their origins and development in large measure to the crucible of past wars.’ [Porter, xix]

*****

Bruce Porter take the view that if the state is to be conceived of as a sovereign power exercising a monopoly of force over a specific geographical area and its population, then the state ‘simply did not exist in the medieval world. The state as we know it is a relatively new invention, originating in Europe between 1450 and 1650.’ [Porter, 6] Since its emergence during this period, the state has taken on a variety of forms. First, there was the quasi-dynastic state with roots in its medieval past but, more significantly, with limited sovereignty, even if this was coupled with unlimited ambition. ‘The European state was no more than a private dynasty, more than a cluster of feudal realms, but it was not yet widely perceived as the political incarnation of a sovereign people.’ [Porter, 106] Second, we see the emergence of the nation state, erupting in the French Revolution and dominating the nineteenth century. Here, for the first time, we see the attempted identification of the nation, a cultural entity, with the state, a political entity. ‘Originating in war and propagated by invading armies, this nationalism transformed dynastic states into true nation states….multinational empires split into a host of new states…[and]…wars of national unification welded disparate principalities into unitary states….This period essentially ended after the First World War, which precipitated the final disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, creating a boomlet of new nation-states on the periphery of Europe.’ [Porter, 106] Third, we see the emergence of the collectivist state in the twentieth century. This state is characterised by the mass participation of its citizens in its politics, at least in principle, but, even more significantly, the extension of the state’s remit to the control of the economy and to the provision of welfare for all its citizens. All these various forms of state were the products of war: the Dynastic State (1648-1789) was a product of the Thirty Years War; the Nation-State was a product of the French Revolutionary Wars and their aftermath (1789-1914); and the Collectivist State resulted from World War I and World War II (1914-present).

*****

War tends to promote territorial enlargement and integration, the cult of the great leader, and the internal repression of a state’s citizens. Europe went from having roughly 1,000 political units of various kinds in the 1300s to around 25 in 1900. War tends to encourage warring factions within the state to submerge their differences. War tends to centralise power and promote the emergence and enlargement of bureaucracies. War invariably increases the government’s fiscal depredations upon its own population in the form of taxes, confiscations, conscriptions, or massive borrowings to be set against future tax income. As Porter notes, ‘few states are able to sustain wars out of current revenue alone, wars almost invariably add to the public debt; historically, a vast portion of the public debt of European countries has accumulated during wartime.’ [Porter, 16] The levels of centralisation, taxation, and bureaucracy attained in war never return to pre-war levels but ratchet up to new heights.
‘Given the close linkage between war and state formation, it can hardly be regarded as coincidental that both the Puritan revolution in England and the secular Revolution in France culminated in military rule.’ [Porter, 133] One made a general Lord Protector; the other made a general an Emperor. Napoleon was responsible for the complete rationalisation and centralisation of power in France by means of the dismemberment of the pays d’états and the creation of départements, the establishment of the Ministries of the Interior and the Ministry of Police, the first to regulate pretty much all activities in France—commerce, transport, education, scientific establishments; the second to censor, carry out surveillance, and control movement by means of identity cards and passports, the latter device still with us. The multiple local legal codes, some four hundred of them, were swept away in the Code Napoléon, a uniform body of law applicable to all. Napoleon, the general, restructured France in the image of a well-organised army. ‘Napoleon’s enduring bequest to France was his forging of a centralised nation-state infused with a secular spirit, substantially divested of traditional impediment to state power, and possessed of a uniform system of administration and laws.’ [Porter, 140-141]

*****

The human suffering and physical devastation are obvious enough consequences of war, though not so obvious as to prevent its constant recurrence. What is not so often noted is the staggering financial cost of war resulting not only from the damage and destruction of property which has to be replaced but from the finance needed to pay, transport and supply the soldiers who are to partake in this unique form of social interaction. C. Northcote Parkinson remarks that from war ‘we inherit the grisly legacy of taxation. Horses, chariots and arms have to be paid for. Taxes bring with them all the attendant horrors of arithmetic, estimates, assessment and accounts. War is thus accompanied by and largely responsible for a vastly more complicated administration.’ [Parkinson 1958, 51] Bruce Porter notes that ‘One factor in the collapse of laissez-faire during World War I was the enormous cost of the war, which dwarfed all previous European conflicts in the magnitude of resources required for its waging. The result was an extremely robust fiscal-military cycle of bureaucratic expansion, centralization, and increased taxation. The percentage of national income devoted to military spending in all the major powers rose on the average from slightly over 4 percent to between 25 and 33 percent over the course of the war.’ [Porter, 162]

*****

The absolute state of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was not the nation state. There was no belief at this time that nation and state should necessarily coincide. This was to become the dominant ideology of the nineteenth century. ‘Nationalism is also a powerful collective emotion fixated on the mystical and mythical image of the nation. It is a kind of modern tribalism or political religion capable of eliciting strenuous exertions, supreme sacrifices, and deeply felt hostility—above all in war and in connection with war.’ [Porter, 122]

*****

Nationalism has been instrumental in the growth of the American state, and war has been instrumental to nationalism. ‘Throughout the history of the United State’, writes Porter, ‘war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance. It has been a wellspring of American nationalism and a spur to political and social change.’ [Porter, 291]

