Introduction

Idealism is an accusation often levied against anarcho-capitalism. The implication is not merely that if anarcho-capitalism is “idealistic,” then it is ambitious, morally demanding, or different from the present order, but fundamentally either impossible or undesirable due to depending on assumptions that cannot survive contact with reality. In other words, the accusation is not just that anarcho-capitalism imagines a better society, but that it requires a false account of the people who would have to live within that society. Since proposed social systems are meant to apply to specific populations, a false account of the people within that population would be a serious objection if it were true.

The accusation of idealism can be divided into two structurally distinct forms: utopian idealism and dystopian idealism. A critique from utopian idealism asserts that the argument being criticized has attributed positive characteristics to the relevant population which do not correspond to reality. In other words, the system is said to require people to be more rational, more peaceful, more informed, more cooperative, more selfless, or more morally disciplined than they actually are. The criticism is that the system only functions because it has smuggled an unrealistically favorable description of human beings into its own premises. It has imagined a population with virtues, capacities, or dispositions which the real population does not possess in the required degree.

A critique from dystopian idealism proceeds in the opposite direction. It asserts that the argument being criticized has failed to attribute some negative characteristic to the relevant population which, according to the critic, really does belong there. In this case, the system is not accused of adding imaginary virtues to human beings, but of omitting real defects. The critic is saying that the theory fails because it does not adequately account for the population’s selfishness, violence, irrationality, ignorance, cowardice, tribalism, shortsightedness, or tendency toward predation. Where the utopian critique says, “your system only works because you have added positive qualities to people which they do not actually have,” the dystopian critique says, “your system only works because you have failed to include negative qualities which people actually do have.”

The important point, at this stage, is that both critiques are structurally concerned with the same thing: whether the argument has accurately described the people to whom the proposed system would apply. They differ only in the direction of the alleged error. The utopian critique alleges an excess of positivity: the theory has made people better than they are. The dystopian critique alleges a deficiency of negativity: the theory has failed to make people as bad as they are. In both cases, the accusation is that the theory cannot survive contact with the actual population, because the theory’s account of that population is false.

Now we will explore the specifics of how these criticisms are meant to apply to Anarcho-Capitalism and how they might be similarly levied against competing systems.

Utopian Idealism in Anarcho-Capitalist Dialogues

Two manifestations of the utopian idealism critique commonly appear in discussions of anarcho-capitalism. The first is an unsuccessful criticism against anarcho-capitalism itself, while the second is a successful criticism against some of anarcho-capitalism’s detractors, particularly socialism. In the first case, anarcho-capitalism is accused of being utopian because it allegedly attributes positive qualities to the population which do not actually obtain. The critic asserts that anarcho-capitalism can only function if people are more peaceful, more rational, more honest, more cooperative, or more morally restrained than they actually are. The accusation, in structural terms, is that anarcho-capitalism has smuggled an unrealistically favorable account of human beings into its premises.

This accusation fails because anarcho-capitalism does not require a transformation in human nature. It does not require that people become unusually selfless, unusually wise, unusually peaceful, or unusually devoted to the good of strangers. Rather, anarcho-capitalism begins from the recognition that human beings act according to their own ends, preferences, incentives, judgments, loyalties, fears, and perceived interests. It assumes that people will continue to economize, trade, compete, cooperate, calculate, miscalculate, pursue advantage, respond to costs, respond to benefits, and attempt to improve their own condition according to their own understanding of that condition. In this sense, anarcho-capitalism does not depend on adding imaginary virtues to the population. It attempts to construct social order around the motives and limitations already present in ordinary human action.

Nor does anarcho-capitalism require pretending that people will always pursue their ends peacefully. On the contrary, the entire point of a legal theory built around property rights, restitution, defense, and the non-aggression principle is that human beings can and do engage in theft, fraud, assault, coercion, trespass, murder, and every other form of criminal behavior. These are not anomalies that anarcho-capitalism has failed to consider. They are among the central problems the theory is meant to address. The anarcho-capitalist does not say that social order will emerge because people have become too virtuous to aggress against one another. He says that social order requires institutions and principles capable of identifying aggression, assigning liability, securing restitution, and permitting defensive force when peaceful cooperation breaks down.

