[gerard.casey]

Most of the material on anarcho-capitalism I am familiar with is book-length rather than article length, and so would perhaps not be suitable for your purposes. The articles I know tend to focus on quite specific aspects of AC theory rather than providing a survey of the whole. The Wikipedia entry on Anarcho-Capitalism, however, is useful. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism) It offers a brief but reasonably comprehensive survey of the whole area, plus some very useful references to both non-fiction and (which is good for students) fiction material. Also useful is Lew Rockwell’s ‘Can Anarcho-Capitalism Work?’, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism. The Wikipedia entry on ‘Anarchism and Anarcho-Capitalism’ situates AC in the broader context of anarchism. You can find it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism.

[gerard.casey]

Now you’ve put me on the spot! What is the best single, short, article-length introduction to anarcho-capitalism? Give me a little time to think about this and have a look around the available resources.

By the way, does your use of the word ‘utopia’ in your query have some special significance in respect of the kind of article you’re looking for?

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

If you email me directly (gerard.casey@ucd.ie), I will send you the latest updated version of the lectures.

I am gratified that you find the lectures insightful.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Jason,

Once again, apologies for the delay in responding.

I’m going to begin by my response by giving you the written version of what appears in the lectures. There may be some differences; in general, the written version is more extensive than the video version.

“With the striking exception of the Meso-American civilisations, all the major ancient civilisations centred themselves around river valleys. (For a highly readable recent account of these and several other early civilisations–including Shang China, Yoruba and Inka—see Bruce Trigger’s Understanding Early Civilizations. For a different (and amusing perspective) on Egypt, see Kealey 2008, 60ff. For a scholarly, yet accessible, introduction to many aspects of Egyptian civilisation, see the beautifully illustrated volume edited by Schultz & Seidel. For more on Mesopotamia see McIntosh & Twist, 46-57 and Service, 203-204; for more on Egypt see McIntosh & Twist, 82-93 and Service, 225-237. For more on early Meso-American and Peruvian civilisations, see Service, 166-202.) Childe points out that such river-valley communities provided the nascent conditions for coercion. Outside the horizons of the river lies desert or wilderness so those who work the land are geographically circumscribed. Although even the strongest of rulers cannot prevent the raindrops falling on your head, they can restrict your access to irrigation. ‘So when the social will comes to be expressed through a chief or a king, he is invested not merely with moral authority, but with coercive force too; he can apply sanctions against the disobedient.’ [Childe, 109] Those who controlled access to the water also controlled the land and its products. Individual farmers, write Davidson & Rees-Mogg, ‘faced a very high cost for failing to cooperate in maintaining the political structure. Without irrigation, which could be provided only on a large scale, crops would not grow. No crops meant starvation.’ [Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 65]

“Though sharing certain similarities, Egypt and Mesopotamia differed from one another in other respects, Egypt being a territorial state and Mesopotamia a city-state, or rather, a collection of city- states. We often have the impression that the use of the fertile land adjoining the Nile was a simple matter of accepting Nature’s bounty but this was not so. The land on the riverbank would have been a tangle of swamps and reeds that needed to be reclaimed before it could be used and this reclamation was no simple undertaking; in fact, this reclamation was, according to Childe, ‘a stupendous task: the swamps had to be drained by channels, the violence of flood-waters to be restrained by banks, the thickets to be cleared away, the wild beasts lurking in them to be eliminated. No small group could hope to make headway against such obstacles. It needed a strong force capable of acting together to cope with recurrent crises…’ [Childe, 107] Much the same comments could be made about Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. There, the land had not just to be cleared but it had to be created more or less ex nihilo. Originally consisting of swamps lying just above the level of the Persian Gulf, the Tigris-Euphrates delta needed to be reclaimed, a dry land created out of a watery chaos. The words of Genesis appear to be particularly applicable to this process: ‘And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” [Genesis 1: 9] Some of the earliest cities in the region were constructed on platforms of reeds laid out on the alluvial mud. Just as in the case of the Nile communities, so too in Sumeria, reclamation required large-scale social cooperation. The drainage, irrigation and protection of this land gave rise to a centrally controlled economic system. Raw materials were needed and so regular systems of trade had to be created to obtain them, requiring merchants, transport workers, specialist craftsmen, and those willing and able to provide security, people to keep records and, most interesting for our purposes, state officials to reconcile conflicting interests. [see Childe, 141-2]”

Now, to respond to your particular questions. The answer to both is, in effect, the same. Those who controlled the water system/land reclamation were not freely selected. In the main, they would have been those who ran the cities, together with their accompanying military force.

