389 Gary Chartier the Anarchist Tradition of Thought Exhibits a High and Perhaps Unique Degree of Dichotomization. It Also Exhib
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book reviews 389 Gary Chartier Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 416 pp. isbn 9781107032286 (hbk). £70.00. The anarchist tradition of thought exhibits a high and perhaps unique degree of dichotomization. It also exhibits an unusual and perhaps unique means of resolving the resulting dichotomies. The principal lines of dichotomization run along the following lines: political versus philosophical anarchism; communal versus individualist anarchism; and socialist versus capitalist anarchism. Not infrequently, these dichotomies are run together such that political/commu- nal/socialist anarchism (or ‘leftist’ anarchism, for short) is set against philo- sophical/individual/capitalist anarchism (or ‘rightist’ anarchism, for short). A common resolution of this dichotomized state of affairs is to deny anarchist status to the other side (in the case of leftist anarchists, who argue that ‘rightist anarchism’ is a contradiction in terms) or to ignore the other side (in the case of rightist anarchists, who seem to believe that leftist anarchism is unworthy of serious theoretical consideration). This is the context in which Gary Chartier offers his contribution to the an- archist tradition of thought. Chartier does not merely supplement this tradi- tion; he challenges – sharply and provocatively – its dichotomized state by advancing a philosophical account of what we might call a lawful market anar- chism that is (according to Chartier, at least) ‘identifiably leftist, anti-capitalist, and socialist’ (p. xiii). Thus, Chartier is anti-state but pro-law and pro-market but anti-capitalist. He is also, in the terms of the traditional anarchist dichoto- mies introduced above, a philosophical anarchist, a (qualified) individualist anarchist, and (he maintains) a socialist anarchist; that is, from the traditional perspective, an unconventional leftist. Chartier’s book consists of seven chapters, but can be divided into four thematic sections. The first section (comprising the first two chapters) outlines the requirements of morality, as Chartier sees them. Chapter 1 presents an account of the good life – from the perspective of contemporary natural law theory – in terms of ‘a substantive and pluriform conception of well-being and a set of constraints governing the flourishing of moral agents and moral patients’ (pp. 7–8). Chapter 2 introduces and argues through the implica- tions of the crucial nonaggression maxim, that is, ‘the injunction that moral agents should avoid harming the bodies and interfering with the just possesso- ry interests of others’ (p. 45). This moral maxim protects Chartier’s social ideal of ‘peaceful, voluntary cooperation.’ The second section (comprising the third chapter) contains Chartier’s argument against the state. The state is, he con- tends, illegitimate (insofar as its ‘claim to authority is an implicit denial of the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/17455243-01303005 <UN> 390 book reviews bedrock importance of social cooperation’), unnecessary (‘to resolve disputes and to offer protection against aggression, or to provide vital public goods’), and dangerous (insofar as it has, ‘in fact, undermined and attacked social co- operation in the interests of the ruling class and its cronies’) (p. 157). As such, the state should be rejected. The third section (comprising the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters) offers a speculative account of social life without the state: an account of the stateless social order or ‘anarchy’ as lawful (though primarily consensual and non-‘state-like’ in this respect), rectificatory (though primar- ily restitutive and non-‘state-like’ in this respect), and liberatory (that is, open to ‘positive social change’ such as the ending of ‘structural poverty’ and the undermining of ‘hierarchy, structural racism and sexism, and stultifying con- straints on personal self-development and expression’ (p. 320)). The fourth and final section (comprising the seventh chapter) constitutes an attempted jus- tification of the radical credentials of Chartier’s position; or, at the very least, a careful explanation of the sense in which his variety of anarchism – lawful market anarchism – can be regarded as leftist (that is, opposed ‘to subordina- tion, exclusion, deprivation, and war’), anti-capitalist (that is, opposed to ‘the privileges and… social dominance of capitalists’), and socialist (that is, part of the anti-statist socialist tradition which seeks ‘to address the “social question” and to foster genuinely social cooperation’) (p. 378). It is impossible in such a brief review to comment on every step taken by Chartier in the development of the argument of Anarchy and Legal Order. Not- withstanding the familiar objections that might be raised to the foundational use of natural law theory, for example, I would like to concentrate on two pos- sible objections to the manner in which Chartier characterizes his final socio- political position: that is, as ‘anarchist’ and as ‘radical’ (in the sense of ‘leftist/ anti-capitalist/socialist’). It appears, on Chartier’s account, that ‘anarchism’ is the belief in the desir- ability and possibility of anarchy; and that ‘anarchy’ consists in the absence of the state (and perhaps some related, but scarcely clarified, social phenomena (see p. 1, note 1)). Thus, Chartier – like most contemporary rightist anarchists and many historical leftist anarchists – appears to identify anarchism with anti-statism. This is problematic, in a number of respects, and enables Chart- ier to sidestep some anarchist objections to the institution of law (or, more specifically, to legal authority as such, as opposed to the political authority of the state). One alleged problem with the anti-statist conception of anar- chism is that it facilitates the inclusion of all manner of Marxists as well as some dubious libertarians in the anarchist tradition. Thus, Mao Zedong and Margaret Thatcher enter the ranks of the anarchists, and this cannot be right! (See Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame (Oakland: ak journal of moral philosophy 13 (2016) 377-396 <UN>.