Martin Elson
Order Nobody Designed ended on two questions to ask of any order: did the people in it agree, and can they leave? Libertarians reach for the second first, and for good reason. A door is easy to check. You don’t need to read anyone’s mind or audit a signature from decades ago; you only need to see whether a person can walk out, and whether anyone stops them. This page argues that exit is necessary but not sufficient. Choosing your ruler doesn’t make you free, some things can’t be signed away even by choice, and every signature is shakier than it looks. That makes the door more important than the signature. It doesn’t make the door the whole of freedom.
A market in governments
In 1860 the Belgian botanist and economist Paul Émile de Puydt proposed what he called panarchy. Government, he argued, should work like insurance or a church. Each person signs up with the regime they prefer, republic, monarchy or commune, at a bureau of political membership, and changes the subscription without changing address. Neighbors on one street could live under different governments. Gian Piero de Bellis, who keeps the idea alive at panarchy.org, insists it is a method, not an ideology, and that territorial monopoly is the thing it abolishes. Read that way, panarchy is a cousin of the overlapping legal regimes in Law Without a Monopoly, and much of it is welcome.
In 2010 Alex Strekal, writing as brainpolice, asked whether it holds together. His target was the slogan that everyone has a right to choose which form of government, and which government, to live under. Real governments are territorial. A “voluntary monarchy” would still reach the people who happen to live or be born in its area, and the children of its willing subjects never signed anything. Followed through, panarchy looks less like the end of the state than like more of them: smaller states in more varieties, each a monopoly inside, tolerating the others outside. That is the system of nation-states we already have, scaled down. His name for it was “micro-authoritarianism advanced in the name of tolerance.” Against it he set a cosmopolitan pluralism, different kinds of people living together in the same place rather than sorted into enclaves, each with its own small sovereign.
The consensual monarch
The comments under his post hold the best defense and the question that settles it. One commenter, writing as Pirate Rothbard, answered that nothing is incoherent about a security company owned by one man, which wins its market by consent and passes to his eldest son. Call it consensual monarchy if you like. Grant it everything: every subject signs at adulthood, no one is bound by birth, and the company claims no territory. Shawn Wilbur then asked why, if each regime is voluntary and anyone can opt out at any time, this is not anarchy in drag.
There are only two answers. If the subjects can leave whenever they like, the monarch is a service provider with a grand title. He rules no one; he sells protection to customers who can walk, and the crown is a brand. That is anarchy under another name. If the subjects can’t leave, because signing up meant giving up the right to sign out, then the choice happened once and the rule goes on after it. Choosing a ruler is not being free of one. The freedom was in the moment of choosing, and the contract spent it.
What can’t be signed away
Here the second answer meets David Ellerman. A right is inalienable, in his sense, when a contract to give it up is void even with consent. The argument rests on a fact, not a decree: responsibility for your own acts can’t be handed to someone else. A person can’t in fact become a thing by agreeing to, so a contract to be treated as one fails however freely it was signed. Consent of the Governed applies this to the oldest political contract, a people’s surrender to a king, and What Rights Are makes it the floor: no one may be used as an input. Authority over your acts can be lent to a delegate who answers to you. It can’t be sold.
The right to leave is the plainest case. A promise never to leave is a promise to let someone else answer for your life from then on, and no signature can make that true. So the consensual monarch who holds his subjects by contract holds a void title, just as the territorial one does. The point cuts both ways for panarchy. It keeps the good version, in which every regime can be left at will, and rules out the bad one, in which you choose your master and then belong to him. It also answers brainpolice’s worry about children. What a parent signed can’t bind a child, any more than what a parliament signed binds a citizen. Each person’s door is their own.
Everyone is bad at consent
If consent counted only at the moment of signing, it would be a fragile thing to build on. Emmi Bevensee’s “Widening the Bridges” starts from that fragility. Everyone is bad at consent, Bevensee writes, and no one is perfectly autonomous; both are worth getting better at anyway. Consent and autonomy are rules of thumb for acting decently in a messy world, and they lean on an idea of the individual that is less stable than it looks. People are less like sealed islands than like networks joined by bridges, across which influence and understanding pass. When the rules of thumb work, they point the right way. When they fail, or are abused, they fail hard.
Take that seriously and the signature loses its glow. People agree while tired, broke, frightened, flattered or badly informed. They agree to things whose costs come later. The person who signed at twenty isn’t quite the person living with it at forty. None of this makes consent worthless. It makes it a snapshot, and a snapshot can’t carry the weight libertarians often put on it. The door is what corrects the snapshot. A signature asks whether you agreed once; the door asks whether you can stop agreeing now. Only the second can catch a mistake, a manipulation or a change of heart, which is why the door matters more than the signature. Bevensee also says what the door is for. Consent and autonomy, on that account, mean little without a larger aim of freedom held in common. The door isn’t a way of being left alone. It keeps the bridges honest.
