Escape from Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare, and Anarchy Reconciled [Hardcover]

This book probably represents a landmark in the literature of liberalism on two counts. One of these is the robust statement of his major thesis on the compatibility of free markets, liberty and welfare. The other is the way he uses the non-authoritarian theory of rationality expounded by Karl Popper and William W Bartley.

"In practice (rather than in imaginary cases) and in the long term, there are no systematic clashes among interpersonal liberty, general welfare, and market anarchy, where these terms are to be understood roughly as follows...". Those who seek linguistic precision may be alarmed that his terms are to be understood roughly. Lester has quite deliberately avoided the kind of conceptual analysis, the teasing out of the meaning of terms, that Popper has labeled "essentialism". At least one reviewer noted the remarkable amount of meat that is packed into the book. This is partly due to the self-conscious avoidance of essentialism, partly to Lester's firm grasp on his materials and party to the mode of argumentation that he has adopted, following the non-justificationist or non-foundational line that has been articulated by Popper and Bartley.

The main characteristic of this approach is that it only attempts to achieve what is possible, which is the formation of a critical preference for one option rather than another, in the light of the evidence and arguments that are available up to date. He does not attempt the impossible, namely a logically conclusive proof of his case. What is possible is to propose a theory or a doctrine and subject it to criticism, then if it stands up we may proceed with that theory or doctrine until such time as an alternative is proposed that has better credentials and stands up to criticism at least as well as the previous candidate.

Turning to the organization of the book, after the Introduction are four chapters; Rationality, Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy. Each chapter is tightly organised and packed with crisply presented arguments which resist efforts to paraphrase them. Consequently no short review will do justice to the contents of the book or its organisation. Lester's theory of rationality has to reconcile two extreme views in economics - the neglected subjective, "a priori" approach of Menger and the Austrians, and the standard objective, empirical account. He adopts the theory that agents are self-interested utility-maximisers and he addresses a number of standard objections that are raised against this concept. He argues, successfully in my view, that the objections do no damage to his thesis.

Liberty is formulated as the absence of initiated or proactively imposed cost, or in the case of a mutual clash of imposed costs, the minimisation of imposed costs. This means avoiding or minimising the subjective costs imposed on us by other people, without our consent. Lester explains this formulation, compares it with typical libertarian alternatives to illustrate its strengths and then tests it by attempting to solve some problems presented to libertarians by David Friedman and John Gray. This is the longest chapter and it covers a huge amount of ground, including intellectual property rights and a theory of restitution for crimes and torts. In addition to the criticism of Friedman and Gray there is also a rejoinder to Amartya Sen and to Karl Popper.

The criticism of John Gray is important because for some time he enjoyed a high profile as a rare instance of a classical liberal Oxford don. Lester also responds to Gray's charge of "restrictivism", directed at liberals on the ground that they do not accept that freedom is "an essentially contested concept". In response, Lester accuses Gray of "conflationism", that is, importing a raft of contentious theories from elsewhere (psychology, hermeneutics, epistemology) to muddle and confuse the issues, at the same time appealing to various authorities and ultimately overriding interpersonal liberty in favour of some other goal.

Welfare is a sticking point for many people of good will who support freedom but believe that they cannot be libertarians because of all the poor people who need assistance. Actually support for deserving poor people could be provided by a VWA (Voluntary Welfare Association), dispensing funds from voluntary donations from all the people who currently vote to support welfare policies. The main targets in the chapter on welfare are R M Hare, Amartya Sen, Bernard Williams, John Rawls, John Harsanyi and Alan Ryan.

The final chapter on anarchy is very short because most of the work to defend private property and the market order has been done in previous chapters. "Basic conceptual confusion and mere prejudice are more the real problems" (page 193). He casts a critical eye over some conceptual aspects of the state and then he turns to John Rawls again as an exemplar of confusion and prejudice. Finally, Lester identifies the way that Rawls has simply ignored the libertarian position on the state, which is perceived as providing the arena where the most divisive issues can be removed from the political agenda.

A reply to Peter Vinton Jr.

