From commenter Guy S, because it bears repetition
Even the commenters here put the trolls to shame.
All the discourse about Anarchy … went to dig up a few things … found it did work, in modified form, in Iceland for a couple hundred years. But Iceland in a number of ways seems to be the exception to the rule.
Then there are those who propose Anarchy to be the “Smiley faced†version of communism. Sorry, that dog won’t hunt either.
Or Nozick, whose contortions in trying to hammer out a “workable†anarchist state, to my mind, brings a new meaning to the word nuanced.
Chris Byrne states above;
Anarchy cannot work, because it is inherently self limiting; never mind that it ignores human nature.And that just about says it all. That pesky human nature strikes again.
And now my head hurts from reading bits an pieces of Chomsky, and others of his ilk.
Zactly, Guy S. And here’s something I suspect further, though I don’t have specific proof therof:
Anarchism is a tool developed for and being used by socialists to effectively disarm people as a nation to allow collectivism to take over without so much as a whimper of “help, help, I’m being repressed!”
If you look at the makeup of the Icelandic population, they were kinda like all related, arriving on sixteen boats – or something.
The island’s only been inhabited since the 10th century A.D. and the genealogy of almost all living Icelanders is collectively traceable to common ancestors, back to 1650. Is “family” or “clan” another word for anarchy? :-)
Even so they still had family “laws” and rules of some sort or another.
And anything by Chomsky is full of shit, anthropologically speaking.
Og, thank you sir! I about fell off my chair when I saw this. You will have to be plied with many adult beverages should you come out to this neck of the woods (while our wives swap tales of our general uncouthness and lack of social graces).
DirtCrashr
Had the added advantage of having been stationed in Iceland for a year. Do to the harsh living conditions, it is little wonder back around the 11th century or so, that their form of anarchy did work. The fact their nation was almost completely isolated from the rest of western civilization, and the need to rely on ones neighbors, family, and friends just to survive, would to my mind,(small as it is) promote a socialistic/communistic society. Indeed the Communist Party was a very strong player in that nations politics (their version, not necessarily the same as the Russkis) even while we were stationed there. That it did work for them for over 200 years speaks very much more to the Icelandic people, their collective (no pun intended) nature, and NOT to Anarchy or any one anarchist line of thought.
Nozick would say that he’s a minarchist, not an anarchist, anyway, as he found the State both inevitable, and better – in its minimal form – than anarchy and the rule of tooth and claw.
I don’t recall a suggestion that anarchy as it could ever exist in reality was his “ideal” state, when reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
(That a notional anarchy that worked because people did respect others’ rights to be let alone would have been his ideal is probably true. Heck, it’s a lot of people’s ideal, but Nozick wasn’t daft enough to imagine it possible.
By the end of ASU, he was more-or-less saying that any form of government was justified as long as you could leave if you didn’t like it. (Thus the “Utopia”, but one of people finding the Utopia they wanted and staying there voluntarily.)