*****

‘In its formative years,’ writes Bruce Porter, ‘the New Deal derived considerable inspiration from Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, one of the legislative milestones of the “Hundred Days,” established the National Recovery Administration consciously modelled after the War Industries Board of 1918-1920.’ [Porter, 277] Bad as the bureaucratic expansion of government had been in WWI, it paled into insignificance beside the WWII expansion. If progression was the innovation of WWI in respect to tax, ‘withholding’ was the innovation of WWII. Introduced as a temporary measure, needless to say it became permanent. ‘By making income taxation largely invisible and hence less painful, withholding not only helped finance the war effort but greatly facilitated postwar revenue extraction and the permanent maintenance of a large federal bureaucracy.’ [Porter, 283] The growth of the regulatory state was further enhanced by World War II so that our mid-twentieth century world found itself with states regulating, sometimes even owning, coal mines, railroads, airlines, steelworks, electricity and gas utilities. Porter writes, ‘The contrast between the liberal Britain and France of 1914 and the highly regulated, economically engaged states that emerged after 1945 was striking.’ [Porter, 169]

*****

By its very nature, totalitarianism has been half in love with easeful death. ‘The antecedents of totalitarianism all shared a common thread: a belief in the achievement of human progress through violence and conflict.’ [Porter, 205] Conflict, strife, struggle are thought to be the very stuff of life—and death. Totalitarian societies are civil societies organised as if they were armies. ‘The defining attribute of the totalitarian state was perpetual mobilization for war—war against foreign adversaries, both real and imagined, and war against its own population.’ [Porter, 195]
It can be no surprise to find that those who have been militarised by their service in the war were receptive to the siren song of the totalitarian state. Life in a genuine civil society is hard, not least because one has to take responsibility for oneself. To those used to the comradeship of the trenches, the challenge of self-sufficiency came as an unwelcome shock. Little wonder, then, that the offer of the incipient totalitarian states to replicate the solidarity and comradeship of war in civilian society was well nigh irresistible to many. Half of all National Socialist recruits ‘were veterans of World War I, a figure far higher than the population as a whole.’ [Porter, 219] Another factor that made the social environment propitious for the new tribalism was the devastating effect of the war on the institutions of civil society. Little remained between the naked individual and the state. The choice seemed to be—on your own or with everyone together. Of course, there were gaps between the totalitarian ambitions of the new tribal states and their ability to implement totalitarianism in fact. Of the various states that took this route, Stalinist Russia was perhaps the most successful in deleting intermediate social institutions, certainly more successful than National Socialist Germany and conspicuously more successful than Fascist Italy.

*****

It is not common to link warfare and welfare. One seems to be organised mass social destruction; the other, organised mass social construction. Yet they are linked. Porter writes, ‘the historical linkages between war and the welfare state are too close and too extensive to dismiss as mere coincidences of chronology.’ [Porter, 180] The beginnings of the welfare state is to be found in Bismarck’s Prussia in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war but it becomes more widely instantiated only during and after World War I until finally it achieves the status of an unquestioned, perhaps even fundamental, part of the role of the state after World War II.

[gerard.casey]

Hello again, Rob.

This is what I’ve written in response to the second part of Hoppe’s A Short History:

“The second part of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s A Short History of Man is largely concerned with offering an explanation of why the Industrial Revolution occurred when it did and not earlier. Hoppe’s answer is—not leisure and not clearly defined and protected property rights (however necessary such things might be) but rather the development of human intelligence to a certain critical level. ‘A certain threshold of average and exceptional intelligence had to be reached first for this to become possible,’ he writes, ‘and it took time (until about 1800) to “breed” such a level of intelligence.’ [Hoppe 2015, 98] Hoppe realises that this thesis is controversial, containing, as it does, ‘a fundamental criticism of the egalitarianism rampant within the social sciences generally but also among many libertarians.’ [Hoppe 2015, 100] What is overlooked by such egalitarians, non-libertarian and libertarian alike, he believes, is that ‘we, modern man, are a very different breed from our predecessors hundreds or even thousands of years ago.’ [Hoppe 2015, 100] I am disinclined, however, to believe that the historical and theoretical evidence shows that human intelligence is the kind of thing that can be raised in an entire population except within certain narrowly defined limits. Instead, I think it more likely that human progress is the result of the accumulation of technological developments and the refinement of social institutions over time that, as it were, raise a platform from which the next generation can work. Nobody can invent the electric light bulb before the discovery of generating electricity. Newton famously remarked, ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ For me, then, human progress is not so much a matter of a rising level of intelligence in a group as a whole as it is the presence of an appropriate level of technology and social institutions that provide the combustion chamber ready to explode from the spark of individual intelligence. The resultant theoretical advances and technological developments are diffused throughout society and so the platform is raised yet again.”

I agree entirely with you that The Economics and Ethics of Private Property is a wonderful book, and I believe Hoppe is absolutely correct to attack the idea that ethics is merely subjective.

Clearly, there are differences in intellectual capacity between individual human beings. My experience as a teacher tells me that the Bell curve seems to fit the reality of things here: some very small number of individuals are exceptionally brilliant, some small number are irredeemably stupid, and the mass are more or less on the same level – differences in achievement here are directly correlated with the amount of work put it. Measuring the intelligence level of aggregates is subject to the usual methodological problems of aggregate measurement and, as is usual, the best of the worst is better than the worst of the best.

Take the (uncontroversial) example of the heights of men and women. If I were to make the claim that “Men are taller than women”, most people would agree with me. Of course, there are women who are taller than most men but this doesn’t affect the truth of the claim which doesn’t tell us anything about the relative heights of a particular male individual and a particular female individual.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello Rob….

I’ve just finished reading Hoppe’s 2015 A Short History of Man. The first part deals with the origin of private property and the family and I have been happy to add some material from this section into my Freedom’s Progress?, which I hope to publish soon.

