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Editor's Introduction To:
Conquest By Default

Vernor Vinge

 

Basing government on reason alone is giving it a shaky foundation. They say that virtue is the love of order. But should and can this love dominate over the love of my own well-being? Let them give me a clear and sufficient reason to prefer it. At bottom their supposed principle is a pure play of words; because I can in turn state that vice is the love of order taken in a different sense. The difference is that the good man refers himself to the order of the whole and the bad man sees the whole in relation to himself: he makes himself the center of all things, while the good man sees himself at the circumference and looks to the center of the whole.

—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile

 

At this point in his personal copy of Emile, Voltaire wrote, "These horrors should never be discovered to the public."

 

The notion of government is embedded in human history. Although we have many theories of anarchy, there have in practical terms been no lasting anarchic systems at all.

Government is supposed to promote "the general good." Even the anarchists suppose that the enforcement of contracts is good for everyone (although by definition a contract that needs enforcement is not good for the party who wishes to terminate the contract.)

Some libertarians postulate a social order in which contracts are enforced through a "private" mechanism that has no powers other than the enforcement of contracts. No one has ever seen such an institution in operation; we do not know what will keep the enforcers from expanding their powers. We do know that power seeks to extend itself.

Suppose that it does not: suppose a society in which there is no law but contract law; a society in which anything goes; a society so free, and thus so diverse, that no notion of "general good" is possible. Can such a society hang together? Who would want it to?

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