Topic: Anarchy

Quotes

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• Not the state is an evil, but the shortcomings of the human mind and character that imperatively require the operation of a police power. Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.#

Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results” (1984)

• Where stateless societies conquer ones with states, they either themselves develop a state or they induce social regress in the conquered society.#
• [Besides the state,] only three alternative bases for order exist: force, exchange, and custom, and none of these are sufficient in the long-run. At some point new exigencies arise for which custom is inadequate; at some point to bargain about everything in exchange relations is inefficient and disintegrating; while force alone, as Parsons emphasized, will soon ‘deflate’. In the long-run normally taken for granted, but enforceable, rules are necessary to bind together strangers or semi-strangers.#