The norm of state governance from the mists of pre-history to the earliest civilisations (and beyond) was some for of kingship, often one in which the king has sacral, as well as civic, functions. In the context of world history, the poleis of Greece and the Roman republic were aberrations.

[gerard.casey]

I’ve just seen your posting. Apologies for not responding sooner. I’m away from my desk at the moment but I’ll revert to you early next week.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

To jthomp76

I’ve just come across your post and I make a sketchy preliminary response below:

I think the problem may be that there is a fundamental vagueness about what you mean by forming a voluntary democratic government.

You are free to join together with others in an association and set up some kind of joint authority if you so choose You would be foolish to do so, however, without a clear and firm grasp of the terms and conditions on which you agree to be governed, including what you can do if you are oppressed. Among those terms and conditions that you should insist on having in your agreement would be some which would outline what should happen if you decide to withdraw from the association.

Let me sketch two different scenarios. In the first, before you join the association, you own your own property, and the exit agreement would be such that if and when you exited, you retain your property. When you do exit, you are no longer subject to the authority of the association. In the second, you might (as in the utopian associations of the 19th century) set up a community on jointly purchased land with others in such a way that only those who subscribe to the authority of the community could continue to live in it. In such a case, the exit condition should include some measure by which the government of the community purchases your property from you at a prior agreed price.

In neither case, can the actions of others subject you to the authority of an association.

In our present case, you cannot withdraw from the state and continue to live on your property, associating with others or not as you subsequently choose to do, as in the first scenario. The state operates as if you had voluntarily committed to a joint venture (as in the second scenario) where withdrawal requires an exit from the territory of the state. But most of us have never made any such voluntary agreement with the state.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Patricia,

I am glad that you found the material to your liking. Thank you for letting me know.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Proposition 1: Absence of evidence is evidence of absence

Subject: Absence of evidence—S
Predicate: evidence of absence—P
Copula: affirmative, either universal, particular or singular
Giving us either SAP, SIP or SA’P

Proposition 2: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Subject: Absence of evidence—S
Predicate: evidence of absence—P
Copula: negative, either universal, particular or singular
Giving us either SEP, SOP or SO’P

The most plausible interpretation of these propositions is as universals and that’s how I’ll take them from now on. If they are taken particularly then it is possible for both to be true simultaneously. If, for example, the propositions ‘students are intelligent’ and ‘students are not intelligent’ are taken universally, then both propositions cannot be simultaneously true; if taken particularly, both can be simultaneously true.

Both of our propositions have exactly the same subject and exactly the same predicate and so are comparable and so can be plotted on the Square of Opposition. They differ in quality—one is affirmative and the other is negative.
We than have SAP vs SEP

Let’s take your second paragraph and amend it slightly[material within []]

If absence of evidence is evidence of absence then there is evidence [of absence].
If absence of evidence is not evidence of absence then there is no evidence [of absence].
Absence of evidence can not be both evidence [of absence] and no[t] evidence [of absence].

True

Therefore, absence of evidence in premiss 1 is not the same as absence of evidence in premiss 2.

Yes, they have different properties, as given by the predicate in their respective propositions but just as a term, ‘absence of evidence’ signifies exactly the same thing.

If the meaning of absence of evidence in premiss 1 [as given by the attachment of the predicate] is used in 2 then premiss 2 is self-contradictory and vice versa.

Well, yes, for this would be to assert SAP and SEP simultaneously.

I hope this helps a little.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

There are two extreme positions that one can adopt in relation to the nature of reality and our knowledge of it.

Realism [extreme objectivism]: the world is the way it is and we can know it just as it is;
Idealism [extreme subjectivism]: the world is the way we know it to be—what it is apart from our knowledge of it is not something we can know.

Each of these extreme positions encounters its own set of problems.

A more moderate form of realism holds that the world is the way it is but our knowledge of it is invariably coloured by our own species limitations and individual limitations. As Aquinas says, quidquid recipitur recipitur secundum modum recipientis—whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. The human senses are limited to a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum and psychologists have demonstrated the extent to which perception is actively constructed rather than passively received. On a higher level, our beliefs are embedded in a web of bias and subjectivity.

On this view of things, our knowledge is real but limited, imperfect but, at least in principle, perfectible. This applies across the board both to physical and to social realities.

