To Fight the State, We Must Build Nonstate Institutions
— Lew Rockwell (@lewrockwell) March 29, 2023
By Ryan McMaken. https://t.co/7lkLrdcPFj
Find the direct link to McMaken's article here.
An excerpt:
Societies Are Composed of Institutions
As libertarian historian Ralph Raico notes, liberals make a key distinction between the state and “society.” Society is simply those institutions that are not the state. Or as David Gordon puts it, “Liberals believe that the main institutions of society can function in entire independence of the state.”
The idea that the institutions of society can function without a state is an established historical fact. Since the beginnings of human civilization, even in the absence of states, people have built up institutions and relationships designed to provide order, security, and social safety nets.
As described by historian Paul Freedman, many societies have been held together by something other than “government in the sense that we understand it.” Rather, they can be held together with “informal social networks and ties.” These include “kinship, family, private vengeance, religion.”
These institutions have also been essential in the Western ideal of dispersing political power among a variety of organizations rather than concentrating it in a single central authority. According to Raico, the Western struggle for freedom and political independence is historically characterized by these institutions’ fight for their own separate legal rights:
Princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights (Magna Carta, for instance) which they were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties.
Not surprisingly, the rise of the modern territorial state is closely connected to the state’s struggle against these institutions. As historian of the state Martin van Creveld has shown, in order to consolidate power, the state first had to gravely weaken the churches, the nobility, and the towns. After all, these organizations competed with the state. They often provided economic safety nets of their own and civil order through courts and local militias. They created a sense of community and social purpose apart from the idea of the nation-state. They provided key economic services, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, which offered safe trade routes and arbitration services for merchants.
