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Panarchism
is a new political philosophy that builds upon and extends the core concept
of consent of the governed, which goes back primarily to John Locke. Consent
of the governed is a concept that permeated revolutionary America. It appears
in Article 6 of the Virginia
Bill of Rights. It appears in the Essex Result. Benjamin Franklin wrote "In
free governments the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors
and sovereigns." The Declaration of Independence asserts that
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed."
Panarchism
proposes a comprehensive extension of liberty to the consensual choice of
government itself, in form and content. It proposes government by consent for
any persons who arrange such government for themselves. Conversely, it
proposes that a government has no authority over any persons who do not
consent to it.
Panarchy
is a condition of human relations in which each person is at liberty to
choose his own social and political governance without being coerced.
Panarchy means that persons may enter into and exit from social and political
relations freely. It means that government exists only with the consent and
by the consent of the governed.
Panarchism
has new conceptions of what a people who are governed, a government, and
consent mean. These give rise to a new conception of the nonterritorial State
and revised ideas about sovereignty and authority. By viewing government as
nonterritorial, panarchism reorients the movement for liberty away from
destroying the governments that others may prefer and toward obtaining
the governments that each of us may prefer.
Free
persons in a free society already practice a degree of panarchy. By
individual consent, they associate with those whom they wish to associate
with (and who wish to associate with them), and they do not associate with
others. By choice, they vary their associations by time, place, duration, and
other dimensions. They choose companions, places to live, workplaces, clubs,
and churches on the basis of individual consent rendered in a noncoercive
social context. Free persons form consensual organizations, associations, and
groups. They form themselves into sub-societies and "peoples,"
which are groups of persons that, via individual consent, willingly aggregate
on various grounds and interests. In doing so, they create multiple
coexisting forms of governance whose basis is not territorial (although it
may optionally be so) but relational.
Panarchism
proposes that panarchy be extended to government (or functions of government)
in the same way that it is already present in society. Let persons be free to
form peoples and to choose their own forms of government.
Why?
Because consent today is too limited to allow a meaningful sovereignty of
people. Because the rulers have become the sovereign and the people their
servants. Because complex systems of voting and parties have diluted consent
to the vanishing point. Because would-be peoples are thwarted from forming.
Liberty does not mean a vote for one of two parties that runs a single
monopoly government. It means active consent over the very form, as well as
the content, of one’s governing relations.
Why
panarchism? Because in today’s governing relations, we find ourselves
living under distant States and governments whose form is not of our choosing.
Because the planet is blanketed with States and governments that too often
deliver injustice, insecurity, disorder, waste, misery, death, and
destruction, as States and governments historically have done. Because States
and governments focus and amplify power, using it for purposes that many of
us do not believe in. And because governments today legitimate and encourage
contentious struggles for domination where one group’s gains is another
group’s loss, and where the struggles absorb more and more resources
and divert energy from productive to unproductive uses.
The
liberty that is basic to panarchy promises a better way of life, by extending
to each of us the capacity to engage in the social and political relations of
our own choosing in accord with our own beliefs. Since persons will not
freely consent to governments whose decisions in the main leave them, by
their own estimation, worse off, the free choice of government will provide
the kind of check-and-balance on government failures and misdeeds that is a
critical missing element of today’s political arrangements.
Panarchy
envisages many possible societies and sub-societies across a land, region, or
province. There need not be a single sovereign authority that imposes law on
all, unless it happens to be by consent. In panarchy, multiple and diverse
sources of self-chosen sovereignty coexist side-by-side, each finding its
source of legitimacy from the consent of those who are willing to place
themselves within a particular set of governing relations. People freely
place themselves within multiple non-territorial governing
associations, as contrasted with finding themselves assigned by
authorities on a geographical basis.
The
American revolutionaries blazed a trail toward nonterritorial government when
they called for consent of the governed, but they simultaneously veered away
from that trail. Just as they skirted the slavery question, they skirted the
issues of what constituted a people, a legitimate government, consent, and
secession. Article 14 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights sought "to maintain Virginia’s
sovereignty over its restless, far-flung western counties." It proclaimed
"That the people have a right to uniform government; and, therefore,
that no government separate from, or independent of the government of
Virginia, ought to be erected or established within the limits thereof."
This particular territorial idea of government was justified by a false
appeal to a mythical right to uniform government, in order to prevent the
formation of West Virginia. Some 85 years later, West Virginia, which for
decades had many sound reasons not to be governed by Richmond, finally
seceded from Virginia.
Little
has changed. Despite hundreds of breakaway and secession movements worldwide,
the territorial notion of government has not changed. Indeed, many such
movements themselves view government as territorial. American federalism has
become nationalism. Governments of today are making societies over, based
upon claims of legitimate authority that are less rooted in consent than in
territorial claims of rulership.
The
idea of government needs to be severed from the idea of the territorial State
and from the notion that the government of such a State is all that
government is or can be. Since the State is single, territorial, and
coercive, such an idea views government as single, territorial, and coercive.
The territorial idea supports States in place. It empties consent of all real
meaning and replaces it by the machinations of meaningless votes, party
politics, lobbying, redistricting, power, and campaign money flows. The
territorial idea of government without consent dooms mankind to living
without one of the most basic liberties, which is the liberty to choose
one’s government.