In relation to the nature of physical reality, these problems constitute a large part of the philosophy of science. I’m going to confine my subsequent remarks to social reality.

You ask: what is objective law?
Laws are prescriptive rather than descriptive; they tell us what should be done or not done, not what is or is not the case. The realism/idealism divide on law comes to something like this:

The legal realist will argue that laws are objective to the extent that they correspond to our human nature, making it possible for that nature to be developed individually and in cooperation with others. There can only be one law or set of laws that meets this criterion.

The legal idealist will argue that, at best, objectivity in law is possible only formally and not materially, there being no way to know objectively what is or is not constitutive of human flourishing.

The moderate legal realist will agree with the legal realist in part [we can know, broadly, what constitutes human flourishing] but will agree with the legal idealist in allowing for a multiplicity of approaches and instantiations of law, all permitting our human nature to flourish, some better than others.

[gerard.casey]

Reading your second last paragraph, you seem to say that the propositions ’Absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ and ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ are not opposed to each other because ‘they are not saying the same things.’

If we plotted them on the Square of Opposition, a lot would depend on whether we took them to be universal propositions or particular propositions. If we took them to be universal, then they would be contraries, and contraries cannot both be true. However, if we took them to be particular, then they would be subcontraries, and subcontraries cannot both be false but may both be true.

Perhaps the addition of a temporal adverb might clarify matters. So

‘Absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ would become
‘Absence of evidence is [sometimes] evidence of absence
as in the case of my elephant in the room example.

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ would become
‘Absence of evidence is not [always] evidence of absence
as in the case of my subatomic particle example.

*****

You write: ‘If I am understanding this Bayesian thing correctly, it is saying the longer something goes without evidence the less likely it will be true. I don’t see how one could get there from absence of evidence is evidence of absence.’

Once again, I believe material [as distinct from formal] factors come into play here. Everything depends on the would-be obviousness of what it is that one seeks evidence of in relation to the relative finitude of the search area.

*****

[gerard.casey]

Dear Patricia,

Thank you for the kind comments. I just hope I have the energy to follow through on my book idea.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

You raise some fundamental – and thus very difficult – issues. What law is or what laws are; the relation (if any) between physical laws/laws of nature and the laws governing man in society; and last, but certainly not least, the nature of objectivity.These are all controversial and controverted topics.

I’m going to take some time to think over your questions before reverting to you with, I hope, some halfway satisfactory answers.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

The question you raise is located not in the pure empyrean region of formal logic but in the much messier and obscure region of informal logic.

Take the phrase: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

Is this necessarily true?

I don’t think so. It depends on what it is that one is seeking evidence of and in what context. Let’s take a few examples.

If you were to claim that there is an elephant in my dining room I would (carefully) check this claim out. My dining room is finite and relatively small, and there is nowhere an elephant, even a baby elephant, could hide. I look all around and I see no elephant. There is a complete absence of evidence for the presence of an elephant. I would conclude, and I think my conclusion would be reasonable, that the absence of evidence for the presence of an elephant is conclusive evidence of an elephant’s absence.

Now, replace the elephant in our example with a postulated subatomic particle. So far, our finite range of experiments has disclosed no evidence for its existence. Can we conclude, therefore, that it does not exist? I think not. The more we look without finding anything, the more we are inclined to believe it not to exist but it is always possible that it is, as it were, just around the corner.

I would like to see the logical proof to which you refer. I suspect it may be the application of some form of Bayesianism with which, I have to confess, I’m not really au fait. If you do find it, post the link.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Patricia,

Below is the basic text of a talk I gave last year to the Property and Freedom Association. It is, I think, relevant to the questions you raise.

**********

The Limits of Liberty, or Hurrah for Repression!
Gerard Casey
University College Dublin
September 2014