The second part is largely concerned with offering an explanation for why the Industrial Revolution occurred when it did and not before. Hoppe’s answer is—not leisure and not clearly defined and protected property rights (however necessary such things might be)but rather the development of human intelligence to a certain critical level. ‘A certain threshold of average and exceptional intelligence had to be reached first for this to become possible and it took time (until about 1800) to “breed” such a level of intelligence.’ [p. 98] Hoppe realises that this thesis is controversial, containing, as it does, ‘a fundamental criticism of the egalitarianism rampant within the social sciences generally but also among many libertarians.’ [p. 100] What is overlooked by egalitarians, non-libertarian and libertarian alike, he believes, is that ‘we, modern man, are a very different breed from our predecessors hundreds or even thousands of years ago.’ [p. 100]

I am disinclined to believe that the evidence shows that human intelligence is the kind of thing that can be raised in an entire population except within certain narrowly defined limits. Instead, I think it more likely that human progress is the result of the accumulation of technological developments and the refinement of social institutions over time that, as it were, raise a platform from which the next generation can work. Nobody can invent the electric light bulb before the discovery of generating electricity. ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ (Newton) For me, then, human progress is not so much a matter of a rising level of intelligence in the group as a whole as it is the presence of an appropriate level of technology and social institutions that provide the combustion chamber ready to explode from the spark of individual intelligence.

In my Freedom’s Progress? (a version of the course which I hope to publish soon) I have written: ‘In many discussions on the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, there is a tendency to suggest that human nature is either something wholly or substantially genetically determined and thus unalterable, or else that it is nothing more than a product of our history and cultural environment, and thus essentially plastic. Neither of these extremes would seem to be correct. [see Duchesne, 33] The genetic basis of human beings is effectively identical; however, the epigenetic expression of those genes is the function of the dynamic interaction of those genes and their environment, resulting in relatively specific character types that, in turn, facilitate character traits (such as trust, capacity for hard work, a disposition to self-restraint and delayed gratification in respect of sex, food and money, etc.) that in their turn, give rise to socio-political institutions such as war, religion, trade and law. Genes hold human culture on a leash, but the leash, as E. O. Wilson remarks, is very long. [Wilson 1978, 167; see also Penman, Carey, Francis and Wade, passim, and Duchesne, 32-38]’

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello robw!

Apologies for the delay in responding to your query (and many thanks for the compliment re the course).

The first thing to say is that H-H Hoppe’s contribution to Libertarian thought is in no way confined to his account of argumentation ethics. From his Democracy: The God that Failed to his The Great Fiction, his libertarian writings (whether one agrees with them in whole or in part or at all) are a hugely significant contribution to the ongoing investigation of the implication of liberty. I never read anything he has written without becoming aware of implications and nuances that I had not perceived before. To take one example, his appropriation of the Marxist doctrine of class warfare (which, of course, antedates Marx) and his application of it to Libertarian ends is really insightful.

Argumentation ethics (AE): here, I’m conflicted. I have examined the arguments pro and con (at one stage, I assembled notes and comments running to about 30 pages or so on the topic) but I wasn’t able to come to a definitive conclusion. AE is an instance of a kind of argumentation sometimes called transcendental. Some thinkers are allergic to this kind of argument in general but I’m not. In fact, in my Libertarian Anarchy, I use just such an argument to argue against strict determinism.

*****

M: No theory can be seriously maintained such that, if it were to be true, its very maintenance would become impossible, meaningless, contradictory or self-refuting.

Apart from the formal constraints on theories of the necessity for consistency and coherence, and the material constraints of explanatory adequacy and coverage, there is also a self-referential constraint on theories, namely, that theories must not render impossible the conditions of their own statement or the conditions of their being maintained. If they do so, they are theoretically self-stultifying. Unless human beings are fundamentally free in their choices and decisions, it is not possible for statements to be meaningfully asserted: that includes the statement of a radical determinism or a radical irrationalism. The statement of a radical determinism is undermined by its own content’s rendering pointless the act of its assertion or by its assertion’s rendering meaningless the content of that assertion; the same holds true for the statement of a radical irrationalism. Iris Murdoch writes: “As a philosophical theory, as contrasted with a theological view or an assumption of popular science or an emotional intuition about fate, determinism fails because it is unstateable. However far we impinge (for instance for legal or moral purposes) upon the area of free will we cannot philosophically exhibit a situation in which, instead of shifting, it vanishes. The phenomena of rationality and morality are involved in the very attempt to banish them.”

Strict determinism falls foul of the maxim since, of necessity, the very attempt to argue for determinism is itself a free act by the arguer which commends itself to the rational judgement of its intended audience. If it is not a free act, we need not regard it; it is only the sighing of the breeze in the vocal chords of the determinist. Irrationalism, on the other hand, while not quite as neatly self-destructive as determinism, is nonetheless obviously rationally unsustainable.

*****

While accepting of transcendental arguments in general, however, I’m not sure if AE is immune from criticism. But then, very few serious philosophical arguments are so immune but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t taken seriously by philosophers.

I wish I could be more definitive in my answer to you query but I hope that I’ve made it clear that I think that Hoppe’s AE cannot be summarily dismissed.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Matthew,

I’ve only just seen this posting! Fortunately, you had the good sense to email me, otherwise we might not have had our afternoon together in Dublin.

I hope the remainder of your trip to Ireland was enjoyable.

Best of luck with all your future endeavours.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

You wrote: Sorry for the slow reply! I can’t always find time to respond, even though I find this discussion very interesting, and personally very important to arriving at a consistent political philosophy. I hope the pace of the discussion is OK with you!

No problem. I won’t address all the concerns you have expressed in your posting in my response. I’ll try to focus on what I think is the most important item. If I ignore something that you think I should deal with or try to deal with, revert to me with the material.

