Well, there is a sense in which I reject the notion of law and a sense in which I don’t. If law
means something like general and enforceable rules of justice, or generalized conventions and rules of procedure for settling disputes about justice, then I’m happy to accept the notion of law; if it means a prescription legitimately enforceable and binding in conscience because issued under color of government authority, then I reject that entirely for the usual reasons. (Both in the sense that I think that the things to which statists apply the term laws
are without any color of sovereign authority, and also because I think the statist conception of law itself depends on a logical impossibility, i.e. a just state.)
The question is as much a rhetorical one as anything else: whether, given the dialectical context, it makes more sense to leave intact the statist identification of law with authority, and then attack the claim that order requires law (in the sense of government edict); or whether to attack the statist identification of law with authority, while leaving intact the claim that order requires law (in a sense divorced from the notion of a sovereign legislative authority). Elsewhere I’ve favored doing the latter, but I’m just as happy to do the former if it better suits the rhetorical context.
I’m trying this way of doing things because my suspicion is that anarchistic conceptions of law mainly appeal and make intuitive sense to confirmed anarchists, or to people who are already immersed in the natural law tradition. To the average person on the street, it takes a fair amount of explaining. Which is fine; I’m all for explaining. But if my audience is the average person on the street and I have only 3-4 short paragraphs to work with, I think that it’s probably easier to just go ahead and use the word law
in its authoritarian sense, in order to convince people that laws (in that sense) are not necessarily and can rightfully be broken or simply ignored (after all, there are plenty of cases in popular culture of people who are thought of and talked about as heroic law-breakers), than it is to uproot that conception of the law, motivate the new conception that you want to replace it with, and then still come back around to explaining the kinds of alternative institutions that anarchists envision in place of government enforcement. So I chose to use the word lawlessness
to mean without government legislation or government jurisdisction
as a rhetorical choice, in order to be able to quickly get on to the point that government laws don’t deliver what the government promises, and to talk about how anarchy provides another way.
Does that clarify?
]]>