Anarchists as Central Planners

In political debates, people often demand that their opponents abandon their own principles before they are even allowed to defend them. Sometimes this happens so subtly that neither side notices. The terms of the debate quietly change until one participant is no longer arguing from his own philosophical framework but from his opponent’s presuppositions.

I have come to believe this is exactly what happens in countless debates over anarcho-capitalism, libertarian anarchism, voluntaryism, and other philosophies that reject the inherently coercive and confiscatory state. Ironically, many of the fiercest critics of these ideas succeed not by disproving them, but by persuading their defenders to stop arguing like anarchists altogether.

Critics insist, for example, that freedom and spontaneous order must first be defended through an exercise in central planning. The conversation usually begins with what economists call the public goods problem. “Who would build the roads?” quickly becomes “Who would provide national defense?” That soon expands into courts, police, environmental protection, disease control, disaster relief, fraud prevention, child protection, financial regulation, and every other difficult problem that any society has ever faced or might someday face. Before long, the anarchist is confronted with an impossible assignment. Unless every conceivable objection can be answered in advance, the entire philosophy is presumed to have failed.

At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. A society without a state would still have problems to solve, and serious political theories ought to confront serious questions. Yet something about this exchange has always bothered me. The difficulty lies not in the questions themselves, but in what they quietly assume.

Notice that no comparable burden is ordinarily placed upon advocates of the state. Defenders of government are rarely expected to explain in advance how political institutions will overcome bureaucratic incompetence, regulatory capture, public debt, corruption, special-interest influence, police misconduct, civil liberties violations, military adventurism, partisan polarization, or the countless government failures that history records with depressing regularity. Governments are generally presumed to deserve the opportunity to evolve imperfect solutions over time, while anarchism is expected to arrive with the completed instruction manual before the experiment may even begin.

This asymmetry changes the nature of the discussion in a subtle but profound way. The anarchist no longer argues that free individuals should be permitted to discover institutions through voluntary cooperation. Instead, he begins designing those institutions himself. He explains how arbitration companies will function, how defense agencies will coordinate, how roads will be financed, how pollution disputes will be resolved, how currencies will compete, how pandemics will be managed, and how every imaginable contingency will be addressed. Before long, what began as a defense of decentralized discovery becomes an exercise in comprehensive social design.

Without realizing it, the anarchist has accepted far more than the role of chief planner. He has accepted the planner’s view of knowledge. He has conceded that the legitimacy of a free society depends upon someone’s ability to specify its institutional architecture before free people have had the opportunity to create it. That concession quietly abandons the most powerful insight ever developed by critics of centralized planning.

The most robust argument against central planning has never rested primarily on the intelligence of planners. It rests on the limits of human knowledge. However brilliant, planners do not possess the knowledge necessary to organize an entire society from above because that knowledge does not exist in any one place. It is dispersed among millions of individuals, embedded in local circumstances, practical experience, changing preferences, and information that often becomes visible only through social interaction. Markets do not succeed because entrepreneurs already know the right answers. They succeed because people are free to discover answers that nobody possessed beforehand.

If that insight is true, then it applies just as forcefully to anarchists. No advocate of voluntary society can possibly know today what institutions free people would develop over generations of experimentation. Nor should anyone expect him to know. The case for spontaneous order is not that its advocates can predict the future. It is that no one can. They are explaining how institutions emerge through discovery, not predicting in advance exactly what those institutions will become.

More than a century ago, Emma Goldman recognized precisely this misunderstanding. She was repeatedly asked to explain exactly how an anarchist society would operate, and she consistently refused the invitation. The demand itself, she argued, misunderstood the philosophy. As she pointed out in Anarchism and Other Essays,

“Anarchism cannot consistently impose an iron-clad program or method on the future. The things every new generation has to fight, and which it can least overcome, are the burdens of the past, which holds us all as in a net. Anarchism, at least as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs. Our most vivid imagination cannot foresee the potentialities of a race set free from external restraints. How, then, can anyone assume to map out a line of conduct for those to come? We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air, must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. If we succeed in clearing the soil from the rubbish of the past and present, we will leave to posterity the greatest and safest heritage of all ages.”

This is why so many debates over anarchism become strangely self-defeating. Critics insist upon a fully specified blueprint before they will even consider the possibility of decentralized discovery. Anarchists, eager to answer every objection, often oblige. They begin sketching an entire civilization on paper. In doing so, they quietly exchange the logic of Hayek for the social engineer’s drafting table.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with exploring possibilities. Historical examples of private arbitration, commercial law, mutual aid societies, private governance, and decentralized cooperation deserve careful study because they demonstrate that human beings have repeatedly organized themselves without relying exclusively upon government monopolies. Such examples weaken the claim that the state is the only conceivable source of social order. They do not, however, reveal the final architecture of a free society, nor should anyone expect them to. Their value lies in showing that institutional discovery is possible, not in supplying the finished blueprint.

We rarely make comparable demands anywhere else. No defender of markets believes tomorrow’s entrepreneurs must first identify every successful product before competition may begin. No investor requires a complete catalog of future innovations before risking capital. No serious scientist insists that every important discovery be known before research deserves support. Progress occurs because people are free to search, fail, imitate, revise, abandon, and improve.

Political institutions are no exception to this broader pattern of human learning. The deepest question, then, is not whether every public good can already be explained in exhaustive detail. It is whether the absence of such explanations somehow transforms political monopoly into the obvious solution. Identifying a difficult problem does not automatically identify the correct institution to solve it. Government failures are no less real than market failures, and every proposed institution, public or private, must answer questions about incentives, information, accountability, and unintended consequences.

Once such analytical concepts are applied consistently, the debate looks very different. The central issue is no longer whether someone can produce the perfect blueprint for a stateless society. It is whether free people should be permitted to discover institutions the same way they discover nearly everything else that advances civilization: through experimentation, adaptation, imitation, correction, and countless decisions that no planner could have anticipated beforehand.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that many critics of anarchism inadvertently reveal the strength of the very philosophy they seek to defeat. By insisting that anarchists design an entire civilization before freedom may be tried, they implicitly assume that legitimate social order must first exist in someone’s mind before it can exist in the world. That assumption does not merely set an impossible standard for anarchism. It quietly embraces the very premise on which every ambitious project of central planning has always depended.