Private Law Society: Introduction

This is the Introduction to the broader construct of a Private Law Society.  It may be helpful to click on that link to grasp a broader view of the overall project, or read the Preface.

Introduction at a glance:

• I.1: General Overview of the work
• I.2: Examination of Historical Thought
• I.3: Examination of Existing Systems and Prognosis for their future course
• I.4: The Theoretical attraction of a Private Law Society
• I.5: Theoretical foundation for the work and generally assumed principles
• I.6: Why this will work

Most people have probably never heard or conceived of a "Private Law Society," and perhaps rightfully so.  While elements and aspects of the theory have existed throughout the entire history of political thought, only recently has the theory been crafted into a fully coherent system of principles and propositions that give it the promise of a proper standing as a Political Philosophy.  I credit Hans-Hermann Hoppe with making this jump --  from a  loose connection of related concepts and thoughts into a properly developed theory.  Within the circles of adherents to the Austrian School of Economics and more broadly in the more radical edge of libertarian circles, this newly-formulated concept of a Private Law Society has made a very rapid ascension to prominence and indeed has established itself as the primary political doctrine of these groups.  Despite this success, the body of work on the subject remains woefully incomplete, due in part to the fact that it is very difficult to systematically describe given it's very radically different nature from the vast history of traditional thought.

The concept of a Private Law Society is very attractive from a theoretical perspective (I will delve into this theoretical attraction in greater detail later in the introduction) because it is truly a maximal conception of liberty -- it makes no compromises in its dedication to a principle of liberty.  From that perspective, I have found that people from across the spectrum of political thought are at least interested in entertaining a thought experiment in the subject matter.  Usually what happens, at least conversationally, is that the discussion tends towards a question and answer section along the lines of, "but how will this work, or how would that work." While people are intrigued by the general concept, there are certain assumed failure points where the theory must fall down and be rendered non-viable as a practical concern.

What appears to be lacking in the body of work on this subject matter is a systematic overview of these very practical matters -- in order for the theory to gain acceptance on a broader scale, it is not sufficient for it simply to be judged on its theoretical underpinnings, but rather there is a glaring need to tackle all of the hard practical questions in one place.  So those questions of, "what about this and what about that" can be answered systematically until there are no more questions, and the reader must then judge the quality of the arguments and make a decision as to whether they are convincing or not -- the goal is to leave no "gotcha" by which someone can hold that the theory fails and must fall down entirely.

This is not a simple proposition -- the concept of a Private Law Society virtually turns all traditional political thought on its head.  At every step and with every hard question, the answer is a radically different conception of how things could work than anything most people have ever considered.  One of the chief difficulties is that even if a proponent of the Private Law Society is convincing on a given proposition (say, the entirely private production of roads) to someone considering the theory, that person's attention tends to quickly move to some other proposition that they expect will invalidate the theory, and as they drift to the next topic expecting to see the theory fall down their tenuous support for the first proposition begins to wane.

The goal then, is to convincingly answer all of these questions in a single place and to allow these topics to be fully referential to one another.  To give a more concrete example of this challenge, what happens in the course of a discussion might be something like this: as I'm describing a system of fully-privatized healthcare, it might seem internally consistent and compelling, but then someone will say, "I like this, but it will never work because ambulances will need to transport patients to a private hospital, but they would have to drive on private roads, and we all know THAT wouldn't work."  To which I counter, "yes, but not 5 minutes ago you agreed that privatized roads WOULD work!"  So there is a bit of a problem of recall -- these concepts are so new and different, that it is difficult to hold them in ones mind for very long.  In fact, it is extremely difficult to "see" the whole picture even for the strongest adherents of the theory!  So the solution is to not only put all of the discussions on these matters into one place, but also make them referential to one another -- as I'm describing the system of fully-privatized healthcare and get to the point of an ambulance taking patients to the hospital, I can link and refer to the section on privatized roads in case the reader has forgotten how that would work, or has not yet read it and is dying to satisfy their curiosity.  This is why my initial draft of this work is taking a web/blog based approach -- specifically to satisfy this need for referential integrity that a linear book could not readily achieve.  If this work is ever published in a book form, it shall be supplemented with a web-based referential system.