On the other hand, the same utopian idealism critique can be successfully applied against many socialist theories, especially those which depend upon the emergence of “socialized man.” In this case, the proposed system requires the population to possess positive characteristics which do not correspond to ordinary human beings as they actually exist. It requires people to treat collective need, collective ownership, and collective planning as though these things reliably override their own private preferences, personal ambitions, local loyalties, and perceived interests. The individual is expected to act, not primarily as a person pursuing his own ends within a social world, but as a member of a collective whose choices are harmonized with the needs of the whole.

This is where the utopian assumption becomes visible. The socialist does not merely propose a different arrangement of property or production. He often requires a different kind of person to inhabit that arrangement successfully. The system functions most cleanly when individuals are willing to subordinate their own purposes to the purposes assigned by the collective, when they do not attempt to privately economize around the plan, when they do not seek personal advantage through black markets, corruption, favoritism, evasion, hoarding, or political manipulation, and when they do not resent the suppression of their own preferences in the name of social necessity. But these are not minor assumptions. They are enormous assumptions about human motivation. They require the population to be more selfless, more collectively oriented, more compliant, and more morally uniform than real populations actually are.

The result is that socialism becomes vulnerable to the precise critique that is often aimed at anarcho-capitalism. It attributes positive qualities to the population which do not actually obtain the required degree. It imagines that ordinary people can be made to consistently choose according to collective need rather than according to their own ends, preferences, incentives, relationships, and perceived interests. That is the utopian error in its proper form: the theory requires a population better suited to the theory than the population that actually exists.

Utopian Idealism in Anarcho-Capitalist Dialogues

The dystopian idealism critique also appears in both successful and unsuccessful forms. In its valid form, the critique identifies a real negative characteristic of human beings which a proposed system has failed to account for. If a theory depends on people being immune to corruption, indifferent to power, incapable of deception, unwilling to exploit institutional loopholes, or permanently satisfied with assigned social roles, then the dystopian critique succeeds. It says, in effect, that the theory has omitted something ugly but real. Human beings are not merely cooperative, productive, and peace-seeking. They are also capable of envy, predation, resentment, opportunism, violence, dishonesty, cowardice, tribalism, and domination. Any system which cannot survive the presence of these traits is not a system fitted to actual human beings.

However, the dystopian critique becomes unsuccessful when it does not merely identify real negative traits, but exaggerates those traits into a false account of humanity. This is often what happens when anarcho-capitalism is criticized on the grounds that human beings require the impositions of the state in order to avoid immediate descent into chaotic and violent depredation. In this form, the critic is not simply saying that some people are violent, dishonest, selfish, or predatory. That much is obviously true, and anarcho-capitalism does not deny it. Rather, the critic is implying that ordinary people are so fundamentally barbaric, so incapable of cooperation, and so incapable of respecting persons and property absent political command, that social order can only exist when imposed by a state. This does not correct an unrealistic optimism. It replaces it with an unrealistic pessimism.

This argument fails because it attributes to the population a level of savagery, stupidity, and antisocial tendency which does not correspond to reality. Human beings are flawed, but they are not merely predators being restrained by the nearest statute. They routinely form families, businesses, friendships, contracts, charities, churches, clubs, neighborhoods, trade networks, and peaceful associations without needing every interaction to be directly commanded by the state. They are capable of responding to incentives, reputation, retaliation, moral norms, future consequences, mutual benefit, and the obvious advantages of peace over conflict. The existence of human vice is therefore not enough to establish the necessity of the state. The critic must show that human vice defeats voluntary institutions specifically, rather than merely asserting that vice exists.

The deepest problem with the unsuccessful dystopian critique is that it often proves too much. If human beings are so violent, irrational, corrupt, and predatory that they cannot be trusted to interact without rulers, then it is not clear why those same human beings can be trusted once they become rulers. The state is not made out of some different material. Its legislators, police, judges, soldiers, regulators, bureaucrats, voters, and political clients are all drawn from the same population whose defects are being invoked to justify state power in the first place. So the more aggressively the critic emphasizes human depravity, the more he undermines his own solution. Human imperfection may establish the need for law, defense, accountability, and mechanisms of restraint, but it does not automatically establish the need for a coercive monopoly over law and defense.