It is
a mistake to identify government as the executive and administrative means of
the monopoly State. When those who are pro-State do this, it leaves little or
no room for those who do not consent and wish to live by their own forms of
government. When those who are anti-State do this, they become
anti-government, a position that does not allow those who want various forms
of their own government to exercise their choices.
Government
is the social coordination of human personal interactions. To the extent that
human beings interact with one another, government is thus inescapable.
Advocates of no government, unless they eschew all social interaction, can no
more live without government than can statists. But the necessity of
government does not imply that government must be nonconsensual and
territorial. We have an alternative to living under a single territorial
State that makes and enforces all sorts of rules, for all of us, all the
time. Panarchy is that alternative.
We
ourselves govern a vast range of human activities by consent,
nonterritorially, and without the State. This was historically and is
currently the case. Persons within human societies create governance from
varied and multiple sources that include moral and ethical codes, custom,
bodies of judge-discovered law, rules, principles, manners, religion, pacts,
agreements, understandings, and contracts, as well as through a variety of
instruments, institutions, and organizations that include family,
associations, churches, schools, corporations, and business firms. Society,
in this sense, which is really many interpenetrating and diverse societies,
already reflects a high degree of panarchy. Societies everywhere already
employ panarchy as a beneficial principle of social organization and order.
Panarchism
proposes extending panarchy further. It stands for a world in which people
live by the governing relations of their choice while abiding by the
decisions of their neighbors to live by theirs. A society with such liberty
will hold together in the same ways that societies have always held together:
through a complex network of shared values, beliefs, ways, language, and
other commonalities that are put to work through self-interest that is
expressed in individual, associational, and cooperative endeavors. It will
hold together better than today’s societies because the nonconsensual
government that fertilizes today’s constant political and economic
battles, rebellions, and civil wars will have been reduced.
Different
people understand freedom and liberty in different ways, and even when they
agree, they place different values on liberty. One woman may choose to labor
for another for a wage, while another may regard wage-labor as slavery. One
man may allow himself to be inducted into an army, while another may look
upon the draft as slavery. These different ideas of good and bad government
can coexist in panarchy. Liberty and government are not at mutually exclusive
poles. Abolishing government per se does not bring liberty for all.
Abolishing government and replacing it with one’s own personal vision
of liberty does not bring liberty for all. Liberty for all entails the
capacity for all to choose their own governments. In panarchy, men and women
are free to be unfree (in the eyes of others) to any desired degree. They may
enter into many different kinds of governing relations. This sets panarchy
apart from political conceptions that deny them the choice of State and
government. Panarchists do not attempt to smash the governments others want.
They deny no one the freedom to be unfree. However, they deny others (and
their States and governments) the freedom to make them unfree.
Once
we open up our thinking on the question of what government is, we can get
away from the idea of "a government" and "the
government." Government is a set of functions that can be identified.
Change is not a question of today's government or none. There are all
sorts of intermediate possibilities.
National
governments have absorbed major functions such as old age security, aid to
the indigent, and health care from civil society and local government. They
have done so via complex majority rules and voting procedures that
circumvented consent of the governed. Governments across the world often
suppress minorities of many kinds. The imposition of nation-wide rules discriminates
against and suppresses all those who do not consent and who do not want their
government to handle certain critical issues. Medicare, for example, involves
a taking and a wealth transfer. This kind of program could become
nonterritorial and consensual. Mr. K can subscribe to a plan and belong to a
government that deducts from his wages, while Mr. J need not. They can be
neighbors and do this.
Many
of today's government functions can remain in place for those who want them
while making them voluntary for those who do not. The idea in these cases is
not to end government but make it consensual. Vast amounts of regulation of
labor relations, energy, education, health, and welfare are such that one
neighbor can live without certain rules even if his neighbor wants them.
Instead of attempting to take Medicare away or attempting to persuade voters
to vote it down, which plays the game of accepting monopoly and territorial
government, panarchism goes at the problem of lack of consent and unjust
powers of government in a different way. Let those who want Medicare have it;
let those who don't withdraw. Panarchism seizes the moral high ground. Why
should those who don't want Medicare be impressed into it by those who do?
Isn't this like making everyone belong to the same church? How can there be
consent of the governed when we are herded, whether we like it or not, into
programs that affect our lives in major ways?
Coordination
problems involving human interaction are not going to disappear. The reform
of government even where coordination issues are not at issue may well be
difficult. Panarchism does not deny these difficulties. It sets out a just
and peaceful destination that can be achieved peaceably, which is a future of
reform in which the State abandons its territorial claims. This may happen
little by little. It may happen by degrees. It may happen partially and
gradually, or it may happen by leaps. Consensual and nonconsensual government
are likely to continue to exist alongside one another for some time. Reforms,
small and large, are unpredictable. They are for people themselves to advance
and accomplish. Every step that people take, peaceful and nonaggressive,
toward devising and living by their own government is a step toward more
complete panarchy and greater liberty.
Michael
S. Rozeff
Michael S. Rozeff is a retired Professor of Finance
living in East Amherst, New York. He publishes regularly his ideas and
analysis on www.LewRockwell.com .
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission
to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is
given.
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