Peter Vinton's title asks "And just where does `anarchy' fall on the spectrum again?" I was persuaded by an editor not to put my essay on this matter into an appendix of the book. I am not convinced that this omission was a good idea. Were it there, Vinton would have been answered and the ideological position of anarcho-liberalism might have been illuminated for other readers (maybe it can be in the next, a revised, edition). The short answer to his question is that anarchy is off the spectrum but on the compass. The long answer can be found here: http://www.la-articles.org.uk/pc.htm.

My intention in writing Escape from Leviathan was, using the critical-rationalist epistemology, philosophically to defend (by responding to all the best or typical criticisms I could find) the social-scientific evidence (but certainly not summarizing it all) that private-property anarchy does not clash with either interpersonal liberty or human welfare (which italicised proposition I called the `extreme classical-liberal compatibility thesis'). I eschewed all moral advocacy as irrelevant and confusing, given the objective nature of my thesis. However, I did, where necessary, engage in meta-ethics to explain how morals and moralizing (but without any particular content) fitted with the rest of my arguments and theories. I emphatically did not avoid morals because I think morals are unimportant or irrelevant to all libertarian arguments, as some critics have supposed. Still less did I write the entire book out of a "desire to address the familiar argument that libertarian principles have no morality", as Vinton somewhat more strangely supposes.

The introduction explains-as its subheadings indicate-the classical-liberal compatibility thesis, why moral advocacy is avoided, and the critical-rationalist method. So I don't agree that it begins "with a `recap' of exactly what constitutes classical liberalism".

In the chapter on rationality I do not only, or mainly, look at altruism, as Vinton appears to suggest. I am attempting to give a comprehensive philosophical defence of aprioristic instrumental rationality. And I look only at the `logic' of altruism (and related aspects of morals), where I look at it at all, rather than "its underlying motivations". I nowhere suggest or imply the proposition that "an attitude of enlightened self-interest is actually a better framework for real altruism than the current atmosphere of welfare" (although I do argue that human welfare is best promoted by laissez-faire). Contra Vinton, I explicitly argue against the thesis that "[p]eople are naturally psychological egoists" and in favour of the thesis that altruism is genuine. Given the immediately previous quotation, he does not even appear to be consistent in what he asserts I say here. Nor do I suggest that "`self-perceived interest' is a better expression than `altruism'" but that it is clearer than `self interest'. And I explicitly defend, not reject, the view that "altruism implies having an interest in others as an end in itself."

It is a howler, given what I write in the book about `coercion', to state "The second part of the book ... explores the end results of coercion versus liberty". And it cannot be accurate to state that the book has "some refreshing new theories on what constitutes equitable redress." For equity (fairness in justice) is not discussed; nor is any theory of justice propounded. However, Vinton is right to note the novelty and, I hope, interest of the theory of liberty as `the absence of [proactively] imposed cost' and the consequences of applying this as a thought experiment in various simple situations.

In the chapter on welfare, I defend the view of (spontaneous-)want-satisfaction as a plausible theory of welfare for persons. That is not the same as advocating that people should be "embracing the motive of want-satisfaction". And to explain and defend the objective libertarian consequences of maximizing such welfare is not to argue that this "leads to a better system of social justice". That is just the kind of red herring about morals the book takes pains to avoid.

The single short sentence on the anarchy chapter does not contain any obvious inaccuracies.

Why do I reply to a review that does not appear to have any real criticisms and quite a few misunderstandings? I don't want to miss an opportunity to clarify what the book is about because I believe it to be both substantially true and morally urgent. However, I do not have high hopes of its being given wider consideration while the publishers continue to sell only the hardback at such a stiff price and while anti-libertarian professors prefer to repeat their old lectures on Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His book is often thought-provokingly clever but it is a justificationist, minarchist, ragbag bereft of a clear theory of liberty and its relation to property and human welfare.

I have replied elsewhere on the net to most other amazon.com reviews, which have sometimes appeared in longer forms first. Seek and ye shall find.