1. Introduction
When discussing libertarianism, I have found from experience that many people are willing to accept that public utilities and product creation and distribution and even schooling and such like can be provided by the free market—but they tend to draw the line at the provision of law, justice and security. This, for many, is a step too far. There can be no doubt that, practically speaking, minarchism is an easier sell than anarchism. However, despite the ‘law, justice and security’ objection’s being the logical (and obvious) point of resistance, the rhetorical or emotional point of resistance lies elsewhere. Libertarians and anarchists are taken to be hard-hearted selfish and self-centred people who care nothing for others and their plight. ‘What,’ I am asked, ‘will become of the poor?’ Of course, there is an answer to this question and in a few weeks I’ll be addressing this objection head on at Queen’s University Belfast when I gave a talk, called, some might think provocatively—‘Let the Poor Starve!’ But that’s another issue for another day. Recently, I have had the experience of people saying to me, ‘I’m no longer a libertarian. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, social order is breaking down, cultural philistinism is rife, we are presented with ever more vulgarity in public. Libertarianism is not enough.’
Well, whoever said that it was?
It cannot be too heavily emphasized that libertarianism is not intended to deny the importance of love, community, discipline, order, learning, or any of the many other values that are essential to human flourishing. Libertarians as much as anyone else can cherish these values but, however much they might cherish them, they reject any and all attempts to produce and maintain them by force, coercion or intimidation. They regard such attempts at coercion as both wrong in themselves and as ineffective. As Tibor Machan puts it, ‘force is permissible and useful only in repelling force, not in building character, love, faith, scientific knowledge, etc.’ In the end, as Rothbard notes, the question for the libertarian is this: ‘Should virtuous action (however we define it) be compelled, or should it be left up to the free and voluntary choice of the individual?’ No third road is possible here; one must choose compulsion or liberty.
Even among libertarians, who might be expected to know better, misunderstandings can arise from a failure to recognise the severely limited scope of libertarianism. It is not intended to be, nor is it, a complete ethical or political system; it is rather an overarching constraint on any such system. Libertarianism does not imply that all modes of conduct are equally valuable or have equal merit. There may well be those who think of themselves as libertarians who believe this but such a view, despite the assertion of some (such as Russell Kirk) that liberty descends into a maelstrom of licence, is not a necessary consequence of libertarianism as such. A libertarian may choose to be a libertine but there is nothing in libertarianism to constrain him to be one. Machan asks, ‘Is libertinism implicit in the advocacy of liberty as the highest political principle?’ and he answers, ‘No—libertarianism only prohibits the forcible squelching of indecent conduct, not its vigorous criticism, opposition, boycott or denunciation in peaceful ways.’ [Machan, 49]
Here’s the question that must be put to people to determine if they are libertarians. “Would you be willing to use force (physical violence), either yourself or delegated to another (person or institution), to compel another (adult) person to act or to refrain from acting in matters not covered by the non-aggression principle?” If the answer is yes, your respondent is not a libertarian. If the answer is no, your respondent is a libertarian. And that’s all there is to that.
We can happily concede that libertarianism isn’t enough for an adequate moral/social/political life anymore than water is the only thing that you should drink if you like an interesting and varied diet. There is more to life than liberty. After all, the point of being free is so that we can go and do things, not just sit around admiring and incensing our freedom.

2. Some distinctions
At this point, we need to make a few distinctions. The first is between implication and consistency. We also need to distinguish between the cultural and political forms of conservatism and liberalism.
Consider the following two propositions: ‘University College Dublin is situated 3.5 miles south of Dublin city centre’ and ‘San Marino is a small mountainous state completely surrounded by Italy’. (San Marino’s motto, by the way, is libertas!) These two propositions are consistent, that is, they can both be true together However, the two propositions are also truth-independent—the truth or falsity of one proposition implies or entails nothing whatsoever about the truth or falsity of the other.
Now, Libertarianism and political conservatism are inconsistent. You cannot be a political conservative and a libertarian. And political liberalism and libertarianism are also inconsistent.
Political conservatives are not opposed to freedom as such. Freedom is valuable but, given the conservative commitment to order, it must be subordinated to morality and to traditional social norms. Libertarians, by definition, value individual liberty in a special way. They reject the imposition by force of particular conceptions of virtue, justice and the good society which, whatever value they may have, do not justify the forcible invasion of a person’s freedom. Libertarianism concerns itself only with determining the conditions in which force or the threat of force may legitimately be used in human relations, namely, for the protection of human individual liberty; all other employments of force or the threat of force are illegitimate: ‘…libertarianism is a claim about the scope of permissible force or the threat of force among human beings, including human beings who constitute the governing administration of a given human community.’
So too you cannot be a political liberal and a libertarian. Political liberals value freedom but, because they value other things more highly, they are willing to coerce others to bring those other values into being.
But both cultural conservatism and cultural liberalism are consistent with—although not entailed by—libertarianism, and so is every cultural position in between. One’s cultural choices are not pre-determined by one’s libertarianism. What cultural position one chooses to adopt is an extra-libertarian matter.

