Ernest Becker (1924-1974) says a man carries two terrors he cannot face at the same time. The first: he will die. The second runs deeper. His death will leave the world unchanged, the water closing over the spot where he went down. Against the second terror a man builds what Becker calls a hero system. He earns a place in a scheme of value that outlasts his body. He fathers sons, raises a barn, writes a book, salutes a flag, joins a church, takes a side. The scheme tells him his life counts in a story longer than his lifespan, and the story lets him sleep.
Gary Chartier (b. 1966) builds his hero system out of the one thing Becker warns us we crave and dread in the same breath. He builds it out of refusing to be ruled, and out of refusing to rule.
I knew him before either of us read Becker. We sat in the same seventh-grade classroom at Pacific Union College, two Adventist boys raised to expect the world to end soon and to keep our rooms clean while we waited. We lost touch. Years passed. I came down with chronic fatigue syndrome, and a man learns fast who stays and who finds the exit when his body quits on him. Many found the exit. I wrote to Gary. He knew my letter was coming and he must have dreaded it, word got around that I was lost and needy, but he wrote back. His words held a sick man to the land of the living. The philosopher who later wrote a book called Understanding Friendship practiced the thing before he theorized it.
Chartier tells a subtraction story, as every serious man does. His runs like this. Take the world as you find it, with its presidents and police and prisons and borders and the long habit of obedience that holds them up. Subtract the part where some men command and other men obey or go in a cage. What remains holds together. People trade, help, promise, forgive, and keep faith with one another because they choose to. He gives this remainder a name that frightens the respectable. He calls it anarchy. In Anarchy and Legal Order he argues that law does not descend from a throne. It rises from below, from the agreements free men make and the courts they build by consent. Order without rulers. The phrase sounds like a contradiction to a man raised on Hobbes. To Chartier it names the only order worth the name.
Becker notices what the subtraction does for the man who performs it. The state, in his account, ranks among the grandest immortality vehicles men have built. The flag outlives the soldier. The nation hands the citizen a piece of forever and asks his life in return. To subtract the state is to refuse that consolation. Chartier gives up the largest immortality symbol on offer and stakes his hope on something smaller and harder: that men will choose the good with no gun at their backs.
A word is a coin that buys different goods in different countries. Say the word “freedom” to Gary and he hears voluntary cooperation, the absence of the command, men ordering their lives by consent. Say it to a Trappist monk and he hears the reverse. The monk’s freedom comes through obedience, the surrender of self-will that releases him from the tyranny of his own appetites. Say it to a wildland firefighter on a burning ridge and freedom shrinks to the next choice under the next gust, the narrow room a man has to move before the fire moves for him. Say it to an old woman who spent forty years under a regime that read her mail, and freedom means the mail arrives unopened. One coin. Four countries. Each man spends it on what his hero system sells.
Take “friendship,” the word at the center of Gary’s life and work. For Gary friendship is a moral, political, and spiritual good, the shape love takes between equals, the bond men make without being bound. For a Marine rifleman friendship is the man on his left, the one he dies beside and for, a tie sealed by shared danger and enforced by shame. For a venture capitalist a “friend” is a useful node, a contact who returns the call, a line of credit drawn on goodwill. For a hospice nurse friendship lasts three weeks and ends every time at the same place, and she gives it anyway. Gary’s friendship asks nothing of danger, nothing of use, and does not close when the body fails. I have the letters to prove it.
Take “commitment.” Chartier wrote a book by that name, The Logic of Commitment. He means a vow freely given that then binds the giver, the free man who chains himself and calls the chain a gift. For a Las Vegas bail bondsman commitment means collateral and a signature and a man you can find again. For a midwife commitment means staying until the child comes, however long the night. For a Sicilian widow commitment means the black dress she wears until they bury her in it. The same word organizes a courtroom, a birth, and a grave, and each speaker thinks his meaning the obvious one.