J C Lester, March 2005

J. C. Lester has written an outstanding book. It fulfills all the criteria for that accolade. It is the author's first book yet he tackles the subject with the consummate skill of an expert in the field. He is up to date with all the relevant literature, that which is sympathetic to his intellectual cause as well as the arguments of its opponents. He is familiar with all of the philosophical issues and manages to breathe some new life into matters that have been discussed ad nauseum by libertarians over the years. While not always crystal clear in his exposition (indeed, this book is not to be recommended to beginners), Lester writes generally in a lively and provocative style which is sure to attract freedom-loving scholars. Furthermore, he is not afraid to take on some well-known shibboleths of contemporary political philosophy and subject them to full libertarian rigor; his critique of democracy was a heady, almost intoxicating, refutation of the most emotive (and apparently uncriticizable) concept in the political lexicon. As he points out, "Democracy is the enemy of liberty and welfare." [1] Of course, most critics of democracy are automatically dismissed as fascists, but that is a most implausible, indeed libelous, charge to level at one who is so committed a believer in freedom.

Lester shows considerable originality, either when he is discussing some of the deepest problems in political theory or when he is making a contribution to some of the more casual issues of contemporary politics. He is able to use the concepts and intellectual weaponry of libertarianism as effectively as the giants of the subject - Rothbard, David Friedman and the early Nozick included. Equally important are his critiques of some of the most well-known critics of libertarianism. His sections on Rawls and John Gray are neat little vignettes, brief but rigorous.

Lester has written a book about libertarianism and he is not frightened to consider the major, and the deepest, intellectual conundrums in the doctrine. But while the discussion is intense and penetrative, the book is not about foundationalism; in fact, the author specifically rejects any fundamental demonstration of the truth of libertarianism, whether that is derived from natural rights, utilitarianism, or any other justificatory intellectual scaffolding that is alleged to be impervious to criticism. In a considerable theoretical coup, Lester adopts Karl Popper's anti-justificatory critical rationalism, though he takes it into areas undreamt of by that philosopher. Rather than aiming at philosophical absolutism, Lester adopts the method of conjecture and refutation. The "truths" of libertarianism emerge as they survive a series of logical (and occasionally empirical) tests. Perhaps Lester pushes the analogy with Popperian science a little far when he says that libertarianism is "as unsupported as universal scientific theories." [2] After all, scientific theories, unlike those of ethics and politics, display a greater vulnerability to falsification, and there is considerable agreement among scientists as to what counts as a refutation of a theory. Furthermore, there is a strong a priori element in Lester's thinking that does not gel easily with Popper's scientific empiricism (though that philosopher is clearly no ordinary empiricist). Certainly, the apodictic reasoning of Mises, who constructed the whole of economic theory from apriori premises, would not be acceptable since, in Popper's view, a proposition that could not be falsified had zero empirical content. Some of Lester's ratiocination looks suspiciously like this.

Still, at least the approach Lester takes gets away from the endless and fruitless search for the permanent and irrefutable justification of political and moral values. Lester is particularly effective in rebutting Gray's critique of classical liberalism, which depends almost entirely on the author's claim that the doctrine fails to be justified in the light some fashionable contemporary doctrines. Gray has repeatedly claimed that liberalism does not to take in account cultural pluralism and that it mistakenly tries to provide universal principles for problems that can only be solved within a localized value framework. But, as Lester stresses, classical liberalism does not need a heavy metaphysical justification. Liberty is not a "value laden" concept that requires agreement on a broad set of philosophical themes, including the notion of the person, if it is to be serviceable normatively. Liberty is a coherent ideal, or set of principles, that, when applied to abiding social problems, has an increasingly universal appeal. Indeed, only the liberty principle can validate cultural variation; it allows a plurality of customs to develop subject only to the constraint of non-interference by any one (the state) over its rivals. What is also surprising and refreshing is that Lester can produce arguments against interference and coercion that, in most cases, though not all, are inferences from the liberty principle itself and its associated economic and philosophical principles. There is no "baggage" of heady but unrealistic metaphysics

None of this is suggestive of a lack of intellectual ambition in Lester. He sets himself the difficult task of producing a fundamental compatibility in our values; liberty, property, welfare, and (ultimately) libertarian anarchy are theoretically harmonious and contain no, or very few, internal inconsistencies. This is a welcome change from much contemporary theorizing in politics which so often depends on precarious tradeoffs between competing values and unstable compromises between rivalrous demands. But Lester is confident that we can maximize welfare and achieve liberty, that legitimate property is perfectly consistent with a coherent conception of justice, and that utility, properly understood, does not clash with libertarian rights. A further welcome feature of his analysis is that, for the most part, he eschews external morality. His normative suggestions derive from the consequences of adopting liberty and self-ownership, not from the demands of a morality demonstrable by reason. But, still, rarely has capitalism been justified with such philosophical expertise.