I had written: Block & Barnett come more or less to this conclusion. ‘There is a way to address this problem that does not rely upon some necessarily arbitrary point along the continuum; it is to resort to common (economically efficient) practice.’ Such reasonable judgements, in fact, are the function of the municipal law, as specified in a particular community by tradition, custom, practice, experience, and so on.

You wrote: This essentially concedes that the foundational concept of self-ownership is subject to the determination of the society/State, and NOT to the individual – right? Then the real question is: *what else* is subject to the determination of the society/State rather than the individual?

No; I don’t think it does concede this. Allow me to present an example from another area in an effort to make my point. Consider the following. Take the principle: murder is both morally and legally impermissible. Libertarians would be willing to grant this. Murder is a pretty solid example of a violation of the NAP. Now, here’s the question. Is every homicide murder? (where homicide is intended to be a neutral description of a human act which has as its result the death of another human being). I think the answer here has to be ‘no.’ Why is this? Well, that brings us back to the notion of murder. Murder is usually defined as the act of killing another human being where the agent intended to kill or cause serious bodily injury to the victim where there are no justifications or excuses [e.g. killing another human being in the line of duty during a war is normally exempted; if the assailant is deemed to have been insane at the time of the infliction of the injury resulting in death, etc.] If we come across a dead human body, nothing about that tells us just as such whether we have a homicide on our hands or not. Suppose, on further examination, it turns out that there’s a gunshot wound to the head and that a doctor verifies that this was the cause of death. Is this homicide? Probably. It could be accidental – carelessness with a firearm. It could be suicide. It could have been the infliction of a second party, in which case we might have justifiable homicide (self-defence, in some jurisdictions), manslaughter (various forms of ‘degree’ in the USA), or murder. Suppose (to cut a long story short) we get to a situation where X is accused of murder. The prosecution have to establish to the satisfaction of the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that X did intend to kill or inflict serious injury and that there were no mitigating circumstances (self-defence, insanity, etc.) In the end, despite the clarity of the principle of what constitutes murder, the questions of whether or not X is guilty of murder requires judgement (based on evidence) in the light of all the circumstances. We cannot make a practical judgement just by having the definition of homicide clearly in front of us.

More broadly: there are two possible ways to make sound moral/legal judgements. One is to have every possible set of circumstances written up in a big book (a very big book!) and just look up whatever we have to evaluate and find it on the relevant page. (Ignore for the moment how this was evaluated in the first place). The second was to make sound moral/legal judgements is to establish some principles which are then applied to particular circumstances. The application of principles to particular circumstances is a practical art and requires the development of prudence. This is done by us individually as we morally mature and by society at large, usually through the medium of contested and settled law cases. (Law in this context is proper law and not mere legislation.) Many applications of principles are easy; some, however, are not.

Now, law in any libertarian society would have the NAP at its core. No form of conduct that violated the NAP could be legal in any libertarian society. Outside this, however, libertarian societies are free to develop voluntary rules and regulations for the production of human flourishing in whatever way seems best to those in the societies and in accordance with whatever overarching agreements such societies are founded upon. I expect there would be much variety here. Even so, situations would still arise which would involve the use of judgement – there is no way to avoid that in any real society. The settling of disputed questions requires matching the case against the NAP—if it violates the NAP, it is illegal. It if doesn’t violate the NAP, it may violate one or other of the agreed upon regulations to which all the members of that society have signed up. If it doesn’t, there is no problem. If it does, then the offender will be judged according to the regulations by the mode of judgement which itself is included and to the operation of which he has agreed.

You wrote: So then, is the real foundational concept of anarcho-capitalism “broad acceptability” — in other words, I can do whatever I like, as long as it is broadly acceptable?

No, the foundation concept of anarcho-capitalism is the NAP. After that, everything else is a matter of agreement.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Coming back (finally!) to your post. First, some general points, and then I’ll address (some of) your questions.

I wrote: The problem arises in boundary situations.
You remark: Yes, of course, this is where all the legal disputes arise—this is where all the really interesting questions crop up—and this is where a theory is really tested to see if it holds water; and you ask: What is the line of demarcation between competent and incompetent?

The demarcation (boundary) problem is not specific to the issue of competence/incompetence but is a general feature relating to the applicability of all binary categories. What follows is an excerpt from a paper I gave at the Mises Institute some years ago, which addressed this issue. (The rest of the paper applied what I had written to the possession/ownership distinction, so I’ve left it out)

*****

Begin excerpt

My children sometimes tease me by suggesting that the best way to send me to sleep is to put a film in glorious Technicolor in the DVD player and make me watch it. According to them, I manifest signs of life only in the presence of black & white films. Whatever about the aesthetic advisability of preferring black and white over colour in cinematic matters, black and white thinking—the application of rigid, sharply delineated distinctions—may not always be appropriate or even possible in intellectual and conceptual matters.

The Sorites
The making of binary distinctions such as that between tall/short, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, generous/mean, chair/non-chair is commonplace but all such distinctions appear to be beset by the scourge of the sorites. In a sorites, by traversing a series of incremental steps or stages between two contraries, we can show that one shades into the other in a seemingly inexorable manner thus eroding (or appearing to erode) the distinction between them. The standard example of the sorites, from which it takes its name, is to ask how many grains of sands to you have to take from a heap before it ceases to be a heap?

Try the following experiment on a captive audience. Ask people to raise their hands if they would consider men 6’ 6” and over to be tall. My guess is that you’ll get a 100% positive response. Now ask people to raise their hands if they consider men 4’ 4” and under to be short. Once again, a 100% positive response. [I’m assuming the experiment takes place in Europe or North America. If you were to run it in parts of Central Africa, you might well get different results.] Move your suggested heights progressively downwards from 6’ 6” and up from 4’ 4” and I suspect that the percentages will drop progressively from 100% the more you move away from your starting points. (Even more interesting, perhaps, is to watch how some hands will raise, then lower, then settle at a kind of half-mast!)