Most men hide their hero system from themselves. They mistake it for the way things are. Chartier belongs to the rare class who name the thing they live by. He says love sits at the center. He wrote it in The Analogy of Love and again in Loving Creation, where the love that moves the world traces back to the God who is love. He knows he trades the hard consolation of power for the soft and risky one of consent. A man this awake to his own scheme earns a high mark on the one test Becker offers, which asks whether you know what you reach for when you reach for a way to outlast death. Gary knows.
One question stays open. The order Chartier rejects, for all its cages and commands, also shelters the weak who cannot defend themselves and have no strong friend to write to. Voluntary love is glorious for the man whose letter gets answered but a scheme built on the free choice to love holds no answer for the one whose neighbors choose not to.
Three coordinates, then, to fix the man.
The shape of the hero. Chartier stands as the man who refuses both the throne and the cage, who looks at the oldest bargain in politics, obey me and I will keep you safe, and declines it, and spends his life drawing the blueprint of an order held up by nothing but the word free men keep.
The unnamed rival. His true opponent never appears on the page by name. It lives in the longing of every frightened man for a strong father, a sovereign, a Leviathan to take the terror off his hands and tell him what to do. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) gave that longing its great argument. Gary spends his work answering a craving older than any state.
The cost the ledger cannot price. The anarchist of love bets everything on the answered letter. He trusts that men will choose one another, will write back, will stay. Sometimes they do. I am alive to say so. But a system of voluntary love cannot price the cost of the letter that goes unanswered, the sick man whose friends find the exit, the one for whom no Gary writes. That bill sits at the bottom of his beautiful arithmetic.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws a line down the modern self. On one side stands the porous self of the older world, open at its edge, pierced by grace and spirit and the love of God, holding its meaning out in a charged world that can reach in and move it. On the other stands the buffered self of the present age, sealed at the boundary, master of its own inside, conferring meaning rather than receiving it, disenchanted and safe and alone. A Secular Age tells the long story of the crossing from the first self to the second. Most modern men live buffered and call the condition reality.
Gary Chartier carries a porous self into a buffered age.
Read his theology and the porousness shows at once. The God of The Analogy of Love and Loving Creation is no watchmaker idling behind a closed cosmos. He acts, He loves, He draws persons into communion, and the love that moves Him moves through the world toward men. Chartier locates fullness, Taylor’s word for the place where life runs deeper and richer, in love and friendship and the bond freely kept. The man who answered a sick friend’s letters across two bad years, with no return in standing, lives out the porous self in plain view. Grace runs between persons. Meaning arrives from outside the skull. That is the older self, alive in a man of the buffered age.
Now read his politics, and the idiom flips. The case for the stateless order comes dressed in the language of the buffered world. Self-evident goods apprehended by any rational agent. Inalienable rights. Consent. Mutual benefit among free and equal persons. Taylor has a name for that picture of society. The modern moral order, the social imaginary that replaced the old hierarchical cosmos with an order of mutual advantage among rights-bearing individuals. Anarchy and Legal Order takes that imaginary and runs it to its far edge, dissolving even the sovereign the order threw up. Chartier does not stand outside the modern moral order to judge it. He stands at its furthest point and pushes.
Watch what he does with the remainder. Subtract the myth that some men hold the right to rule, he argues, and a voluntary order stays behind. Taylor built a career taking apart that shape of argument. He calls it a subtraction story, the tale of modernity as the clean residue left when illusion drops away. His answer holds here too. No neutral remainder waits under the state. What stays after the subtraction is a positive construction, a new moral order with its own goods and its own picture of the person, carried in practice and image and story rather than deduced from bare reason. Chartier presents his anarchy as what reason sees once the fog lifts. Taylor places it as one articulation among the many the modern age has thrown off, an option in the nova, not the floor beneath the options.
Here the seam opens, and the seam is the man. His moral source runs porous, communal, incarnate, particular, the love of a God who acts and the friendship of one man for another. His public argument runs buffered, universal, rationalist, the rights and reasons any agent anywhere might grant. Taylor names the strain without making him choose. The universalism is the buffered dress a porous source puts on to be heard in an age that will not take “God is love” as a premise. Chartier reaches for self-evident reason because the room has stopped listening to grace, and the reaching hides the true ground of the thing, which is communion.
