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 under star teacher Audrey Judd (wife of the hilarious PUC talker Wayne Judd), 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 because 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: 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 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.
The Voice
The first thing about his voice on the page is how mild it runs against how radical it argues. The man wants the state gone, and he writes about that in the tone of a professor chairing a faculty committee. No heat, no rabble, no polemic. Reviewers keep landing on the same word for it. One found The Analogy of Love spare and lucid and free of jargon, and another said the case in Anarchy and Legal Order comes laid out so an ordinary reader can follow it. A third granted that the book does not show off its learning. The plainness is a choice. He holds a Cambridge doctorate and a higher doctorate and could write the dense Continental anarchist sentence in his sleep, and he declines to.
His signature move is the flat provocation followed by the hedge. He opens a piece by stating the bomb in a short declarative sentence, libertarianism is a redistributive project, market anarchism belongs to the socialist tradition, and then he spends the next paragraph qualifying it, surrounding it, asking which questions you have to answer before the claim holds. The shock sits in the content. The delivery cools it back down at once.
Under that runs the analytic philosopher and the lawyer braided together. He likes the formal definition with variables. He will say one man stands subordinate to another when the second holds significant and persistent power over the first, A and B, the way a logic text or a statute reads. He likes the clean triad, opposition to subordination, exclusion, and deprivation, the way the subtitle of Markets Not Capitalism lines up bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty. He draws distinctions for a living and the prose shows it, the careful sorting of a normative claim from a descriptive one, the border between applied and foundational ethics named as a border.
And he hedges without pause. I suggest, I take to be, it seems clear that, this is rightly seen as, what may be a thread. For a man whose conclusions sit at the far edge, the epistemic manner stays tentative and invitational, never thumping. He grants the other fellow’s view a fair hearing before he offers his own, and concedes that rival characterizations are not wrong-headed. The courtesy is constant and it is the rhetoric. A reader braced for a firebrand meets a host instead, and the welcome lowers the guard. You find yourself nodding at the abolition of the state because the man proposing it sounds so reasonable.
The register shifts when he turns from politics to God. In the devotional books, Vulnerability and Community, Understanding Friendship, Loving Creation, the variables drop away and the sentences warm and slow. Love, friendship, communion, the words carry the weight. The same lucidity holds, but the lawyer’s scaffolding comes down. One reviewer of the love book confessed that a few stretches grew abstract enough to wear him out, which fits a writer who reaches for the careful qualification even when the subject is the love of God.
Buffered and Porous Selves
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.
He 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: 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 (1932-1998)
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.
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.
René Girard (1923-2015)
René Girard traced human war to one root and human peace to one crime.
The root is desire. A man does not want from the gut, on his own. He learns what to want by watching another man want it. Desire copies. Girard calls it mimetic. I reach for the thing my neighbor reaches for, not because I knew its worth first but because his reaching taught me, and now we both want the one thing and stand as rivals over an object our wanting made precious. Spread that across a community and the rivalries feed one another. Each man imitates his rival’s hatred as he once imitated his rival’s desire. The violence doubles and runs from hand to hand until the whole community stands at the edge of the war of all against all.
Then the crime that saves it. The mounting violence, with nothing left to settle it, settles on one man. The crowd turns as a single body against a single victim, an outsider, a cripple, a stranger, a king, someone marked and unable to strike back. They lay the whole crisis on him. They kill him or drive him out. And the fever breaks. The peace that floods in feels like his gift, so the dead man turns holy, guilty in the hour they fell on him and sacred once he lies still, and the community remembers the murder as a sacrifice and repeats it at an altar to keep the calm it bought. Violence and the Sacred lays this out. The scapegoat founds the order. Every archaic religion spends one life to spare the rest.
The state is the heir to that bargain. The court takes vengeance out of the hands of the wronged man and gives it to a third party he cannot strike back at, and the blood feud stops because the verdict comes from a power above the quarrel and answers to no one in it. The law is channeled violence, the old single victim refined into a standing institution that holds the monopoly on the sword and so keeps the rivalries from running to the crisis.
