I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
Murray Rothbard

Anarchism may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
Benjamin Tucker

The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.
Sheldon Richman

Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime.
Robert Higgs

The greatest achievement of the statist intellectuals is the fact that they have cultivated the masses' natural intellectual laziness (or incapacity) and never allowed for the subject to come up for serious discussion. The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government.
Lysander Spooner

Set men up to rule their fellow-men, to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous.
Auberon Herbert

Although resting on violence, the State in the final analysis, exists by virtue of a state of mind which prevails toward it, a peculiar ignorance, delusion, and moral debility which, in the face of its unbroken record of doing nothing honestly and efficiently, tends to call on it to ameliorate any social predicament.
Laurance Labadie

The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge.
Butler Shaffer

Why don't we have libertarian anarchy? Why does government exist? The answer is that government as a whole exists because most people believe it is necessary.
David Friedman

Liberty is not a box into which people are forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.
Karl Hess

A free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others' values by violence and coercion.
Samuel Edward Konkin III

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
William Godwin

Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything—not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing—the same way again.
Lew Rockwell

Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.
F. A. Hayek

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies—almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful.
Michael Huemer

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin.
Walter Block

If most people truly consent to taxes let's make them voluntary. We'll find out real quick what people consent to.
Dave Smith

Telling strangers that they do in fact consent despite them explicitly stating otherwise is a mockery of the concepts of consent and of contract, and one of the more incoherent ways used to justify state oppression.
Michael Malice

A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus imposing by force their wills upon his will, they are breaking the law of equal freedom in his person; and what the motive may be matters not.
Herbert Spencer

I don’t like the use of force. I like voluntarism. That’s what a free society is supposed to be all about.
Ron Paul

The voluntary arrangements of a private property society would be far more conducive to peace and the rule of law, than the coercive setup of a parasitical monopoly government.
Robert Murphy

Because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.
Stephan Kinsella

Anyone who actually believes in the principle of non-aggression - the underlying premise of libertarianism - must be an anarchist, as it is logically impossible to oppose the initiation of violence while supporting any form of "government," which is nothing but violence.
Larken Rose

Human beings have a major cognitive dissonance problem when it comes to taxes. For some reason they don't see it as an armed extortion racket.
Jeff Berwick

Statism is the very paradoxical idea that people are inherently greedy and self-interested and therefore we should pick a handful of them and give them all the power.
Spike Cohen

The State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people.
Albert Jay Nock

Market anarchism is the doctrine that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions unjustly and inefficiently monopolised by the coercive State should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual forces of market society.
Roderick T. Long

History shows that the masses are always improved in mental, moral, and material conditions as the powers of the state over the individuals are reduced. As man becomes more enlightened regarding his interests, individual and collective, he insists that forcible authority over him and his conduct shall be abolished.
Joseph A. Labadie

Authors > Gerard Casey

Gerard Casey Quotes

I believe we are free to bind ourselves by entering into informal and contractual relations with others, even relations in which we voluntarily subordinate ourselves to others. I do not accept the common claim of anarchists from the left side of the political spectrum that such relations are necessarily anti-anarchic. If we are not free to bind ourselves then we are not really free, our liberty is compromised. The form of anarchism that accepts this radical notion of freedom, our freedom to bind ourselves, I call libertarian anarchism.

Gerard Casey

Source: Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (2012) [link] #279

It is undeniable that human beings have killed other human beings for as long as human beings have lived on this planet, but to kill other human beings efficiently and in large numbers takes a state.

Gerard Casey

Source: Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (2012) #302

Political theory--and, I suggest, most political practice--is dominated by a myth to the effect that the state is necessary, for many things, perhaps, but primarily for the provision of peace and security; without the state (the state being that group of people which wields a territorial monopoly of alleged legitimate force financed by a compulsory levy of the inhabitants of that territory) there would be anarchy--anarchy being understood to be widespread disorder, violence, and chaos… the important rhetorical point of the historical examples of functioning anarchic societies and the contemporary evidence of functionally anarchic elements in Statist societies is, among other things, to emphasize the sheer contingency of what seems like a necessity--to show that it wasn’t always like this, that it isn’t like this everywhere or in every respect even now, and that it doesn’t have to be like this.

Gerard Casey

Source: Reflections on Legal Polycentrism (2010) [link] #371

About Gerard Casey

(From Wikipedia)

Gerard Casey (born 1951) is an Irish academic who is Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin.

He holds law degrees from the University of London (LLB) and UCD (LLM) as well as a primary degree in philosophy from University College Cork, an MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame and the higher doctorate, DLitt, from the National University of Ireland. He was formerly Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.) 1983–1986. He was a member of the School of Philosophy in University College Dublin (UCD) (Head from 2001–2006) from 1986 until he retired in December 2015. He is a Fellow of Mises UK, an Associated Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and an Associate Editor of the Christian Libertarian Review. He is also a member of the Free Speech Union. He has been a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the American Philosophical Association and The Aristotelian Society. In December 2006, Casey, along with host Pat Kenny and Richard Dawkins, appeared on The Late Late Show to discuss Dawkins’s book The God Delusion.

He was active in Irish politics in the 1990s and led the Christian Solidarity Party between 1993 and 1999. He now holds libertarian and what he terms (philosophically) anarchistic views. His philosophical interests include political philosophy, philosophy of law and philosophy of religion. He has appeared from time to time on radio and TV in Ireland and the UK, contributing to discussions on topical social and political issues. More recently, some recordings of him speaking on different topics can be found online. He describes himself as Catholic in religion, in social matters, conservative, and in political matters, libertarian. His book Murray Rothbard (Vol. 15 in the series Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers) was published by Continuum in 2010 and became available in paperback in August 2013. Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State, was published by Continuum in July 2012 (UK) [September 2012 USA]. A comprehensive history of Western political thought from the perspective of liberty, Freedom's Progress?, was published by Imprint Academic in September 2017. ZAP: Free Speech and Tolerance in the light of the Zero Aggression Principle, was published by Societas in October 2019. After #MeToo: Feminism, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity and Sundry Cultural Delights, also published by Societas, appeared in March 2020. Hidden Agender: Transgenderism's Struggle against Reality, was published (again by Societas) in March 2021.