The hidden ground turns out to be the part his politics needs most. A stateless order cannot live as argument. It has to live as a social imaginary, the way ordinary men picture and inhabit their common life, carried in habits and bonds and shared practice. The polycentric-law theory is buffered theory. The imaginary that might hold an order together without a throne is the sacramental one, church and friendship and mutual aid, the communion his theology already describes. His rationalist register conceals the resource his anarchy depends on.
One pressure stays unrelieved, and candor keeps it open. Taylor’s history says the modern moral order and the disciplining state came up together, the reforming, ordering, civilizing power growing alongside the imaginary of mutual benefit. Chartier keeps the order and discards the state. He bets the two pull apart. Taylor’s long account suggests they grew from one root, and the bet runs against the grain of the story that produced the very goods Chartier wants to save.
In an age that flattens the good into private preference, Chartier does the rare Taylorian labor. He articulates his moral source instead of leaving it tacit, and names love and God as the place his ethics draws its power. He scores lower where he takes that articulation for the voice of reason as such, one window held open in the immanent frame mistaken for the open sky. He writes from inside the buffered age with the window open, and his politics reads as the porous self trying to build a public world that lets the window stay open. The letters that reached a sick man were the same project in miniature. Communion first. The argument comes after, reaching for words the age will still accept.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970)
Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) names two things a man does when the firm or the church or the country he belongs to starts to fail. He leaves. Or he stays and complains. Hirschman calls the first exit and the second voice. Exit is the clean economist’s move. You take your custom elsewhere and the provider feels it in his receipts. Voice is the messier political one. You stay in the room and argue and organize and try to set the thing right from inside. A third force decides which a man reaches for. Hirschman calls it loyalty. Loyalty raises the price of leaving and holds a man in his seat long enough to use his voice, and without some of it the able and the quality-minded walk at the first sign of trouble and leave the failing thing to rot.
His sharpest finding cuts against the easy faith in choice. Cheap exit starves voice. When the door stands open and leaving costs little, the men most alert to decline, the ones who might have fixed the place, go first, and their leaving pulls out the pressure that might have forced repair. Exit turns into a safety valve that lets bad management sleep. Voice needs men who stay.
Gary Chartier builds the purest exit doctrine in modern political thought.
His anarchism runs on leaving. Anarchy and Legal Order hands a man competing providers of protection and law, courts and agencies he hires and fires, and the remedy for a bad one is to take his business down the road. He does not petition a sovereign. He does not outvote a majority. The state, in Chartier’s case against it, traps a man and gives him only the weakest voice, a single ballot counted against millions, take it or leave the country. The market gives him exit, and exit disciplines a provider as no vote can. Chartier prefers the open door to the long argument. He stakes the order on it.
Hirschman knew exit in his own body, a Jew who ran from Berlin and then from Paris ahead of the Germans, and he knew voice, the lifelong optimist who bet on reform from within and called himself a possibilist. He gave neither the last word. He spent his book warning against pure voice too, the trapped subject of the tyrant who cannot leave and cannot be heard. But he presses the question Chartier’s confidence skates past. What happens to voice in a world built for exit.
The answer runs against the anarchist hope. In an order where leaving costs nothing, the first to leave a souring community is the man who cares most and sees clearest, the one whose staying and arguing might have saved it. His exit is rational and his exit is a loss, because it strips the group of the voice that mends it. A community needs men who stay through a bad season and fight for the thing. An order that prices exit at zero teaches every able man to skip the fight.
Then loyalty, and here the pressure climbs. Loyalty does the work exit cannot. It carries a group through the year exit would empty out. A pure-exit order gives loyalty no anchor in its structure. Why bleed for a community a man can quit tomorrow at no cost.
