Ed Stringham's "Private Governance" was the first libertarian / anarcho-capitalist book I have read in two years. My favorite book in the genre by far is still Michael Huemer's
The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
, which I highly recommend if you're considering reading a book in this genre. (Note: I'm giving "Private Governance" 4/5 stars only because it doesn't live up to the high standard set by Huemer.)
That said, Stringham's book provides a lot of insight that Huemer doesn't get to.
As someone who is already a libertarian anarchist (and as a non-economist), the most valuable insights I got out of "Private Governance" were those related to seeing the extent to which private governance exists in all societies (even statist ones) to varying degrees and the extent to which legal centrism ("the idea that order in the world depends on and is attributable to government law") is false.
Stringham writes: "Although not legal centralists in the traditional sense, many radical libertarians are legal centralists of a sort who simply substitute private enforcers for government enforcers of law. If a potential problem comes up, the libertarian legal centralist is prone to say, “That would be illegal in my ideal world.” Yet even the best private police or courts might not be able to solve a problem in a cost-effective way, so private parties may have to live with certain trade-offs or seek alternative solutions."
"Private Governance" explores these trade-offs and alternative solutions--creative solutions that even many anarcho-capitalists and other free market thinkers (who now seem to me as well to give legal centrism too much credit) don't seem to be aware of or don't mention as much as they should.
Education about these many kinds of private governance are important in part because the more that people learn about the large variety of possible private solutions to problems, the less likely they will be to assume/believe (like nearly everyone mistakenly does) that government intervention to try to solve these problems is beneficial or necessary.
Stringham's book definitely increased my awareness and appreciation of the extent of private governance solutions that exist. This was not the first time that my beliefs about how well private actors could solve problems was changed in this direction. Rather, my views have shifted further in this direction a great deal over time as my views changed from default-statism to minarchist libertarianism to anarchist-libertarianism (and then even kept shifting further from legal centrism even after I became an anarchist). While my views on this hadn't changed much lately, this book definitely shifted my beliefs further.
And then: In his last chapter Stringham claims to have just skimmed the surface of examples of private governance with his exploration in his book, and I believe him.
He writes: "In many cases, solutions do not exist, or have yet to be invented. For example, cavemen, and for that matter the vast majority of people in human history, did not have the luxury of the New York Cotton Exchange or Chicago Mercantile Exchange acting as rule-enforcing clearinghouse. Such is the world. But innovations are always popping up, and a researcher can help document them rather than assume that markets are made possible by declarations of law."
So now I am lead to believe that more voluntary, private solutions to problems currently exist (and and can exist--they just need to be invented) than I will ever be aware of. And further, to the extent to which I or others believe they don't exist, we are probably simply not looking hard enough or not being imaginative enough. This is an important lesson that "Private Governance" teaches.
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Think government is necessary to solve problems? This book explores the wide variety of private governance solutions that exist
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2016Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2018
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Mr Aidan Walsh
This is a really super book. A lovely
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 11, 2016