A door is not enough
Exit is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient, and not only because a door can be open on paper and shut in fact. Hume’s peasant could leave his country in law and not in life; Consent of the Governed takes him up. An exit that costs everything you have isn’t a door. It is a window on a high floor.
The people with the most at stake often have the narrowest doors. Susan Moller Okin pressed this against liberals who would let communities govern their members as they like, so long as members can leave. The women and children inside such groups are the least able to go, often because the group has made sure of it. And easy exit can starve the alternative to leaving. Albert Hirschman showed in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that when leaving is easy, those most able to complain are often first out the door, and those left behind lose their best voices. An order that answers every grievance with “you can always leave” has stopped listening. That is why Order Nobody Designed asks a third question: can those who stay work to change things, without forcing the change on those who like it as it is?
Nor does an open door excuse what happens in the room. A place you can leave can still use you while you are there, and the floor applies inside as well as at the threshold. Why so many people stay under rule they could in principle leave, out of habit, deference, or the kinds of capital Pierre Bourdieu mapped, is a question of its own. Power Distance takes it up.
Build the doors first
William Gillis drew the practical lesson in 2009, in “Socialist Programs.” However much an anarchist opposes welfare and public schooling, he wrote, hardly any would set out to abolish them first: a prisoner’s first task is to escape, and that is no reason to stop eating the meals. That is exit applied to reform. Closing what people lean on before anything else exists doesn’t open a door; it pulls the floor out. The right order is to build the co-ops, mutual aid societies, commons and clinics that Order Nobody Designed shows people already make, and let the state’s version become irrelevant as people leave it for something better: the door first, then the wall. The Economics section takes up his case, and the welfare question, in full.
The strongest case against
The best case that exit is enough comes from Chandran Kukathas. In The Liberal Archipelago he pictures a free society as a sea of associations, many of them illiberal inside, held together by mutual toleration and one core freedom, the freedom to leave. A community may order its life by its own lights, however strange to outsiders, so long as members can go. Ask for more and you must decide for other people how they are to live together, which is the move every state makes. One of brainpolice’s commenters put the same case more plainly. Exit is always the primary basis of freedom, he wrote, and objecting to separate communities whatever their context is a moral absolutism of its own. Let the separatists separate, and let everyone else learn from how it goes.
This site agrees with more of that than it rejects. No one should be forced into cosmopolitanism, and many experiments beat one designed from the top; that is the point of Order Without a Master Plan. The parting comes over the door itself. Kukathas holds that an exit can be very costly and still count. Okin’s reply stands: a right of exit the people most at risk can’t use is a right for someone else. And a door one generation that can bolt on the next isn’t a door. So the archipelago passes only if every island keeps every member’s door open, those born there included, at a cost a person can bear, and doesn’t use people while they stay. That isn’t one more rule laid on top of exit. It is what exit means once it can’t be signed away.
No one is an island
Choosing a ruler isn’t freedom; keeping the power to unchoose one is where freedom starts. Some things can’t be signed away, and the right to leave is first among them. Because every signature is imperfect, the door matters more than the signature: it is the part of consent that keeps working after the ink dries. But a door is not a room. What happens inside still answers to the floor, the rights no arrangement can sign away, set out in What Rights Are; those who stay still need a voice, and the doors people will need have to be built before the old supports come down. Consent of the Governed tests the signature. This page tests the door.
Sources
- Alex Strekal (as brainpolice), “Is Panarchy A Coherent Concept?” (Polycentric Order, March 2010), with the comment thread. Panarchy as tolerance between states that are monopolies inside; “consensual monarchy” (Pirate Rothbard); “anarchy in drag” (Shawn Wilbur). archived · copy here
- Paul Émile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (Revue Trimestrielle, Brussels, 1860). Choosing a government without moving house. Public domain. panarchy.org
- Gian Piero de Bellis, “On Panarchy” (panarchy.org). Panarchy as a method, not territorial. original
- David Ellerman, “‘Inalienable’ Means Inalienable Even With Consent.” Rights void to alienate even with consent; the de facto inalienability of responsible agency. original · copy here See also “Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice” (Law and Philosophy 29, 2010); full entry under Propertarianism.
- Emmi Bevensee, “Widening the Bridges: Beyond Consent and Autonomy” (C4SS, January 2019). Consent and autonomy as imperfect rules of thumb; the networked self. original · copy here
- William Gillis, “Socialist Programs” (Human Iterations, November 13, 2009). Build the exits before closing the programs. Reference copy in Economics. original · copy here
- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States(Harvard University Press, 1970). Easy exit can silence voice.
- Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2003). Freedom of association with exit as the core right; the strongest case that exit is enough.
- Susan Moller Okin, “‘Mistresses of Their Own Destiny’: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit” (Ethics 112, no. 2, 2002). Who can actually use the door.