Chartier has his answer. He wrote a book called The Logic of Commitment and another called Understanding Friendship. His left-libertarianism comes thick with mutual aid and bonds freely kept. Loyalty, he says, lives in those bonds. Men stay because they love one another and keep their word, not because the law bolts the door. The loyalty is real and the loyalty is chosen, and the two sit at peace.
Hirschman’s counter comes quiet and hard. Loyalty bites when a man stays though he could go. A tie he can dissolve at will, at no cost, holds him only while he wants to be held, which is the season loyalty is not needed. The test arrives in the bad year, the year a man has every reason to walk, and a loyalty with no grip in that year is a fair-weather thing. Chartier makes every bond exit-able by design. He has theorized loyalty with great care and built an order that taxes it lightly and gives it nothing to hold.
And then the man who cannot exit at all. The exit order rewards the mobile, the solvent, the connected, the customer with a second provider down the road and the cash to switch. It offers nothing to the one with no alternative and no means to reach it. The sick man cannot shop for a healthier town. The poor man cannot fire his only protector. The friendless man has no second friend to call when the first goes cold. In an order all exit and no voice, his decline draws no notice, because notice comes from the threat to leave, and he has nowhere to go. He is the cost the ledger cannot price, the figure who falls through the floor of a market in everything.
I have stood on that floor. When my body quit, the friends who could leave, left. They took their custom to healthier company, and the market in friendship cleared them out of my life at small cost to them. I could not exit my body. I had no second provider. I wrote to Gary, who owed me nothing and stood to gain nothing, and he wrote back, and kept writing across 1992 and 1993. That was not exit. That was loyalty, and the voice of a man who stays. The philosopher of the open door practiced the thing his politics leaves thin.
So Hirschman finds the missing half of Chartier’s philosophy. An order built all of exit needs loyalty and voice to live through a bad season, and the place that half already lives, in Chartier’s own work, is the theology of friendship and commitment he keeps in a separate book from the politics. The consent-and-providers language carries the exit. The love language carries the loyalty. He has written both and joined neither, and the bridge between them is the one a sick man crossed on paper thirty years ago, when a friend chose voice over exit and answered the letter that the market said to leave unopened.
Mancur Olson broke a comfortable assumption, that men who share an interest will act on it. The old view ran that a group with something to gain together will organize to get it, the way a market of buyers and sellers finds its price. Olson found the opposite for any group past a certain size. In The Logic of Collective Action he argued that a rational man in a large group will not pay for a good the whole group enjoys, because his single share of the benefit is small, his single contribution moves the outcome not at all, and he collects the good whether he pays or not. So he waits for others. Everyone waits. The good goes unprovided, or under-provided, though every man in the group wants it and gains from it. Not because any man is wicked. Because each man is rational, and rational men ride free.
The good that fits this trap best is the one no man can be shut out of. Olson’s name for it, the collective or public good, covers the things that reach a man whether or not he chips in. Clean air. A levee. The peace of a street. Above all, defense. Hold off an army and you hold it off for the man who paid nothing as surely as for the man who paid. So the man who pays nothing comes out ahead, and the rational move runs to letting the neighbor fund the wall.
Gary Chartier asks free men to fund the wall.
His order runs on voluntary supply of the goods the state now monopolizes by force. Anarchy and Legal Order gives a society its law through customary courts and competing arbiters, its protection through agencies a man hires, its disputes settled by bodies that earn their standing rather than command it. No tax. No conscription. No sovereign compelling a man to pay for the common peace. Chartier’s hottest fire falls on the legitimacy of that compulsion. No man consented to the state. Its authority rests on a story. Strip the story and the coercion stands naked.
Olson grants all of it and asks a question the legitimacy argument never touches. Concede that the state holds no rightful claim. Concede every man sincere and decent and willing in principle to support the common order. Who pays for the courts. The free-rider problem does not care whether the state is legitimate. It bites on the supply of the good, not the right of the supplier. A town of honest men who all want a militia still under-funds the militia, because each honest man reasons that his own contribution will not decide whether the militia stands, and the militia, if it stands, guards him regardless. Goodwill does not dissolve the logic. This is the bite, and it lands with none of the cynicism that reads men as knaves. Olson’s free-rider wants the good. He sees that his coin will not buy it and that he gets it free if others buy.
