Challenge to Statists

A state is a compulsory, territorial monopoly of judicial services and enforcement.  A statist is someone who believes that a state is a positive good or a necessary evil.  This post is a challenge to statists in two parts.

The first part of the challenge is this: why is a state necessary for the functioning of society?  The answer is that it isn't--there have been societies surviving and thriving for centuries without a state.  Medieval Europe is an outstanding example where landowners served as primary judge on their own lands, kings and royal magistrates served as courts of appeal, merchant courts met to apply the law merchant, admiralty courts to apply admiralty law, and church courts to apply canon law, and these courts could and did enforce their own decisions.  These courts even competed with each other for disputants: for example, two merchants could have their case heard in a noble or royal court or in a merchant court, or even in a church court if they swore an oath to God as part of the transaction under dispute.  Somehow, this anarchy survived for over a thousand years and produced a thriving society.  A statist must explain how a state is superior to this system of competing jurisdictions at producing justice, and given the performance of states in the past two-hundred or so years, this is a very tall order.

The second part of the challenge is moral.  A statist who believes that a state is a positive good must demonstrate how a compulsory territorial monopoly is morally superior to any other method of providing judicial services and enforcement.  To put the matter starkly, let us suppose that there is a territorial monopolist of these services, one whose jurisdiction extends beyond its own property.  An anarchist (at least one of the stripe I represent) raises no objection as long as certain conditions are met.  If the monopolist's extended jurisdiction is based on contracts with the particular people, these contracts must have been freely agreed to and must allow the people in question to cancel them without relocating.  If it is based on restricted titles to land, there must be a way for landowners to remove those restrictions.  The statist must explain why such requirements are villainies deserving repression.  Why must a territorial monopoly be compulsory?  Why must people be forced submit to an authority other than that of justice itself?  Is the state automatically the executor of justice?  In that case, the Holocaust was a just deed, and those who died deserved what they got.

A statist who claims that a state is a positive good must answer both of these challenges; one who considers it only a necessary evil must merely answer the first.  If he cannot give a answer to his required questions, then he must become a philosophical anarchist.  The weakest position permitted by logic and honesty is "I oppose the state, but don't see how to get rid of it anytime soon."  On this count, have no fear--the state is busy destroying itself all on its own.  Someday it will come crashing down.  I only wish it that would get on with it.