Lester takes a robust and relatively uncomplicated view of the person (though this is not to say that his analysis is not complex). Against those who maintain that individuals have a propensity for valued action that may not be revealed in their uncoerced choices, a position that normally leads to paternalism, Lester is happy to see us as rational choosers whose desires are perfectly valid reasons for action. This enables him to surmount the old altruism/egoism conflict. The fact that we are sometimes other-regarding in our actions is not a reason for dropping self-interest as the primary focus of action. Action is a product of perceived self-interest and there is no reason why that should always take an immediate egoistic form. When we behave altruistically we do so from a "selfish" desire to effect some improvement in the world. However, Lester slightly relaxes this rigor when he admits into the theory what he thinks is the necessity of cardinal utility (knowing how much a person is better off from a course of action). While he concedes that such notions are not strictly measurable, he claims that "without the notion of cardinal utility we are left without the notion of conscious beings." [3] I am not sure this is consistent with his minimalist, even materialist, view of the self that he espouses earlier. I wonder what some persistent interventionist might make of the notion of "conscious being": it could be used as a device for suppressing our choices in the market.

Naturally, Lester concentrates on liberty and he has some very important and novel things to say about it. To get away from the endless debates about the meaning of the concept, and the limits and extent of unfreedom, he conjectures that liberty is a state in which people do not have a subjective cost initiated and imposed on them by others without their consent. [4] People are at liberty when they pursue their choices in the market. Withholding a benefit to which a person might (mistakenly) think he is entitled, often a feature of positive liberty, is not a loss of freedom: only the imposition of a cost is. This might cover most cases of unfreedom, but there is a problem because of its unavoidably subjectivist nature. Those of a deep religious persuasion undoubtedly feel a loss of subjective liberty when their faith is traduced, as Muslims undoubtedly did when the author Salman Rushdie parodied their beliefs. This example is used by Lester, but not very satisfactorily. He simply says they had no "realistic case" without properly analyzing it in the context of his philosophical position. I do not think the notion of harm can be eliminated from a discussion of permissible actions, even though Lester rightly points to its conceptual ambivalence. Despite the ambiguity here, and irrespective of the Muslims' perhaps explicable anger at Rushdie, it is hard to imagine that they suffered a loss in liberty. Only by a perverse definition could their interests be said to have been harmed. The disputatious nature of harm is matched by the irredeemably subjectivist aspect of Lester's criterion of the imposition of cost.

The connection between liberty and property is obviously of crucial importance to libertarians and Lester has some interesting comments to make about it. In his discussion of the propertarianism versus libertarianism debate he comes down on the side of liberty. Indeed, the notion of self-ownership derives from the idea of liberty conjectured in a state of nature. However, the fact that liberty must prevail over property might pose some problems for Lester's compatibility thesis. He quotes the familiar example of the property owner buying up land so that he surrounds an otherwise innocent person, completely eliminating his freedom. Is property to be legitimately limited to prevent this happening? Lester merely asserts that liberty takes priority. Similar problems, identified by David Friedman, occur with a possible conflict between liberty and an uncontroversial notion of utility. Are we entitled, albeit illegitimately, to seize a gun when that is the only way of controlling a dangerous lunatic? Lester seems to go along with common sense solutions to admittedly unusual cases; they do pose probably insoluble intellectual problems. But they could be converted into more plausible scenarios by anti-libertarians using well-chosen examples.