Chartier has answers, and Olson handed him the best one. Olson’s own escape from the trap runs through what he called selective incentives, private rewards bundled with the public good and withheld from the man who will not pay. The union wins the wage for all workers and the trap should sink it, so it bundles the wage with members-only benefits and a closed shop, and the private lure funds the public win. Chartier’s protection agency works the same seam. It sells protection as a service a man buys for himself, excludable, like insurance, billed to the subscriber and denied to the man who skips the premium. Make the good excludable at the point of sale and the public-good framing falls away. A second reply runs through size. Olson said small groups supply collective goods well, because each member’s share grows large enough to move him. Chartier’s order is built of small things, mutual-aid societies, congregations, guilds, neighborhoods, the privileged small groups Olson exempted. A third runs through the social rewards Olson saw in face-to-face groups, the esteem and shame and standing that move a man among people who know his name, enforced by reputation and the door shut to the cheat.
Olson’s counter comes in three matching strokes, and they cut. The selective incentive funds the excludable rind and leaves the public core unpaid. A protection agency can sell a man a guard at his door. It cannot sell him deterrence, the peace that settles on a whole district when raiders learn the district fights back, because that peace falls on the subscriber and the holdout alike. You cannot repel an invasion for paying customers only. The big, lumpy, non-excludable goods, external defense and the general peace, are the ones no subscription captures, and they are the ones the state seized first. The agency model covers the part a man can be billed for and abandons the part he cannot.
The small-group reply meets the second stroke. Olson granted the small group and then pointed at the gap above it. A federation of small communities has to supply a good larger than any one of them, the peace among them all, and that larger good faces the same trap one floor up. Each small group rides free on the order of the whole. The mutual-aid society funds its own and lets the wider peace fend for itself, because the wider peace reaches it whether it pays in or not. Olson’s logic does not vanish when you stack small groups. It returns at the join.
The social reward meets the third. Esteem and shame govern a man among people who know him, and they thin as the circle widens and the faces turn anonymous, the scale at which the largest public goods live. Reputation polices the village. It does not raise an army or keep the peace among strangers across a thousand miles.
Chartier is a left-libertarian. He cares about the poor, the weak, the worker, the man at the bottom, and he built that care into his anarchism, against bosses and structural poverty. Olson’s logic falls hardest on the goods that care depends on. The protection of the man who can pay no premium is a public good in its purest form. Justice for the indigent, a hearing for the man with no retainer, defense for the district too poor to fund a guard, these reach people who cannot be billed and spill onto a wider public that need not pay. The selective incentive cannot fund them, because their beneficiary is the man with nothing to offer in trade. The state funds them, when it funds them, by compelling the man who can pay to cover the man who cannot. Chartier abolishes the compulsion. His leftism wants the poor man guarded. His libertarianism forbids the forced transfer that pays for the guard. Olson stands at that seam and asks which half gives way.
So Olson grants Chartier the whole moral case and presses the structural one beneath it, and the pressure runs to a fork. Either the voluntary order stays small, where shares are large and faces are known and the logic sleeps, and gives up the scale at which a modern society lives. Or it builds selective incentives strong enough to fund the public core, compulsory dues, exclusion, enforcement against the holdout, and starts to wear the coat of the thing Chartier undressed. The protection agency that must compel payment to fund the peace that spills onto non-payers collects a tax and calls it a fee. Scale or compel. Olson says a man cannot have large-scale voluntary supply of non-excludable goods, and that pairing is the one Chartier’s order needs.
The honest close names what the ledger cannot fund. An order built on what each man will pay for guards each man to the depth of his purse and stops at the goods that belong to everyone and are owed by no one in particular. The clean street. The kept peace. The open court for the man who arrives with empty hands. These are the goods a free-rider order under-buys, and the man they fail is the one who could never have paid his share, the one Chartier the leftist set out to defend. He wrote the case against the boss and the case against the state in the same breath. Olson points to the bill between them, the cost of the poor man’s peace, and asks, in a society of free men paying only for what they choose, whose name goes on it.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, Chartier loses the floor he stands on.
