1 - Anarchy and community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Summary
Introduction: the scope of the book
I set out in the studies which have resulted in this book to discover whether anarchy – doing without the state – is viable and, if so, what sort of anarchy that would be and whether it was compatible with certain fundamental ideals of communitarian anarchists and other socialists, notably those of liberty and equality.
It seemed to me that the critical test of the viability of anarchy was whether its members could maintain social order, in the basic sense of security of persons and their property (however much or little property there is). Most writers in the communitarian anarchist tradition do not recognise this as a problem for the anarchies they desire or predict for the future, where it would be solved or obviated by a transformed human nature, appropriately socialised. But the maintenance of social order has always been a problem, in every kind of society, even in those where private property or possession is limited to the barest, easily replaceable goods; and there are no grounds for the anarchists' optimism that the problem would resolve itself as effortlessly as they suppose even in societies of the sort they envisage. When I speak of it as a problem, I mean that individuals will not voluntarily refrain from doing those things which threaten social order. The reason for this (as I argue in Section 2.1) is that there is an important element of social order which is a ‘public good’, that is to say a good which (roughly speaking) benefits every member of the public regardless of whether he contributes in any way to its provision.
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- Community, Anarchy and Liberty , pp. 1 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982
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