There is a property problem more immediately relevant to public policy than the examples of "desert island ethics" analyzed in detail by Lester, however. I refer here to the original ownership of land and the rationale of land rent. It is a problem that bothered classical economists in the nineteenth century and it should concern libertarians today more than it does. It certainly has a bearing on Lester's compatibility of liberty and property thesis, for the case for a land tax (Henry George's single tax) is the only example of an interventionist policy I know that is consistent with efficiency (utility) and a superficially plausible notion of liberty. What gives the lucky inheritor of land the sole title to a resource limited by nature? What can possibly justify the differential rent paid to an owner of a property in New York which is identical to a property in Idaho? The owner of the New York apartment did not create that extra value: in a sense, everybody did. Are libertarians saying that inheritors of land display entrepreneurship? If so, then that concept becomes entirely analytic. Of course, the followers of Henry George did not deny that improvements to land should be fully rewarded. They were, on the whole, pro-market, and they could easily argue that no efficiency losses would occur through the single tax (as land has little alternative use). I do not deny that there are libertarian replies to consistent Georgists, but I was disappointed that Lester ducked the issue with his assertion that "....exclusive land ownership, for reasons of security and privacy, is usually a relatively trivial imposed cost on people and its absence a great one." [5] I am not sure that it is trivial, even though in the modern world knowledge is probably a more fertile source of wealth creation than landownership. Lester does recognize some constraints on original acquisition, [6] deriving from a version of Locke's injunction to leave "as much and as good" for others, and also those embodied in the claim that it is illiberal for people to consume irreplaceable natural resources. It is therefore a little disappointing that he gives no attention to the only socialist proposition that ever made any sense, i.e., collective restraint on individual landownership.

With regard to welfare, which Lester handles with considerable aplomb, there is only one area that provoked dissent from this reviewer. After eloquently defining welfare in terms of want-satisfaction, where only the individual is qualified to determine utility (defined in preference terms rather than quantifiable units of pleasure), Lester suddenly invokes the idea of the interpersonal comparison of utilities (an assertion which has an unacknowledged affinity with his earlier sympathy for cardinal utility). [7] It is true that he does so somewhat warily, aware as he no doubt is of the way in which interventionist, Benthamite utilitarians have used the notion to smuggle in all sorts of constraints on liberty and the market (for example, progressive income tax) which allegedly make everybody better off. Lester, however, says we make such utility comparisons all the time. Of course, a mother often says Susie needs a new dress more than Tommy needs shoes, and she no doubt thinks the family as a whole is better off as a result of the purchase. But we don't want such judgments to invade public policy. To my surprise, Lester says "general arguments can show that certain social rules are likely to promote over-all want-satisfaction."[8] It is true that he does not want some sort of comprehensive utility function imposed on society, but he is obviously worried by the implications of the formal Pareto criterion. For a welfare improvement to occur, everybody must gain, and there is a rigid prohibition on any interpersonal comparisons of utility in Paretianism.

This austere doctrine means, for example, that any movement from a slave to a free society requires the agreement (or compensation) of the slaveowners, or that the landowners in Britain would have to have been compensated on the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. But the problem here has been misunderstood. The Paretian is not necessarily precluded from making moral judgments about the evils of slavery or monopoly landownership; he is not necessarily an emotivist or a logical positivist. All he is arguing is that such appraisals have no relevance to a scientific analysis of what constitutes a welfare improvement. Slaveowners and monopoly landowners are simply immoral, but Lester is reluctant to make ethical judgments. Sometimes we must, though, if we are to have a fully compatible set of values.

In a short review article it is impossible to do justice to Lester's remarkable book. He manages to say new and exciting things about criminal justice (restitution should replace formal punishment), new ways of internalizing externalities, and property rights solutions to the "tragedy of the commons." Not all libertarians, for example, would agree with his claim that creators should have full claim to profits from copyrights and patents and there is a respectable body of thought that maintains that these arrangements simply establish economically and morally unjustified monopolies, but Lester's arguments are presented with sophistication and are informed by an impressive mastery of the secondary literature.

To conclude on a slightly critical note: anarcho-capitalists are very good at showing how a private enterprise system of law enforcement could work, how even national defense could be provided voluntarily, and how well-defined property rights would solve all the problems of the environment. Indeed, with some minor discordances, Lester has shown how in such a world all our values are compatible. Getting there, however, is not only an immense practical problem, but it is also an intellectual one which tests compatibility to the full. How can unfunded pension systems be wound up without hurting one generation? What about all those people who have become completely dependent on welfare through coercive national insurance schemes? Can they all be compensated in any changeover? We know the world looks very pretty in theory but in practice it bears the same tawdry and weary face that it always did. And always will?

[1] J. C. Lester, Escape from Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy Reconciled. (London, Macmillan, 2000), 203.

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Ibid., 48.

[4] Ibid., 54.

[5] Ibid., 106. Emphasis in the original.

[6] Ibid., 93-95.

[7] Ibid., 152.

[8] Ibid.