Anarchy Defined

What is Anarcho-Capitalism anyways? This post will answer a few basic misunderstandings people may have with the idea of anarchy. Anarchy is not chaos. It is very different from chaos. If a person were to say that an anarchist is an advocate of chaos he would, of course, be mistaken but on more than one level. They first define anarchy as chaos which is not the case. Anarchy is simply no government (government is a monopoly of coercion in a geographical areal). Secondly they would be mistakenly concluding that government is the author of order. This too would be a terrible mistake.

Dictionary.com has four definitions for anarchy. The first definition is "a state of society without government or law." Well, an anarchist society would definitely have law. The definition is not specific enough and therefore misleading. A better definition would be "a state of society without government or government enforced law." The second definition is an absurd definition, it doesn't fit the word. It is "political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control." This definition is flawed because order is not a characteristic of government but a characteristic of freely interacting individuals.

The third definition of anarchy could be considered a good definition if not interpreted as a socialist ideal but free interaction. The third definition is "a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society." Cooperation is not a necessary part of anarchy but a part that will naturally form because people are self interested. Forced cooperation brings about chaos and would be another state. Cooperation itself must be voluntary in order to achieve and anarchist society.

The last definition, "confusion; chaos; disorder," is absurd. If people want to use this definition of the word they cannot mean the political system. They would necessarily have to mean an environment in which there is government. It is sort of absurd to define a word as antonyms but who am I to judge the people who mistakenly evolve words into something they are not. The best definition of anarchy is "a society without government where government is a geographical monopoly of coercion."

Is an anarchist society a utopia and therefore unattainable? Murray Rothbard addressed this criticism in the last chapter of For a New Liberty. He claimed that limited government was the utopian ideal and only anarchy was defendable. What would a free society look like anyways? A free society is a society where people are free to cooperate or dissociate from whoever they please. It is a society in which property rights prevail because people own the product of their labor. A free society is a society in which people can buy and sell the products of their labor; they are not tied to it by government edict like they are in a feudalist or communist society. A free society is not a democracy or monarchy or any society that has a government.

The definition of anarchy as stated above is the definition that this site endorses. If a person critiques anarchy in any of the ways mentioned above they are not critiquing anarchy at all, they are critiquing government.

--George Edwards