Anti-Climacus

WELL: Just some hypothetical speculation about state-of-nature theory so that I'm not sticking strictly to silly stuff this weekend:

Suppose you have a population with a standard variation of skills, abilities, and intelligence. One might speculate, reasonably, that, absent a Rousseau-ian 'will of all' (a highly dubious concept, if ever there was one in political theory (and there are many)), no one can legitimately lay claim to superior political authority (Hobbes, for example, argues along these lines). You might conclude on that basis that any government is just the lucky group of people who happened to use force first and best; in this, the libertarian and anarchist seem to agree.

But I do sort of wonder about it, because while it's clear that the use of force is always tied up in issues of power, it's not clear to me that the use of force will always be the worst thing. We can certainly imagine counterfactual worlds where the use of force makes everybody better off than they'd be without it (I don't want to violate Godwin's Law, but you can guess where I'm going with that). And you can probably also buy into the Marxian notion (here Marx only insomuch as he follows Smith or others) that some coercive action actually probably benefits all--the famous baker can only not care about you if he's free from worrying, say, that someone will come along and horribly murder him on his way to work.

I don't say this to be polemical at all, even if it sounds that way--libertarianism is the only major political philosophy that's totally foreign to me (it violates oh-so-many of those Christian-deontologist-quasi-Trotskyist beliefs). I have no idea what the folk assumptions are of people who subscribe to that view, so I'm curious to hear from my libertarian readers (and I know I have a few) whether it's coercion and force as such that are bad, whether they're universally bad, or whether they're just bad in this current instantiation, etc etc.

I close with the following bit of conversation from a few weeks ago:

ME: Democracy is a lot like Communism: it's a good idea in theory, but it never works out in practice.
FELLOW GRAD STUDENT: Yeah, except it's not even a good idea in theory.