What will a stateless society look like?

We envision a world without privilege, exploitation or domination. A world without institutionalized coercion, slaughter and injustice. In short, Liberty.

However, the specifics of how a society without centralized political authority will look are far more difficult to predict. One of the major arguments for freedom in the classical liberal tradition was originally put forward by F.A. Hayek in what has become known as “the knowledge problem.” He argued that no single individual or group of individuals has all of the economic information necessary to centrally plan an economic system (or potentially any social system for that matter). To assume this pretense of knowledge is to commit the fatal conceit of rational constructivism.  To work most effectively and safely, systems require a decentralized approach — economically speaking, this means individuals making decisions for themselves and exchanging their legitimate produce voluntarily for mutual gain, which results in the price system.

Since market anarchists recognize that consensual institutions will inevitably be shaped by market and other social forces, we can say that Hayek’s knowledge problem will, in a stateless society, even impact “governance” in the sense of how enterprises provide dispute resolution and security services. We can’t predict the details of how free people will choose to organize provision of these services. The forms of such organization would be an open-ended matter, subject to free experimentation and resulting diversity.

Moreover, Anna Morgenstern’s Anarchism: Necessary but not Sufficient and Charles Johnson and Roderick Long’s Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved? make the case that even once the oppression of state rule is over, cultural forms of oppression unconnected to the state will still  linger which desperately need to be challenged and overcome.  Statism is the biggest hurdle but not the only one which we will need to confront in a stateless world.

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