The Gospel breaks the spell. The Passion tells the scapegoat story for the first time from the side of the victim. It shows the crowd, the false charge, the expulsion, the death, and it declares the dead man innocent and the crowd wrong. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning read the Cross as the unveiling of the founding murder as murder. The long fallout is the modern conscience, the concern for the victim, the instinct to check whether the accused crowd has it right. But the unveiling strips away the old cover without stripping away mimetic desire. It tells men the scapegoat is innocent and leaves them still wanting what their neighbors want. So the modern world comes out more tender toward victims and more exposed to its own violence at once, the brakes loosened, the calm no longer cheap. Girard turned apocalyptic at the end, in Battling to the End, watching for the restrainer that holds the crisis off and fearing its removal.
Gary Chartier wants to remove it.
He is a Christian theologian of non-aggression who looks at the institution holding the sword and judges its violence unowed and its authority a story. He wants the state gone. Set him beside Girard and the convergence runs deep, deeper than with any other man. Girard says the state is the scapegoat refined. Chartier says the state is a maker of victims, and he can point at the cell, the gallows, the conscript, the enemy named in a war, the foreigner at the line. He can quote Caiaphas, who told the council it was better for one man to die for the people, and name that the founding formula of the thing, the single victim spent for the peace of the rest, written into law and called justice. Chartier the anarchist refuses Caiaphas. He reads the Gospel’s defense of the victim straight through to its political end and asks why a community redeemed from sacrifice still keeps the great sacrificial house standing. On Girard’s own ground he looks like a man trying to build the post-sacrificial order the Cross made thinkable, the society that holds together with no victim buried under the foundation.
Then Girard turns and asks the dark question back. Can it hold.
The state, on his account, is also the restrainer. Its monopoly court ends the feud because no party can avenge a verdict that comes from above them all. Take the monopoly away and put competing agencies and rival arbiters in its place, the polycentric order of Anarchy and Legal Order, and the reciprocal shape returns. My protector against yours. My court against the court you hired. No final third that no one can strike back at, which is the office the sovereign filled. Girard has a name for two rivals who mirror each other with no power above to part them. He calls them doubles, and the doubles are the engine of the crisis. An anarchy of protection agencies, to Girard’s eye, is the mimetic crisis with the brake pulled out, and the crisis in his anthropology ends one way. It finds a victim.
Chartier has a strong reply. The unveiling is not the whole of it. Christ gives men a model to imitate whose desire grasps at nothing, and to copy that model is to drain the rivalry at its source instead of damming its overflow with a corpse. Good imitation. Converted desire. Forgiveness, love of the enemy, mutual aid, the bond freely kept. Chartier wrote The Analogy of Love and Understanding Friendship and built a politics on the claim that men can want with one another rather than against one another. His order does not contain violence by spending a victim. It dissolves the rivalry that breeds the victim. And the state, far from restraining that violence, is its largest organized supplier, so striking it down follows the anti-sacrificial logic to the floor.
Girard’s counter. The Cross removes the lie. It does not remove the desire. A man can know to the marrow that the scapegoat is innocent and still want what his neighbor holds and still escalate when his neighbor wants what he holds. Conversion is real. Conversion is partial and rare and slow. An order that runs on converted desire across a whole society bets on the sanctification of nearly everyone, and Girard spent fifty years showing that nearly everyone, under pressure, reaches for the victim. Pull out the restrainer before the conversion comes and you do not arrive at the Kingdom. You arrive at the crisis, and the crisis makes a fresh victim, worse than the old one because no ritual bounds it and no altar limits the count. The century behind us made its mass victims fastest where the old restraining order broke and the redeemed community was declared at hand. Chartier risks loosing the violence the crude state crudely holds, and the loosing ends not in friendship but in a new founding murder.
Chartier bets that love reshapes desire at the scale of a society. Girard bets that the Gospel unveils the victim and then leaves humanity standing between the Kingdom and the apocalypse with the archaic net cut away. Both read the Cross as the end of sacrifice. They split on what a man does the morning after the veil comes down. Chartier trusts the converted heart to carry a stateless order. Girard suspects the unconverted majority will slide back toward the crisis the moment no power above them holds the doubles apart, and that the suspicion is the sober reading of the record.