Block & Barnett
The sorites problem can be applied to libertarian topics and has been so applied in an article written by Walter Block & William Barnett II. [“Continuums”, Ethics and Politics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 151-66 (2008)] They identify what they call a “continuum” problem [i.e. a “sorites” problem] in law and political economy. They begin with this example. What, they wonder, constitutes a genuine threat of violence? They imagine someone shaking his fist 3 inches away from someone else’s nose (other circumstances being appropriate such as its not being playful, or a joke, or part of a rehearsal for a play) and then they imagine him doing so 3 miles away. 3 inches very likely constitutes a threat; 3 miles doesn’t. They then go on to say: “If the same action is a threat at 3 inches but not at 3 miles it follows ineluctably that at some point in between these two distances its very nature changes from the one to the other.” (p. 152 Emphasis added) If this point of change were, say, 30 yards, then fist-shaking at 29 yards 11 inches would still be a threat but not at 30 yards 1 inch. !

As we saw in our experiment, along any given continuum (let’s stick with the “short” and “tall” example), we can move progressively from a given point which can correctly be described as short to a point that can be correctly described as tall so that as we move along the line change does occur from one to the other; however, it doesn’t follow that the change occurs at a point. Some people are clearly and unambiguously short, others clearly and unambiguously tall, and others—well, who can tell?

To return to Block and Barnett’s example: at one point on their continuum what we have is clearly not a threat; at another it clearly is a threat, and in between, we have a fuzzy area where we simply can’t tell for sure whether someone is making a threat or not. Block & Barnett concede as much when they conclude: “How, then, can we solve the problem of whether or not a response or retaliation against a threat is justified or not given the conditions as depicted above? The only answer is that there is no answer, at least not one that admits of geographical extension. That is, no single cut off point will be both reasonable and non arbitrary.” (p. 153 emphasis added) While we may be unable to draw a dimensionless dividing line between threat and non-threat, it does not follow that there is no difference between them or that there is no way of making a reasonable judgement as to which is which.

Block & Barnett come more or less to this conclusion. “There is a way to address this problem that does not rely upon some necessarily arbitrary point along the continuum; it is to resort to common (economically efficient) practice.” Such reasonable judgements, in fact, are the function of the municipal law, as specified in a particular community by tradition, custom, practice, experience, and so on. In response to such problems, the law elaborated the concept of assault (as distinct from battery) to signify any act that created an apprehension in another of an imminent, harmful or offensive contact, that act to consist of a threat of harm accompanied by an apparent present ability to carry out that threat. Whether or not an act of fist-shaking constitutes assault is a matter of judgement, but the judgement, while requiring the exercise of discrimination, is not based upon arbitrary factors.

B&B’s overall conclusion is that libertarian theory (and I would add, not only libertarian theory) has continuum problems in which one is not in a position simply to set arbitrary cut off points. “We conclude from this not any shortcoming in the principles of non aggression but rather the importance of private institutions in the law industry” (161-62).

End excerpt

*****

I had written: If such a child doesn’t own itself, is it owned by another? Perhaps, but not in the way in which, say, a pencil can be owned. Rather, it has to be owned as something which has the capacity to become a self-owner in time, so that the ownership by another of it is to be exercised for its benefit, a kind of trustee ownership, if you will.

And you responded: Yes, this is the heart of the matter. But what bothers me about this line of reasoning is that it treats this kind of situation (namely, trusteeship) as an edge case, as an odd example, saved for the last topic in course because it is so difficult. But this is really not an edge case—it is absolutely fundamental. After all, every competent adult was once an incompetent child.

I think it is fairly clear that an entity such as a chair is not the kind of thing that can be an owner of anything, not even of itself. Somewhat more controversially, I would argue that non-human animals cannot own anything either (they can, of course possess something, but that is not ownership). Only rational beings can own anything. I would argue that there is no problem in principle with human beings owning non-human things (leaving aside specific justifications for X’s owning Y). The limiting—or edge case, if you like—is whether or not human beings themselves can be owned and, if so, in what ways.

There are two basic positions on this: one says ‘no’; the other says ‘yes’. The ‘no’ position, typically, simply denies that human beings, being rational, are the kind of thing that can be owned by anyone, even by themselves; in effect, that the notion of ownership has no purchase in this context. The institution of slavery, one of the oldest of all human institutions, and whatever one’s moral approach to the topic, would seem to provide compelling legal evidence against this view.

If we think it makes sense to say (of competent adults) that they own themselves, then, and only then, does the problem of incompetence arise. All (competent) adults were once (incompetent) children (as you note), and some (now competent) adults will become (incompetent) adults.

This is where B&B’s suggestions come in and I quote again from my paper: ‘Block & Barnett come more or less to this conclusion. “There is a way to address this problem that does not rely upon some necessarily arbitrary point along the continuum; it is to resort to common (economically efficient) practice.” Such reasonable judgements, in fact, are the function of the municipal law, as specified in a particular community by tradition, custom, practice, experience, and so on. In response to such problems, the law elaborated the concept of assault (as distinct from battery) to signify any act that created an apprehension in another of an imminent, harmful or offensive contact, that act to consist of a threat of harm accompanied by an apparent present ability to carry out that threat. Whether or not an act of fist-shaking constitutes assault is a matter of judgement, but the judgement, while requiring the exercise of discrimination, is not based upon arbitrary factors.’