3. Society and Tradition
Man is an inherently social being, living in and through society. Society is not simply a random assemblage of individuals but is a network of individual relationships existing under conceptual descriptions, and it is permeated and interpenetrated by institutions of various kinds, which institutions constrain, compete and cooperate with each other, contextualise and shape people’s lives, and act as repositories of artistic, technical, social and political knowledge. Society is real—not in the way in which a garden gnome is real but real in much the same way that the market is real. Society is not the outcome of some grand design or some overall plan. It is, rather, the evolutionary resultant of how people have lived their lives over many years, the decisions they have made, individually and together, the laws that have emerged to regulate their lives in community, and the means they have devised to further their ends.
Society, at bottom, depends upon attachments that precede reason and calculation such as love of one’s family and locality and other attachments that radiate outwards from there into one’s country and one’s nation. Such attachments are constitutive of one’s being; they are not chosen arbitrarily.
In their focus on tradition, conservatives are on to something important, which, however, may not have quite the political significance they attribute to it. It is undeniable that much of what we are is simply given to us and is not a matter of choice. The family we belong to, the nation we conceive of as ours, the language we speak, the way we speak it, indeed, many of our ideas—all these are important, perhaps constitutive, parts of what we are, parts of our very identity, if you will, and yet not a matter of choice. Even if one changes one’s political allegiances and obtains a new passport, it is scarcely possible to cease to be in some fundamental sense a member of the nation you were born into. Similar considerations apply to one’s family. One chooses one’s friends or they you, but one’s family is simply a given. It makes sense to talk of an ex-friend or an ex-roommate or an ex-partner but we would struggle to make sense of someone’s referring to his ex-father or his ex-sister. In matters of nationality and matters of family, we are in what Henry Maine would call the realm of status, not contract. Yet, despite being constitutive of our identities, tradition, for the libertarian, can have, at best, an heuristic rather than a normative function for however much something has been done, for however long, and by however many, questions can always be asked—Is this right? Is this good? Is this the best?—and these questions subvert any ultimate normative claim that tradition can make.
While some libertarians adopt a hostile attitude towards custom, habit and tradition and, in particular, towards religious traditions, this was not the position of the pre-eminent libertarian of the latter half of the 20th century, Murray Rothbard. In an essay on Frank Meyer, who sought to ‘fuse’ the conservative’s reverence for tradition with the libertarian’s love of liberty, Rothbard wrote that custom ‘must be voluntarily upheld and not enforced by coercion’ and that ‘people would be well advised (although not forced) to begin with a presumption in favor of custom…’ A key point of tension between conservatives and libertarians is precisely this question of coercion but if it were granted that one should not be coerced into observing customs or traditions Rothbard, for one, was more than happy to go along with much of conservative thought. In a late essay, he called his fellow libertarians to order, remarking that libertarians often mistakenly assume ‘that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange’ forgetting that ‘everyone is necessarily born into a family’ and ‘one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions.’
Libertarianism differentiates itself from liberalism (in both its classic and its modern incarnations) and also from conservatism in rejecting the use of force in all cases except those of resisting or punishing aggression. The modern liberal is (or was, until recently) content to use the power of the state to enforce his economic views on all to produce what he considers to be the correct distribution of goods and services while claiming as large a space as possible for personal, especially sexual, morality; the conservative, on the other hand, generally wishes to leave as much space as possible for economic activities while recruiting the state to enforce his moral views on others. Unlike the libertarian for whom liberty operates as a principle across the whole range of human endeavour, both the liberal and the conservative are selective in those spheres in which they will allow liberty to operate. Where a libertarian differs from the conservative in the matter of custom, habit, and tradition is not necessarily in his lack of appreciation of their social, moral and cultural value but simply in refusing to allow their maintenance or propagation by means of force or coercion. If coercion is ruled out, then many libertarians are only too willing to entertain a presumption in their favour.
When it comes right down to it, the difference between conservative and libertarian is not whether order is desirable; it is what kind of order is desirable and where that order is to come from. For the libertarian, genuine order arises intrinsically from the free interaction among individuals and among groups of individuals; it does not descend exogenously from on high. As is clearly shown in the world of business, high level order can emerge without an orderer. Each individual consumer, each firm, orders its own affairs and the relations it has with others. Out of this nexus of relationships emerges a higher level order that is not the design of any one person. No one person or agency, for example, is required to organize the production, transport, distribution and sale of food in a given country. Food producers, transport firms, wholesalers and retailers, each working to their own ends, produce an ordered and flexible outcome that is not planned by any one person or agency.
It is clear that conservatives and libertarians accord liberty different priorities. Nisbet claims that for libertarians ‘individual freedom, in almost every conceivable domain, is the highest of all social values’ and is so ‘irrespective of what forms and levels of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual debasement may prove to be the unintended consequence of such freedom.’ [Nisbet, 21] This is an instructive, if mistaken, judgement. On the contrary, I should say that for libertarians, liberty is the lowest of social values, lowest in the sense of most fundamental, a sine qua non of a human action’s being susceptible of moral evaluation in any way at all. Human freedom can be used for all sorts of actions directed to all sorts of purposes which are then susceptible to moral evaluation but, unless human action is free from coercion, moral evaluation is intrinsically impossible. Libertarians value freedom as a hard core without which morally significant human action is not possible but, to repeat, while libertarianism as such has nothing to say beyond asserting and defending individual liberty, this is not at all the same as thinking that libertarians in living out their lives are concerned with nothing other than liberty. As if to contradict Nisbet, Murray Rothbard, whose credentials as a libertarian none can doubt, remarked that ‘Only an imbecile could ever hold that freedom is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life’. For him, such a claim is scarcely coherent or meaningful. He agreed with Lord Acton that ‘freedom is the highest political end, not the highest end of man per se…’ [Rothbard 1984, 95]
A libertarian, then, can accept, to a large extent, the presumptive legitimacy of existing social structures but without conceding any inviolable status to them. And a libertarian can be a gradualist in respect of necessary or desirable changes, albeit a rapid gradualist. Such is the complexity of existing institutions that any immediate or radical change is likely to be wildly destructive and perhaps even inimical to a coherent and improved restructuring.