I knew the smaller version of this. A sick man is a soft scapegoat. The healthy keep their distance from the one whose body has failed, half blaming him for a thing he did not choose, treating the misfortune as a contagion to back away from, and the backing away clears the troubled figure out of the group and lets the group feel whole again. When my body quit, that is the move I watched. Friends found reasons to stand off. The crowd did not turn violent. It turned its back, which is the gentle face of the same act, the quiet expulsion of the marked man.
Gary did the other thing. He turned toward the one the others were easing out. He wrote, and kept writing, and named the marked man friend. That is the Gospel’s move in Girard’s own telling, siding with the victim against the crowd that casts him off, the good imitation that copies the model who stands with the expelled and not the model who throws the first stone. One man refused the expulsion. The converted desire Chartier builds his politics on is real, and I am the small evidence that it is real, because it reached me on paper when the market in healthy friends had cleared me out.
Whether the thing that saved one sick man scales to hold a whole society with no sovereign over it is the bet Girard will not cover. The frame leaves Chartier his sainthood and doubts his sociology. It grants that the Gospel makes the stateless order thinkable and warns that thinkable is not the same as safe, because the desire that builds the scapegoat outlives the lie that hid him, and an order that forgets this prepares, without meaning to, the altar for the next one.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
Pierre Bourdieu says no man speaks from nowhere. He speaks from a spot on a field. A field is a structured game, the academy, the law, the church, the art world, each with its own prizes and its own referees and its own buried sense of what counts as a good move. Men enter carrying capital, and Bourdieu counts more kinds than the banker does. Economic capital, money. Cultural capital, the degree, the diction, the trained taste. Social capital, the web of useful ties. And symbolic capital, the prestige the other kinds turn into once a field grants them recognition. A man plays his capital for the stakes the field has set, and what he says, his position-taking, tracks the position he holds and the room left open to him on the board. Bourdieu calls the unspoken rules doxa, the water the fish forgets it swims in. He calls the player’s feel for the game habitus, the dispositions a whole life lays down so deep they pass for instinct and read like free choice.
In Homo Academicus he treated the professors as a tribe and mapped their feuds as struggles over position, and he drove the reflexive knife to the hilt. A scholar’s ideas, his own among them, carry the watermark of where he stands. What a man calls the truth, Bourdieu calls, more often, the misrecognition of his position as a truth.
Set Gary Chartier on that board and the picture comes up fast.
Start with the habitus and the path that laid it down. A Seventh-day Adventist boyhood in Glendale, a sabbatarian sect that built its identity standing apart from mainstream Protestant America, schools its children early in principled nonconformity, in the feel of being right while outside. A father who worked as accountant and physician and leaned libertarian, and a son who found the economic libertarian authors in high school following that lean. The dispositions came in matched, religious dissent and market dissent, the temperament of the reasoning outsider who keeps the room clean while he waits for a world the majority does not expect. Then Cambridge for the doctorate, UCLA for the law degree, Cambridge again for an earned higher doctorate, the LLD. The trajectory fits the position he came to fill the way a hand fits the glove cut for it.
Now the fields, because the same word lands differently in each, and the whole of the man sits at the border where they meet.
In the mainstream legal academy and in analytic political philosophy, anarchist is a near-disqualifying label at the center, a word that costs a man his seat at the high table. Chartier does not sit at that table. He holds a distinguished chair and an associate deanship at La Sierra’s business school, and that is a second field with its own doxa. An Adventist university prizes a morally serious Christian scholar carrying a Cambridge consecration, and his anarchism reads there as exotic rather than threatening, while his output and his prestige bring the institution symbolic capital it could not buy. The radical word costs him nothing in that field. The Cambridge LLD brings the school glory, and the school wrote it up when it came.
Then the third field, the small left-libertarian and market-anarchist subfield, the Molinari Society, the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson and Roderick Long, Reason, the radical micro-presses. Here anarchism is not heterodox. Here it is the doxa, the ticket of entry. And Chartier walks in carrying the one capital the subfield runs short of, academic consecration, a Cambridge doctorate and a higher doctorate and university-press books, in a corner of the world thin on credentials. He brings cultural capital into a field hungry for it, and the field hands him standing in return. The most credentialed man in the room.