In a libertarian society, the legal bedrock is the principle of non-aggression. But, of course, that only provides the outer boundary of what cannot legally be done to you even outside the context of consent. Within the context of the non-aggression principle, any society is free, consensually, to organise its own affairs. In some matters, members of any society are likely to avail of various forms of expertise—medical, arbitration, etc. And it is in this context that contested cases will be arbitrated.

You ask: Who is to decide the nature of trusteeship?

Once again, a boundary problem. Take a case of the trusteeship of property. If a trustee converts the trust property to his own use and consumes it, that’s clearly a violation of trust. If a trustee supervises the property as if it were his own, exercising care and diligence, and handing it over eventually to the beneficial owner in an improved state compared to that in which he received it, that is clearly a case of a trust well carried out. Now any legal system would have to have the means to address contested cases, and in a libertarian society, it would be foolish to leave such things to chance.

The same considerations apply to trusteeship over non-competent human beings. Some ways of treating them will be clearly a violation of trust, other ways, clearly a satisfactory way; and still others, contested. Once again, it would be foolish to leave such things to change.

You seem to be coming to a somewhat similar conclusion when you write: But in an anarcho-capitalist society, to whom does the child have recourse if the trustee abuses his trust? I suppose it would be left up to the community’s moral sentiments to interven if there was some kind of consensus about the situation. The community could come up with some general principle by which they decide such things. Etc. But again, this gets to the fundamental question: who decides?

Once again, I believe that, given the nature of such possible disputes, any libertarian society would have to accept some method of resolving them in a way that is broadly acceptable. This could vary in detail from one society to another. To take an example, let me refer to the question of whether, in an society that is both agricultral and pastoral, the owners of animals have an obligation to fence them in, or the owners of crops have an obligation to fence them out. Either solution solves the problem. In Britain and Ireland, the owners of animals have the obligation to fence them in; in the American West, on the cattle ranges, it would have been staggeringly expensive, even if possible, to fence the cattle in, so the other option was taken.

You write: I suppose, in the end, it boils down to this (for me at least): There will always be disagreements, and it is not possible to resolve the all—let alone resolve them all in a manner that seems just and right to all parties. And the fact is, regardless of the political or legal ecosystem in which we find ourselves, we still need to find a way to live in a society where was have substantial, material disagreements with out neighbors. Appealing to a ‘final authority such as a State obviously brings about more problems than appealing to a ‘final authority’ such as a local community of peers and neighbors informed by libertarian ideas. I suppose the real problem is preventing the latter from inexorably mutating into the former. But without a clear theoretical basis to guide this work—a theory that covers all the edge cases—how are we to proceed?

I am in substantial agreement with this comment of yours, right up to the last sentence! No system can cover every possible edge case in advance. For example, the common-law principle of Rylands v Fletcher was developed precisely in a context in which the circumstances were non-normal and there was no immediately obvious set of principles to appeal to. In practice, any society has a case-law system that covers many of the more common sources of friction. The principles are, firstly, the non-aggression principle, and secondly, the body of practically educed principles that a society has evolved over time, which are known to all, and in the light of which new, unforeseen cases of friction can be resolved.

Perfection is not possible, but a dose of practical wisdom will take us a long way.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Thank you for those interesting comments and follow-on questions. I am going to take a little time to think them over before reverting to you.

Best,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

From a libertarian perspective, I would say that the operative principle is ‘My house, my rules’ so that you should be free to say whatever you want on your own property or what other property owners license you to say on their property. Public property, so-called, doesn’t belong to the public but to those who legally control it, usually the local government.

Incitement to violence is often taken to be an obvious limitation to free speech but I don’t think it is. If X incites Y to commit an act of violence and Y commits that act then, unless Y is under some form of mind control by X, Y alone is responsible for his actions. X may be deemed to have some moral responsibility but I cannot see how, in a libertarian world, he could be held legally accountable. The situation is different, however, if the speech in question is the initiation of a joint act.

[gerard.casey]

Dear Matthew,

Before I respond to your question, I’d like to invite you to get in touch with me if you’re going to be in Dublin at any stage during your visit to Ireland. I am relatively free for the next few months and if you would like it, I’d be happy to meet you to talk about topics of mutual interest.

Now, to your question. Ireland is well-stocked with Neolithic remains (Newgrange being perhaps the best known), and castles (difficult not to trip over one on a ramble through the countryside). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Celtic monument. The Celts did not live in cities (almost all our cities, including Dublin, are Viking foundations) or, for the most part, build in stone, either domestically or monumentally. So there are few surviving Celtic remains where you could walk where Brehon judges carried out their trade; some hill forts (dún) are all I can think of. The Hill of Tara and Dun Aonghusa are the most prominent of these. The Brehon law was a social rather than a concrete institution and with the collapse of Gaelic Ireland in the early 17th century, that institution collapsed.

When I was a student of archaeology, my vade mecum was Peter Harbison’s Guide to the National Monuments of Ireland, which I found invaluable as I wandered around on my little motor bike. It’s probably still available in an updated edition; if so, it’s worth taking a look at.

I hope we get the chance to meet while you’re here.

With every good wish,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Seraphim,

As Jeeves in the P. G. Wodehouse stories might say: Rem acu tetigisti – you’ve put your finger on the sharp point.

The paradigm case for discussions in libertarian theory involves relations between competent adults. The applicability of libertarian principles to incompetents (I use this term non-pejoratively to cover the categories you mention in your query) is contested.

In the course I taught for several years on ‘Anarchy, Law and the State’, which used Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty as a core text, I always left his chapter on children until the very end, so controversial did it always turn out to be.

I am not aware of any completely satisfactory treatment of the issues you raise. There may be such a treatment but, if there is, someone needs to point it out to me. I would be just as glad to know of it as you would and I’d be very happy that someone else had done the heavy lifting.

