Description: This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of non-aggression, it features a clear explanation of why the state is illegitimate, dangerous, and unnecessary. It proposes an understanding of how law enforcement in a stateless society could be legitimate and what the optimal substance of law without the state might be, suggests ways in which a stateless legal order could foster the growth of a culture of freedom, and situates the project it elaborates in relation to leftist, anti-capitalist, and socialist traditions.
Brief description: Gary Chartier is Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. He is the author of Economic Justice and Natural Law (2009), The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011) and The Analogy of Love (2007), as well as the co-editor (with Charles W. Johnson) of Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (2011).
Review Quotes: "Anarchism's case, against the state and for the viability and desirability of a polycentric legal order, receives its most challenging and detailed articulation in Chartier's book."
--Hillel Steiner, FBA
Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Manchester