See the position. One label, three fields, and Chartier occupies the spot where it pays in all three at once. Heterodox enough to stand out, consecrated enough to stay safe, Christian enough for La Sierra, radical enough for the stateless-society press. Anarchy and Legal Order is the brand object that performs the whole alchemy in its spine. Cambridge University Press, the summit of symbolic capital in his trade, publishing a defense of anarchy. The press that no one can dismiss as fringe lends its seal to the content no one can then dismiss as uncredentialed. The pairing is the capital play in physical form, the consecrating house married to the heterodox claim, and the marriage turns a word that ends careers into a mark of distinction.
This answers the question the merits alone never settle. Why this synthesis, natural law fused to market anarchism, from this man, in this place. Natural law gives the Christian field a moral grammar it honors and gives the secular academy a respectable analytic lineage to argue inside. Market anarchism gives the radical subfield its content and its membership. The hybrid is the position that stays legible and pays capital across every field he stands in at the same time. Bourdieu does not ask whether the synthesis is correct. He asks what shape the space of possible moves had, for a man with this habitus standing in this spot, and the synthesis is the move that maximized the return on every kind of capital he held.
The illusio is the player’s investment in the game, the lived conviction that the stakes are worth the fight. Chartier is no cynic working an angle. The habitus produces sincere belief, and that is the whole force of the idea. Misrecognition is the experience of a position-bound conviction as a universal truth. His natural law holds that any rational agent anywhere apprehends the same basic goods. Bourdieu reads the phrase any rational agent anywhere as the universalizing of one Cambridge-trained, Adventist-raised, American man’s well-schooled intuitions, felt from the inside as the voice of reason.
Interaction Ritual Chains
Randall Collins (b. 1941) says the smallest real thing in social life is the encounter. He builds on Durkheim (1858-1917) and Goffman (1922-1982) and names the unit the interaction ritual. Four things have to catch at once. Bodies in one place. A barrier that marks who is in and who is out. A single focus the group shares. And a common mood that climbs as the people feed it back and forth until it runs through all of them as one feeling. When the four lock, the encounter throws off three products. Solidarity, the sense of one body. Sacred symbols, the words and emblems the group will then defend as holy. And emotional energy, the current that fills a man when the ritual fires, the confidence and warmth and drive to go on. Collins makes that current the thing men seek above money and above truth. Encounters link into chains. A man walks a lifelong chain of them, charged by the ones that catch and drained by the ones that fall flat, steering by feel toward the rituals that pay him energy and away from the ones that leave him cold. Ideas ride the chains too. In The Sociology of Philosophies he mapped the great thinkers as networks of charged meetings, master to pupil, rival against rival, and found the creativity massed at the center of the network, where the energy ran hottest.
Gary Chartier runs hot on the chains.
Look at the production and the rituals behind it. Books at a clip few scholars hold, some years two across two presses, plus the edited volumes, Markets Not Capitalism with Charles Johnson, the Routledge anarchism handbook with Chad Van Schoelandt, the social-class volume with a four-man editorial table. Edited volumes are interaction rituals on paper, a barrier drawn around the contributors, a shared focus fixed, a common mood built from the introduction out. The conference circuit feeds the same current, the Molinari Society session at the Pacific APA, the panels, the symposia where five commentators gather around one book and charge it with a day of shared attention. The blog keeps a smaller ritual turning between the larger ones. And under all of it, the church, Adventist worship, the sabbath kept weekly, the oldest interaction ritual in his life, bodies gathered behind the sect’s barrier in a focus held since childhood. Collins reads a man this productive as a man wired into many charged networks at once, each meeting paying energy that the writing then spends. The output is the visible track of a chain running hot.
The sacred words come next. Consent. Voluntary order. Anarchy. Friendship. To the frame these are emblems, symbols charged in the rituals of his networks and defended after because the energy lives in them. The small market-anarchist subfield runs its solidarity the way every group does, on a shared sacred object and a shared profane one. The voluntary order is the holy emblem. The state is the profane thing the membership rejects together, and rejecting it together is part of what charges the room. Collins watches the word state become the object a network bonds against, and the bonding is what he tracks.