Here is a tentative attempt at answering your questions, revisable in the light of objections, counter-examples and further discussion (which I invite)

Let me take the case of a very young child as a point of discussion (which can then be applied, if indeed it can, to the other categories of incompetents you mention.)

It is hard to understand what would be meant by claiming that a one-year old child is an actual self-owner. Such an entity might be a moral patient (that is, be such that certain things cannot be done to it) but scarcely a moral agent (that is, an entity that can be help morally accountable for its actions). If such a child doesn’t own itself, is it owned by another? Perhaps, but not in the way in which, say, a pencil can be owned. Rather, it has to be owned as something which has the capacity to become a self-owner in time, so that the ownership by another of it is to be exercised for its benefit, a kind of trustee ownership, if you will.

Something like this already applies in our legal system. If a very young child becomes the heir of its deceased parents, the law will not recognise it as having the capacity to exercise actual ownership rights over the property that has been bequeathed to it. Instead, the law will appoint a trustee (if one has not already been appointed) who will be the legal owner of the child’s property and who will be expected to exercise control over that property for the benefit of the child (the beneficial owner) and, eventually, upon the child’s reaching its legal majority, to relinquish full control of its property to the child.

This notion of trustee ownership could be applied not only to a child’s external property but to the child itself, so that its parents (or guardians) are its legal owners who must exercise that ownership for the child’s benefit and ultimately relinquish it to the child.

Now we come to your two questions: (1) who decides?, and (rephrasing your question slightly)(2) who gets to decide the circumstances in which X is not in a position to be an actual self-owner?

Who decides? Trustees, which would be, in the case of incompetent children, its parents or guardians; in the case of incompetent adults, those whom that adult has appointed when competent or, in the case of non-appointment, that adult’s nearest relative or someone appointed by the relevant legal authorities.

Who gets to decide the circumstances…..? Sometimes no serious decision is required. A one-year old child is not competent; a sixteen year old child is normally competent. The problem arises in boundary situations. Here, there is no way, it seems to me, of deciding a priori. Competence is a capacity which should be empirically demonstrable. If a person claims to be competent and can demonstrate it, then that answers the question and no one can override that person’s decisions. If, by any reasonable standard, a person (a young child or an adult who has become senile or an adult with mental problems of a sufficiently serious nature, etc.) cannot demonstrate competence,then, it seems to me, that has to be taken to show their incompetence and others will have to make the relevant decisions on their behals.

There are further issues. Who, if anyone, has an obligation to exercise the role of trustee in cases of incompetence? Can a trusteeship be imposed unilaterally on an unwilling agent?

I have answers to these questions (based on the principles outlines above) but not everyone may agree with me.

In any event, take what I’ve written as a first try, and let me know what you think.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Karen,

Apologies for the delay in responding to your query.

I am not sure in which lecture or lectures a distinction between state and government was made or in what context so let me try to make some sense of it here and now.

Of course, as with the usage of any contested terms, some may use ‘government’ and ‘state’ to refer to the same entity. However, it seems to me that it can be useful to distinguish between those actual individuals who hold the reins of political power at any given time (the government), and the more or less permanent structures of political control regardless of who is actually in a position to employ them (the state).

If an analogy might help, try this. A corporation (say General Motors, for example) has a more or less permanent legal structure which persists even though the actual holders of particular offices can change.

I hope this helps?

If you locate the specific place in the lectures which occasioned your query, you might revert to me.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

*****

Here is an excerpt from an extended version of the lecture material, bearing on the status of collectives that may be of help:

At times in this history, I will speak of various forms of collective—government, state, nation and the like. It is important to be clear just what the status (no pun intended) of such collectives is. Are groups, corporations, tribes, clans, nations and states just convenient ways of organising the lives of individuals or do these collectives have a measure of real existence of their own? If so, are they at least as real, or perhaps even more real, than the individuals who constitute them? This dispute on the ontological status of groups or collectives is the classic battle between Platonists and Aristotelians transferred from the empyrean heights of metaphysics to the sublunary arena of human action. Are the Forms, à la Plato, more real than the things of this world, existing apart from them yet giving them the small measure of reality that they have; or are forms in things, à la Aristotle, making them to be what they are but having no independent real existence apart from them? This argument is not merely of historical interest; it is a perennial area of philosophical dispute. [see Pettit and List, passim] Today, as Tom Palmer notes, ‘An army of illiberal academics have posited an array of “social forces” of domination—including class, gender, race, and other categories—that are more active and real than the mere flesh-and-blood “individuals” that surround us (although it takes the hard work of tenured professors to see those social forces properly and without distortion). [Palmer 2014b, 113] For such latter-day Platonists, reality is a bloodless ballet of interacting abstractions, a phantasmagoria of forms, and grubby individuals are of little or no significance.

It is certainly true that we speak of groups or associations and that these groups or associations can constitute the subject or object of sentences with action verbs, for example: ‘The State today recognised its obligation to care for the long-term disabled’ or ‘The Government issued instructions to all local authorities concerning levels of local taxation’ or ‘The University has adopted a new entrance policy for disadvantaged students.’ What is the ontological, moral, and/or legal status of the subjects of these sentences? In answer to this question, we might adopt a position—call it social nominalism—that denies that these groups or associations have any mode of existence at all, being merely a convenient way of speaking of individuals cooperating with each other; or we could subscribe to social realism and hold that such groups have a transcendent reality above and beyond the members who constitute them or the relationships (informal or contractual) that bind those members together; or, finally, we could accept social epiphenomenalism, which is the position that social groups and associations are entities of a sort, created and sustained by the network of intentions (often embodied in rules, laws and constitutions) of those who compose them, either informal (in the case of football supporters) or formal (in the case of members of a corporation).

