do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it's a...marketing ploy. but it's sincere.

A Philosophical Challenge

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State (SUNY Press) argues that all the arguments of the great philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, Nozick, and Habermas, among others), are, putting it kindly, unsound.

The state rests on violence: not the consent of the governed, not utility, not rational decision-making, not justice.
 
Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are shockingly fallacious, a scandal, an embarrassment to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can't, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

I'd offer a huge cash prize, but I'm broke.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an evil, irrational cultist.

You're an anarchist now, baby, until further notice.

e-mail responses to [email protected]

Yours in anarchy,
Crispin Sartwell

you can pre-order from amazon, or actually get holt of it from suny press.

from against the state:
The attempt to justify state power ethically has made no substantial progress for centuries. Indeed, for two hundred years, philosophers have rested content with recapitulating Hegel, Locke, or Hume, or constructing collages, such as those of Rawls and Habermas. Of course, probably the best policy is to approach the monuments of the intellectual tradition in a posture of respect, with a presumption that they were produced by smart people thinking hard and so cannot be merely ridiculous. With regard to the arguments that have been offered for the legitimacy of the state, I cannot manage to assume this posture. The arguments themselves are pitiful: riddled with holes, rationalizations, dreams of submission dressed in the leering semblance of rationality.

     The arguments of a Hobbes, of a Hume, of a Rawls are, I want to say, unworthy of human beings. They are arguments that we should all submit, but they are expressions above all of the slavishness of the writer. They are justifications of slavery by slaves, and with regard to any such argument, you must question its sincerity and sample its stench of self-delusion as well as evaluate its logical quality. And whatever you may think of the motivations, the arguments are shockingly fallacious: one strives by any means to justify the central moral fact of one's life: one's destruction as an autonomous human being; one's pervasive use for the purposes of others, one's tininess, impotence, and one's collusion in this tininess and impotence: one's need for it, love of it. One is an insect, by choice, by commitment, by history, by necessity, though hardly by philosophy. And when it comes time to argue, one argues as an insect would argue. One philosophizes like a gnat.

     "Locke," "Rousseau," "Hegel," "Habermas" are sounds that reverberate through human history like the tolling of great big bells. They have their moments: Locke's epistemology, Rousseau's philosophy of education, the very idea of the philosophy of history, the lovely dancing delight that is the prose style of Jurgen Habermas. But their books are also all contained within the still-emerging world-historical destiny of the state, not to speak of its patronage systems and threats of repression. There may be better justifications of the existence of the state than they came up with, but any candidate had better start more skeptically, by feeling actually threatened, undermined, by anarchism. And so we anarchists must do all we can to destroy their arguments and any others that may eventually be put forward. Only thus can we serve the cause to which we are all, ultimately, committed: the destruction of human moral autonomy.