John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) builds his anthropology on three claims. Man is social and tribal before he is anything else. Socialization and inborn sentiment set his values before his reason wakes up. Reason ranks last of the three drivers, behind both. Each claim cuts at a load-bearing wall in Chartier’s house.
Start with the consenting individual. Chartier rests his edifice on the person as the unit of moral concern, the one who holds rights and grants or withholds consent, and his case against the state turns on the point that no man agrees to be ruled. Mearsheimer answers that the man who “consents” arrived pre-loaded. Family and society infused him with a value code through a long childhood, before his critical faculties came online, so the agent Chartier needs as foundation shows up only after the formative work is done. Consent becomes a ratification of what socialization already wrote.
The point lands hard on Chartier’s own path. He found economic libertarian authors in high school, following his father’s lean. Mearsheimer reads that sequence as the rule rather than the exception. The value infusion arrives first. The reasons come later and dress it.
Next, natural law. Chartier grounds morality in practical reason apprehending basic goods, and he extends the result as a universal apprehensible by any rational agent. Put reason last, as Mearsheimer does, and the motor stalls. The “natural law” a man reads off the world starts to look like the moral grammar of his particular formation, Adventist, Anglo-American, Cambridge-trained, mistaken for the deliverances of universal reason. Flourishing Lives: Exploring Natural Law Liberalism and Radicalizing Rawls both reach for the whole planet. Mearsheimer treats that reach as the liberal delusion itself: everyone holds the same rights, so the liberal feels licensed to carry them abroad. Tribal man does not love mankind. He loves his own and will bleed for them.
Then the stateless order. Here Mearsheimer turns from inconvenient to lethal, because his social man predicts the state. If survival runs through the group, the group builds hierarchy, authority, and enforcement, and then it builds walls against the next group. The realist reads anarchy as the danger, the absence of authority that breeds fear and violence, not the prize. Anarchy and Legal Order asks free men to order their lives by consent and polycentric courts. Mearsheimer points at every state that ever formed and asks why social man, left alone, keeps reinventing the master Chartier wants abolished.
Love and friendship cut both ways. Mearsheimer agrees with the deepest thing in Chartier. We are profoundly social, we form strong attachments, we sacrifice for our fellows. Understanding Friendship and Vulnerability and Community sing the same social man Mearsheimer describes. But Mearsheimer’s bond runs thick inside the line and thin or hostile across it. In-group love implies the out-group edge. Chartier takes the bounded thing, tribal solidarity, and stretches it into a universal principle, friendship as the template for an order among all men everywhere. The stretch is the delusion Mearsheimer names.
So the fair verdict, with the comfort removed: under Mearsheimer, Chartier is a liberal at the root, an individual core, a universal right, a faith in reason, wearing anarchist dress, and the dress exposes him further rather than less, because he strips away even the coercive tribe his own social nature throws up and trusts a purer version of the consenting rational man.
Now the strongest reply Chartier has. He is not the atomist Mearsheimer attacks. His left-libertarianism comes thick with mutual aid, community, anti-capitalism, and the claim that men owe one another more than non-interference. He concedes most of the social anthropology going in. His quarrel narrows to a single bet: social man can order himself by consent without a sovereign over him. Mearsheimer answers that bet with the historical record, every state, everywhere, always. Chartier answers with customary law, polycentric courts, and the long history of cooperation that needs no throne. The disagreement turns empirical, about what social man builds when no one rules him, and the record leans Mearsheimer’s way while leaving Chartier his examples.
One convergence. Both men distrust the crusading universalist state and its wars, Mearsheimer because realism should restrain the liberal crusade, Chartier because the state holds no legitimate claim at all. They reach the same door from opposite rooms.