Of these three positions on the ontological status of collectives, social epiphenomenalism seems to me to be the most defensible, at once reflecting our lived experience while avoiding the obvious problems with social realism. ‘One’s ordinary common sense baulks,’ Ervin Laszlo remarks, ‘at treating what appear to be merely associations between individual human beings as entities in themselves.’ [Laszlo 1972b, 98] Some social wholes—teams, corporations, even nations—can, once established, maintain a coherent ethos and mode of existence even as the personnel of whom they are composed change. Such relative stability, which includes a capacity for self-perpetuation, is ‘typical of all groups of interacting parts when the parts maintain some basic sets of relationships among themselves.’ [Laszlo 1972a, 7; see 44] While there are material elements associated with such social groups—football grounds, company headquarters, bank accounts and the like—the principal sustaining element in the creation and maintenance of social wholes are the beliefs of its personnel and of those who relate to it. ‘Attitudes, beliefs, world views—these all play a vital role in determining the environment of social systems. Not that the real and objective factors can be neutralized, but they are overlaid by what people believe about them, and thus their effect is modified (cushioned or sharpened) by the dominant culture.’ [Laszlo 1972a, 62]

Human action, whatever else it may be, is ineluctably particular. One cannot take a dog in general for a walk in general or post a letter in general to no one in particular; it has to be this particular dog, now, in this particular park, and this particular letter to this particular person posted in this particular box. Collectives have a secondary mode of existence, consisting ontologically of a network of relationships subsisting among individual human beings. These relationships are real and so to the same extent are the collectives constituted by them. A family is a set of human beings related by genetics (usually), upbringing and environment. A football team is a set of human beings related by a particular purpose that is determined by the constitutive rules of the game and the organisational rules of the governing association. We can say that the family did that or that the football team did this but, in the end, only individual human beings act. When we make a collective the subject of a sentence, what we are describing is the action of an individual or individuals under a certain description. [see Shand 1984, 4-6 but see, also, Bunge].

Murray Rothbard posits methodological individualism as the first implication of the concept of human action. ‘The first truth to be discovered about human action is that it can be undertaken only by individual ‘actors.’ Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by ‘groups,’ ‘collectives,’ or ‘states,’ which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals.’ [Rothbard 2004, 2 Emphasis added] Although football teams or universities or society are not completely non-existent, for Rothbard they certainly do not possess a mode of reality over and above that of the individuals and the relationships among those individuals who constitute them: ‘[T]o say that “governments” act is merely a metaphor; actually, certain individuals are in a certain relationship with other individuals and act in a way that they and the other individuals recognize as “governmental.” The metaphor must not be taken to mean that the collective institution itself has any reality apart from the acts of various individuals.’ [Rothbard 2004, 3, emphasis added] It should be noted that Rothbard does not deny the reality of groups or aggregates completely. What he does deny is that they have a mode of reality apart from or superior to that of individuals.

The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is notorious for having remarked that there was no such a thing as society and she has been roundly castigated for that remark ever since. What she in fact said was ‘Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people’. [Woman’s Own 31 October 1987; emphasis added] Later in the interview, she went on to say again ‘There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’ What is usually presented as an example of stone-cold heartlessness on Thatcher’s part is, in fact, a call to take responsibility for oneself and to help one’s neighbours and to stop shuffling your problems and their problems off onto somebody else. The selective misquotation and mischievous misinterpretation of Mrs Thatcher’s comments was instantaneous and egregious, so much so that she took the unprecedented step of issuing a clarification. ‘All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society,’ she said. ‘Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done.’ [The Sunday Times, 10 July 1988] She might have spared her breath. As the newspaper reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence says when the truth of who really shot Liberty Valence is finally revealed, ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. Mrs Thatcher might have been surprised to discover that her views on society echoed those of the eminent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Carl Gustav Jung. He believed that ‘society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society—the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.’ [Jung 1957, 357]

As might be expected, Murray Rothbard’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, also supports the principle of methodological individualism. [Mises 1996, 41-43] He considers the common objections to that principle: human beings are always part of a greater social whole; that it is impossible to conceive of man as an isolated individual; that language is a social phenomenon; and that reason can only emerge ‘within the framework of social mutuality.’ [Mises 1996, 41] He responds by noting that the evolution of reason, of language, and of cooperation are all real processes but they are the outcome of processes of change in individuals. Mises is quite willing to ascribe a measure of reality to groups and even to grant them a determining role in human history. ‘Methodological individualism,’ he says, ‘far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation”. [Mises 1996, 42]

Are Mises and Rothbard at loggerheads on this matter? No. Just as Rothbard does, Mises too asserts that ‘all actions are performed by individuals’ and that ‘a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions.’ [Mises 1996, 42] What determines an action to be merely the act of an individual or, on the other hand, to be the act of a group—a state—is the meaning that is ascribed to that action. ‘The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman’s action an action of the state.’ [Mises 1996, 42] To recognise collectives is to exercise an act of understanding, not perception. Collective wholes ‘are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts. We can see a crowd….Whether this crowd is a mere gathering…or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves attach to their presence. And this meaning is always the meaning of individuals’. [Mises 1996, 43] ‘On a purely factual plane,’ writes Alexander d’Entrèves, ‘the State does not “exist”: it is nowhere to be found, a real person of flesh and blood. Only individuals can be found.’ And while it may be the case that, as with all corporations, ‘the State is said to have capacities and liabilities’, this is so only because ‘the law, and the law alone…creates and determines them.’ [see d’Entrèves 1967, 19; but see also Gierke 1900, and Gierke 1913]

[Author]

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