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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 10
Lesson 2: The anarchist’s challengeThe anarchist’s challenge
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (associate professor of Philosophy at Elgin Community College) presents the anarchist’s challenge to the state by asking whether we have a moral duty to obey the law and, if so, why?
View our Democracy learning module and other videos in this series here: https://www.wi-phi.com. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
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- I really don't get it, they talk about the challenge of anarchism but they don't even describe what an anarchist society would look like, apart from quoting 2 philosophers who describe the state of nature, which has nothing to do with what anarchists advocate, this video is short and leaves me feeling quite :|
at least it forces you to do your own research(3 votes)- As for what an anarchy would look like, answers are divided, with some considering anarchy a utopia and others seeing it as a "nasty and brutish" dystopia (those terms, of course, borrowed from Hobbes' Leviathan).
There are many libertarian thinkers who want a minimal state instead of complete anarchy, and both Nozick and Chomsky can be considered such thinkers. Even Marx and Engels saw the socialist state withering away, to pave way for an equal communist society. (I believe Marx's ideas have been covered in the history videos on Khan Academy, and you could search for them.)
Modern anarchism in Europe, however, is often associated with thinkers like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. Even Gandhi can be seen as anarchist to a certain extent, insofar as he vehemently opposed strong state, preferring instead that India be organised as "oceanic circles" of self-reliant village-republics.
If you read Plato's Republic, the very first ideal state Socrates describes is actually very Gandhian in a sense. Only the second state begins the infamous class division, with the rule by philosopher-kings, etc. Plato, of course, has been covered in Wi-Phi.
Then there's the question of living anarchies. In Leviathan, Hobbes speaks of the Americas (in his time) as living in a state of nature. Many early anthropologists too saw isolated tribal groups (in remote islands or hills, for instance) as living anarchies. But James C. Scott's research argues otherwise: his ethnography in Zomia (a landlocked region in East and South-East Asia if I'm not wrong) shows that stateless communities there are, rather than a frozen-in-time anarchy, resisting state governance.(1 vote)
Video transcript
[Intro jingle] Hi. I’m Geoff Pynn, and I teach
philosophy at Elgin Community College. In this video, I’m going to ask:
why should we obey the law? Suppose you run a shop in a neighborhood
controlled by a powerful gangster. He demands regular cuts of your earnings. He tells you what you’re allowed to sell. He expects you to do what he says.
And you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t. This gangster is a bad guy.
You should resent his authority. He has no right to tell you what to do. But the
government also demands regular cuts of your earnings, in the form of taxes. Its laws tell
you what you can and can’t sell. And if you disobey, the police
can arrest you and even put you in jail. While we may sometimes
resent the government authority, most of us think that there is a fundamental
difference between the government and a gangster. Ofcourse it's in your
self-interest to obey both. But don’t you also have
a duty to obey the law? A gangster who can’t hurt you can
be ignored with a clear conscience. But even if you can get
away with breaking the law, most of us would still think
you’d be doing something wrong. Anarchists disagree. They deny there’s a fundamental difference
between the gangster and the government. Of course we're are taught to respect the state’s authority.
But, anarchists claim, this respect isn’t deserved. The state’s authority rests entirely upon
its power to punish your disobedience. The anarchist’s challenge to the state’s authority requires
us to consider why we have a duty to respect the law. Another way of asking this is, what
makes the state’s authority legitimate? Of course, many laws of the
state reflect the rules of morality. Your duty to obey the law against murder
Is nothing more than the immorality of killing people. But laws governing taxation, traffic, commerce, contracts,
health care, education, and so on usually aren’t like this. What obliges you to obey
the law beyond your personal moral code? Well, you
might respond, don’t we need the state? Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher from the 1700s, argued
that our lives would be immeasurably worse without a state. He asked us to imagine living
in what he called the state of nature a condition without
government or laws at all. It’s natural to put our own needs -- for
food, shelter, security, and companionship before those
of other people, especially strangers. We do this in order to survive. That
takes resources. But, Hobbes thought, resources would be scarce in the state of nature.
Food and shelter would be hard to come by, and there would only be
so much to go around. Fierce competition for these scarce
resources would inevitably arise. We would constantly be struggling
to acquire what we needed and living in fear that others
would rob us of what we already had. Such a life would be
bleak, even nightmarish: “In such a condition, there is no place for
Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain. And consequently no Culture of the Earth
... no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of
Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear,
and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” Without the benefits of
society, Hobbes argued, the scarcity and competition in the state of
nature would inevitably lead to a state of war. Now Hobbes was pretty pessimistic. But his argument
is compelling even if you’re an optimist. Even if people want to cooperate for the greater good,
it’s impossible for them to do so without trusting others. And a constant fear of starvation, suffering, and death would make even the most well-meaning
person distrust their neighbors. Without trust, cooperation is impossible. Since cooperative endeavours are essential to
agriculture, science, industry, and literary culture, the state of nature
would lack all these things. No farms, no
laboratories, no factories, no books. The only remedy, Hobbes, thought,
was a sovereign with absolute power. They could establish and enforce a common set of
rules that would lay the foundation for social trust. The Chinese philosopher Mozi anticipated
Hobbes’s argument by more than a millennium. Before the state, the world was “as chaotic as
though it were inhabited by birds and beasts alone.” He thought this was
because of people’s natural disagreements: “Each man believed that his own views were
correct and disapproved of those of others, so that people spent
their time condemning one another.… Those with strength to spare
refused to help out others, those with surplus wealth would
let it rot before they would share it, and those with beneficial
doctrines to teach would keep them secret.” Like Hobbes, Mozi thought the only way
to avoid this chaos was by establishing an absolute authority with the power to “unify
the standards of judgment throughout the world” and enforce
their standards through punishment. Once people were no longer free to act according to their own ideas,
they could live peaceably with each other, and society could flourish. Today, most people think the
state’s power should be much more limited. But we generally agree that we need a state
to protect our interests and enforce the law. We need only look to countries that have been torn apart by civil
war to see what happens when the state’s authority breaks down. Yet even if the state does serve the common good, that still
doesn’t mean we are obligated to respect its authority, After all, your neighborhood might be an even more
dangerous place without the gangster’s authority. So why do we have a duty to
the state, but not to the gangster? We haven’t yet answered the
anarchist’s challenge to the state. What if you can serve your own
interests better by breaking the law? Do you really have a duty to obey, or to accept
the consequences of disobedience? And if so, why? [ Jingle ]