4. Capital: Economic and Social
Men act to improve their situations. In order to act, something about one’s current situation must be apprehended as being capable of improvement and we try to bring that improvement about. A man came across his friend banging his head against a wall and asked him why he was doing this. “Because,’ replied his friend, ‘it feels so good when I stop.” A being perfectly satisfied in every way would not act—it’s a moot point if he even could act! Just as in economics, equilibrium is tended towards but never reached, because of the ever-changing, kaleidoscopic nature of the world, so too, in our human lives, complete satisfaction is never attained but is, at best, intended. Our ever-changing physiological conditions, force us to act to preserve homeostasis. But we are also psychologically unstable and, if St Augustine is to be believed, also spiritually unstable. ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts know no rest until they rest in Thee.’ We can live hand to mouth, as our remote ancestors did, or we can try in a more ordered and long-term way to improve our situations—the way we do this economically is by the creation of capital.
There are bad ideas that, despite their demonstrable and demonstrated idiocy, refuse to go away, vampire notions that just won’t stay in their graves. I’m thinking of setting up a Society for the Flogging of Dead Horses because some dead horses simply won’t lie down and die. One such seemingly indestructible bad idea is Marxism in all its multifarious variety of forms. One particularly annoying aspect of Marxism and Marxists is their complete inability to appreciate the nature and function of capital. This may seem surprising given that Marx wrote a very large volume on that very subject but such is the case. Marx and his latter-day disciples are prey to the ever-popular illusion that consumption is the key to economic prosperity and that capitalists, by exploiting their workers and by hoarding their ill-gotten gains, are guilty not only of theft but of bringing the whole economy to periodic ruin.
The basic fallacy here is a variety of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc—after (or with) this, therefore because of this. Decreased spending is associated with the bust phase of the boom/bust cycle so our Marxists come to think that the bust is caused by the decreased spending. The very last thing that is required in an economic bust is exogenous stimulation of the economy. The economic ‘hair of the dog’ solution’ is just as ineffective in economics as it is in drinking and simply postpones or prolongs the inevitable hangover or retrenchment. You can spend now and save later; or save now and spend later. What you cannot do is spend now and spend later. Of course, the inconvenient truth is that capital is the very first requirement of genuine economic development but capital can be acquired only by a restriction on consumption and by a deferral of immediate gratification. Saving is the key to prosperity, not just for the bloated capitalists but for everyone.
The Marxist misunderstanding of capital hasn’t gone away. The (unlikely) publishing sensation of this year was a massive (700 page) volume by the French economist, Thomas Piketty, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century which, as the title suggests, presents itself as a kind of Das Kapital brought up to date. As an account of capital and capitalism, it is just as unsuccessful as Marx’s original, with economic aggregates such as ‘national income’ and ‘return to capital’ dancing with each other in a bloodless ballet. Piketty, conflating real wealth with monetary instruments, is animated throughout by an egalitarian envy of those who have more money than others and, not surprisingly perhaps, he earns the praise of those, such as governments, who have a vested interest in relieving the rich of what governments regard as their ill-gotten gains. Perhaps the book’s most egregious error is the idea that capital is a kind of economic cornucopia whose gifts never fail, like magic beans, but which automatically, even mechanically, produces ever-growing wealth for its owners. Profit, profit, profit is all that capital can ever bring, never, it seems, a loss. This, of course, is true of the kind of government-sponsored capitalism crony capitalism that we see in enterprises that are considered ‘too big to fail’ but it is not true of free-market capitalism.
Capital plays a role in culture just as it does in economics and it is no more miraculously produced in the one area than in the other. Both forms of capital require saving, restriction, limitation, delayed gratification—perhaps initially induced by our family and our society but later, self-imposed.
A civilised existence requires both freedom and order. Just as a sound economy requires capital which is produced by saving, by delayed gratification, so too, cultural capital is similarly produced by delayed gratification. Freedom without order is like a sudden release of energy, a pointless and destructive explosion; order without freedom is a lifeless corpse. Freedom and order together produce a living, vital society.
Cultural conservatism is the Austrianism of culture. Cultural liberalism is the Keynesianism of culture.