James C. Scott (1936-2024)
James C. Scott spent a career on one fact. The state cannot see most of what it governs, and what it cannot see it tries to flatten until it can.
The argument runs through legibility. A central power needs its subjects readable from the capital, so it remakes them into forms a clerk can file. It replaces the local land tenure no outsider could follow with a survey grid and a deed. It fixes the wandering surname into a registry. It clears the mixed old forest into rows of one tree planted for the timber yield, the scene that opens Seeing Like a State, and the planted forest dies in a generation because the tidy rows the foresters could measure left out the soil life the old tangle had carried. The lesson generalizes. High modernism, the faith that a clear plan from above beats the unplanned order below, builds the model village and the collective farm and the planned city, and the schemes fail where they erase the thing the planners could not see. Scott names that unseen thing metis, the practical feel a people carries in its hands and habits, the knowledge of this soil and this season and this neighbor that lives nowhere a survey reaches and dies when the grid lands on it.
In The Art of Not Being Governed Scott walks the highlands of Southeast Asia, the vast upland he calls Zomia, and reads its peoples not as backward holdouts the state had not yet reached but as men who fled the state on purpose. Their swidden farming, their loose and shifting leadership, their oral culture that keeps no records a tax man could use, their very location up where the rice state could not climb, all of it reads as a craft, the art of staying illegible, of ordering a common life below the reach of any throne. Stateless order is not the absence Hobbes feared. It is a built thing, chosen, maintained, and old.
Gary Chartier could not ask for a better witness.
Hand Scott to Chartier and the anarchist gets his evidence. Anarchy and Legal Order argues in the analytic key, from consent and basic goods, that men can supply law and peace without a sovereign over them, and the standard reply calls the picture utopian, a philosopher’s dream with no instance on the ground. Scott answers that reply with a map. Customary law that grew from below and bound men for centuries without a central court. Stateless peoples running real social order through kinship and reputation and the open exit up the hill. The legibility critique hands Chartier the deepest charge against the state he could want, not that it lacks consent, his own charge, but that its way of seeing is blind by design, that it must crush the local knowledge a good order runs on to make that order taxable and countable. Scott’s planted forest is Chartier’s parable ready-made. The state kills the living thing to file it. The metis that the central plan destroys is the very capital a voluntary order would keep. On point after point Scott supplies the worldly flesh for the bones of Chartier’s case.
A limit. Scott’s stateless peoples buy their freedom at a price Chartier might not want to pay, and Scott counts the price without flinching. The art of not being governed is also the art of staying poor, oral, and small. The upland orders that evade the state evade its literacy too, its accumulation, its scale, its long memory written down. Scott does not romanticize the hills. He shows that illegibility and statelessness come bundled with a ceiling on what a society can build, because the same records and standards and central reach that let the state see its people also let a civilization run a complex economy and a far-flung law. Chartier wants the stateless order and the modern goods at once, the polycentric law and the university and the press and the wide cooperation across millions of strangers. Scott’s evidence suggests the historical stateless orders held precisely where life stayed local and unwritten and modest in scale, and thinned as the scale grew, which is the same fork Olson drew by a different road. Stay small and illegible and keep your freedom, or grow large and legible and grow a state along with it. Scott documents the trade. He does not show the upland craft scaling up to run a continent without a capital, and Chartier needs exactly that scaling.
A second limit. Chartier’s own order would have to see its members somewhat to work. His courts must identify the parties, his protection agencies must hold records, his customary law must be known and citable. A polycentric legal order is not an illegible order. It trades one central eye for many smaller eyes, and Scott’s warning about what the seeing eye does to metis does not vanish when the eye is private and plural. The insurer and the arbitration firm and the credit bureau read a man the way the tax office does, and the modern stateless utopia of contract and arbitration may turn out more legible, not less, than the upland villages Scott admired. Chartier borrows Scott’s hostility to the state’s gaze while building an order that needs a gaze of its own.
The Great Delusion
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 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.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
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.
Pinsof 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. 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.