If Mearsheimer is right, then, Chartier has not been refuted so much as outbet. The realist has not shown that society needs a master. He has wagered that it always finds one, and handed Chartier the burden of proof.
David Pinsof says we should set the mission statement beside the deed and ask what a man’s behavior buys him in a world of status-climbing, coalition-building primates. Forget what he says he wants. Watch what he gets. Run Chartier through that test and the picture turns sharp and unkind, and then it turns on the frame.
Start with the sell. The anarchist case, Chartier’s included, leans on a belief about belief. Men prop up the state because they accept a myth, the myth that some men hold the right to rule. Strip the myth, show the citizen that authority rests on nothing he ever agreed to, and the voluntary order comes out from under it. Pinsof has a name for that shape. The misunderstanding myth. The flattering story that bad beliefs cause the trouble and the thinker who corrects beliefs saves the day. His answer comes blunt. Men do not back the state because they misread its legitimacy. They back it because it points guns at their rivals and they want their hands near the trigger. The voter is not confused. He is competing. Chartier asks him to set down the richest prize in the society, the coercive apparatus, on the strength of an argument, and the frame reads the request as the one move a competitor never makes.
So the philosophy, on this reading, aims at a target that is not there. No misunderstanding waits to be cleared. A fight over the machine runs underneath, and Chartier proposes that everyone walk away from the machine at once.
Then the position. Pinsof treats stupidity as strategic and treats a man’s stances as a portfolio. Left-libertarian market anarchism pays a dividend most positions cannot. It draws moral credit from the left, against bosses, inequality, corporate power, structural poverty, and draws the contrarian’s distinction from the libertarian refusal of the state, and it lets the holder stand above the left-right scrum claiming a purity neither side can match. The mainstream cost of wearing the word anarchist is the price of product differentiation in a crowded market of intellectuals. The man holding the position is a distinguished professor, an associate dean, a Cambridge LLD, prolific across two presses a year. The frame notes that the anarchism, far from costing him his place, made the place distinctive. Anarchy and Legal Order is the brand.
Now the hard part, love and friendship, where the frame meets its strongest counterexample. Chartier’s stated center is love. He wrote The Analogy of Love and Loving Creation and built an ethic on Understanding Friendship. Pinsof’s first move is the Starbucks move. The elevated universal love reads as mission statement, and pretending to care differs from caring, and actions speak louder. Then comes the deed. The man answered a sick man’s letters across two years, with no return in status. Actions speak louder, and these actions say the words were not empty.
Watch how the frame absorbs this. Pinsof grants the friendship at once. Particular, reciprocal kindness to an ally is the oldest evolved behavior in the primate book, and his model predicts it. What his model doubts is the leap, the jump from one answered letter to an order among all men held up by love. The particular bond is the real and evolved thing. The universal banner is the display. The warmth that clears the man of cynicism is the warmth aimed at one former classmate, and Chartier asks it to scale to humanity, and the scaling is the part the frame calls a mission statement. The deed vindicates the man and undercuts the doctrine in the same stroke.
Pinsof’s lens re-describes every act of love as a status move and every argument as a weapon, and hand it any behavior and it returns the same verdict. A tool that cannot fail to convict tells you more about the tool than the defendant. The letters are the test case. A frame that has to read two years of correspondence to a sick nobody as coalition maintenance has stretched the word coalition until it wraps around everything and grips nothing. Pinsof half-knows this. His essay closes by swallowing its own tail, the only misunderstanding is that there was a misunderstanding, and that ending is a confession that the lens explains too much to explain anything in particular. The cynic’s frame cuts deep on the crowd and shallow on the man. It is sharp on stated motive at scale and blunt on the private deed done in the dark.
So under Pinsof, Chartier’s politics looks like a portfolio aimed at a misunderstanding that is not there, and his universal love looks like a banner flown for moral altitude. His friendship survives the test. And the survival of that one friendship is the crack in the frame, the place where the deed outruns the cynicism built to explain it away. I was the data point. The man wrote back when no status came from writing back, and the most cynical reading on the market cannot make that disappear.