The structural point is therefore the same as before. A successful dystopian critique identifies a negative human trait that a theory has genuinely omitted. An unsuccessful dystopian critique invents or exaggerates negative traits in order to make the theory appear impossible. In the case of anarcho-capitalism, the common claim that society would rapidly dissolve into violence without the state is not a realistic correction of ancap naïveté. It is often a dystopian fantasy in which real human flaws are inflated into a theory of universal barbarism. Anarcho-capitalism does not require denying that people can be violent, dishonest, or predatory. It only denies that these facts become an argument for placing a monopoly of coercion into the hands of people who possess the very same defects.

These two errors can be understood separately, but they can also be collapsed into a single, more general fallacy: the fallacy of population mischaracterization. In both the utopian and dystopian forms, the critic errs by giving a false account of the human beings to whom the system would apply. The difference is not that one concerns human beings and the other concerns something else. Both are errors about the population. The difference is only the direction from which the error is approached. In the utopian case, the critic alleges that the theory has attributed some positive characteristic to the population which does not actually belong there. In the dystopian case, the critic alleges that the theory has failed to attribute some negative characteristic to the population which really does belong there.

These two forms are closely related because affirming and denying human qualities often amount to inverse ways of describing the same alleged defect. To deny that people are sufficiently rational is very close to asserting that they are irrational. To deny that people are sufficiently peaceful is very close to asserting that they are violent. To deny that people are sufficiently cooperative is very close to asserting that they are antisocial. Likewise, to assert that people are predatory is very close to denying that they are capable of stable peaceful association. To assert that people are hopelessly shortsighted is very close to denying that they can respond meaningfully to long-term incentives. The utopian critique usually says, “you have added a positive quality that is not there,” while the dystopian critique usually says, “you have omitted a negative quality that is there.” But at the level of logic, both critiques concern whether the population has been characterized truthfully.

However, it is still useful in debate to identify which flavor of the fallacy is being committed, because the argumentative response differs. If the critic is making the utopian accusation, then the task is to show that the theory does not require the imaginary positive attribute being alleged. In the case of anarcho-capitalism, this means showing that anarcho-capitalism does not require people to be saints, geniuses, pacifists, or perfectly rational moral agents. It requires something far more modest: that human beings act according to their own ends and attempt to economize scarce means toward the satisfaction of those ends. They may do this wisely or foolishly, peacefully or aggressively, honestly or dishonestly, but the basic fact is that human beings act purposefully under scarcity. Anarcho-capitalism does not require a population better than this. It is built around this.

If the critic is making the dystopian accusation, then the response is different. The task is not merely to deny that anarcho-capitalism requires superhuman virtue, but to deny the critic’s exaggerated negative description of humanity. In that case, the question becomes whether human beings really are so barbaric, so irrational, so violent, or so incapable of social coordination that they will descend into wholesale madness without an authority figure standing over them. The anarcho-capitalist response is that this does not correspond to reality. People are deeply imperfect, but they are not merely dormant predators restrained only by political command. They form families, businesses, contracts, communities, markets, associations, and systems of trust. They respond to incentives, reputation, retaliation, habit, affection, moral norms, and the benefits of continued cooperation. The absence of a monopolistic authority does not magically remove all of these constraints from human action.

This is why the distinction remains useful even after the two errors are reduced to the same general fallacy. In both cases, the critic has mischaracterized the population. But in one case, he claims that anarcho-capitalism falsely adds virtues to human beings. In the other, he falsely adds vices or intensifies real vices beyond recognition. The first objection is answered by showing that anarcho-capitalism requires no impossible virtue. The second is answered by showing that the critic’s picture of humanity is more monstrous than realistic. Both responses defend the same underlying point: anarcho-capitalism is not built on a fantasy population. It begins with ordinary human beings as they are; purposeful, limited, self-interested, social, imperfect, capable of cooperation, capable of conflict, and always acting under conditions of scarcity.