5. Manners as Cultural Capital
Burke thought that manners mattered more than law and even more than morals inasmuch as both law and morals in large measure depend upon manners. In his ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’ he writes ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breath in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.’ [Burke 1796, 126]
We do not produce and maintain our manners primarily by some process of detached reason. They arise naturally in the context of social relations. Such judgement as they embody is a kind of pre-reflective judgement, what Burke calls prejudice. Manners as prejudices allow us to act swiftly and surely and rightly without the need for agonised reflection and reasoning. At the root of manners is the notion of restraint, of limitation, of delayed gratification, and its product is a kind of social capital, just as the product of fiscal delayed gratification and restraint is economic capital. Burke contrasts this form of ordered liberty with mere licence which is the freedom to do whatever one wants to do without regard to circumstances. Will you have ordered liberty, or will you have licence? What shall it be?
Now, libertarianism is compatible with both Burkean liberty or with Burkean licence. A libertarian can arrive at substantially the same conclusions as Burke with this difference, that the restraints and limitations that channel our exercise of liberty must, with the exception of the restraint of actions aggressing against others, be self-imposed, self-accepted, and not imposed by the coercive power of the law.
When manners decline as the result of cultural decay, then the law (or rather legislation) rushes in to fill the vacuum. Matters that in a culturally rich society sre dealt with by informal sanctions now have to be overtly regulated by laws, for example, date-rape or hate speech, with a consequent intrusion upon our liberty. But the law is a blunt and crude instrument and such micro-regulation is both ineffective and also stifling. man does not live by legislation alone. A society replete with minute and detailed legislation is a society whose stock of social capital had declined and is declining. This, I suggest, is a correct description of much of contemporary Western society. Whether these societies can recover is a matter for conjecture. some societies have done so in the past—but others have not, and have perished.
Order is needed for human flourishing. You can have it, or a simulacrum of it, by micro-managing legislation or you can have it by what Burke calls manners. The choice is your. I know what I would choose.

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[gerard.casey]

Dear Patricia,

Your post has to be a prime example of what Jung would call ‘synchronicity’! Now that I’ve finished the history of political thought, I’m thinking of writing a book with a title like: Conservative Anarchism or Confessions of an Anarchic Conservative! The theme of the book will be to demonstrate that there is no necessary conflict between liberty and authority.

If I had to characterise my position, I would say that I am a cultural conservative and a political liberal (libertarian). The key difference between a political conservative and a cultural conservative seems to me to be this: both agree on what needs to be preserved and encouraged as the ground of a functioning society – they disagree, however, on the means by which this is to be brought about. A political conservative is willing to use force, including the power of the state, to achieve his desideratum; the liberal or libertarian is not.

As you can see, I very much share your conservative instincts (as, indeed, did Murray Rothbard).

Thank you for your thoughtful post.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[Author]

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