Why Isn't Daniel Hannan an Anarchist?
What patriotic conservatives (and some other classical liberals) continue to get WRONG.
I truly loved Daniel Hannan’s book Inventing Freedom. I learned many things from it, and it changed the trajectory of my thinking in a number of important ways.
On my last trip to the United Kingdom, I visited Runnymede—the site of the signing of Magna Carta. I would have visited anyway, but after having read Inventing Freedom, the place felt all-the-more special. It was drizzling (surprise, surprise), so I just took off my shoes and walked in the wet grass barefoot—imagining the barons imposing restrictions on the vile King John, and wondering if maybe a distant ancestor of mine had been on that field.
Inventing Freedom also had the effect of adding context to the great Netflix show “The Last Kingdom,” which dramatized King Alfred’s defense of Wessex against the onslaughts of the Danes (and machinations of his neighbors). Having read Hannan’s book, I better understood what was really happening when a council of wise men chose Alfred to succeed his brother as king, rather than his accession being a foregone conclusion (or precluded by a hard-and-fast rule of primogeniture). I understood why Winchester was once called Witancaester.
Having read Hannan (and Churchill), I understood why Alfred was portrayed as having such a keen focus on knowledge and justice. And when the show’s Alfred said “War is how a man takes his wealth, Earl Ragnar; it is the land and trade that makes it. And for the land and trade to flourish, there must be peace,” I appreciated it in a much more goosebumpy way.
Whatever greater depth of understanding I enjoy, I owe in significant measure to the early chapters of Inventing Freedom. In these, Hannan waxes rhapsodic—with justification—about the Anglo-Saxon roots of many of the legal principles we employ today in hopes of protecting individual rights.
These precepts had their genesis in the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements, in the dark years, violent and unchronicled. From that era came three interrelated concepts that were to transform humankind. First, the idea of personal autonomy, including in contract and property rights; second, the notion that collective decisions ought to be made by representatives who are answerable to the community as a whole; third, the conception of the law as something more than a projection of the wishes of the ruler, as a folkright of inherited freedoms that bound the King just as surely as it bound his meanest subject.
In spirited and joyous prose, Hannan traces the rights-protective systems we revere today back through English history all the way to Germanic tribes in the primeval forests of first-century Europe. Systems grounded not in edicts passed down by rulers, but in principles that bubble up from the people, and from the land itself…
The idea that an assembly might remove an official—even a king—who had broken the law did indeed have pre-Norman roots. As we shall see, the Anglo-Saxon assemblies, the Witans, had on occasion rejected the claims of their monarchs on grounds of what would now be called abuse of office.
Ponder, for a moment, that astonishing fact. More than a thousand years ago, in England, the precedent had been set that a ruler might be judged before a representative assembly. The law, in other words, was not simply the sovereign’s decree; nor yet was it an interpretation of Holy Scripture. The law, rather, was a set of inherited rights that belonged to every freeman in the kingdom. The rules did not emanate from the government, but stood above it, binding the King as tightly as they bound the poorest ceorl. If the monarch didn’t uphold the ancients laws and customs of his realm, he could be removed.
English-speaking peoples still commonly, and exceptionally, talk of “the law of the land.” Not the King’s law, not God’s law, but the law of the land—a set of rights and obligations immanent in the country, growing incrementally, passed down as part of the patrimony of each new generation.
It is a powerful account of principles that are absolutely true.
There really is a law of the land—a law of nature that stands above any manmade authority. And any laws that man makes are only just when they are in accord with, and designed to uphold, this natural law.
Where Hannan errs, I believe, is where most patriotic Anglophone conservatives (and limited-government libertarians) err, and where I have erred for the bulk of my adult life: in the belief that the sort of “representative” governments we have now
properly actuate these principles,
are the ultimate evolution in such actuation, and
can be limited, or restored to a limited condition, through political action.
The rise of representative governance described by Hannan is indeed rooted in attempts to involve the people in decision-making and to limit the arbitrary and centralized authority of hereditary rulers:
First, tribes guided by meritorious leaders, and the open-air meetings where those leaders were held to account. Then the Witan. Then the Barons. Then the Burgesses. Then Parliament.
Great!
What Hannan fails to catch is that Parliament, and its many analogues throughout the West, is now the arbitrary and centralized authority. The democracy mystique and the mythological power of “the vote” notwithstanding, representative systems of government are ultimately no more consensual than monarchical ones (and bureaucrats are way more up in your business than any king ever was).
Moreover, as Hans-Herman Hoppe ably describes in Democracy: The God That Failed, the descent of representative systems to the sorry state we find them in today was very likely inevitable from the start.
Hannan’s reverence for the freedom-oriented innovations of our ancestors is absolutely justified. Yet that reverence, coupled with a conservative temperament that seeks to preserve the good of the past, has us frozen in amber. What should have been transitional has become being permanent and unquestionable, due to romanticism, inertia, and fear (or lack of knowledge) of alternatives.
Hannan’s moving description of the law of the land, and its early manifestations in our history, will stay with me forever. And he is absolutely correct that we ought to employ systems that defend and uphold that law. Yet the belief that the systems we have devised actually serve that function is a pipe dream under which we have all languished for far too long.
Indeed, the problem is far more fundamental than problems with any one particular type of system. As Murray Rothbard and Randy Barnett note below, ALL forms of involuntary governance fail an even more basic test (emphases added, and TL;DR below):
[I]n addition to the historical inaccuracy of the view that the State is needed for the development of law, Randy Barnett has brilliantly pointed out that the State by its very nature cannot obey its own legal rules. But if the State cannot obey its own legal rules, then it is necessarily deficient and self-contradictory as a maker of law. In an exegesis and critique of Lon L. Fuller's seminal work The Morality of Law, Barnett notes that Professor Fuller sees in the current thinking of legal positivism a persistent error: “the assumption that law should be viewed as a…one-way projection of authority, originating with government and imposing itself upon the citizen.”…
Fuller sees the positivist error as stemming from failure to recognize a crucial principle of proper law, namely that the lawmaker should itself obey its own rules that it lays down for its citizens, or, in Fuller's words, “that enacted law itself presupposes a commitment by the government authority to abide by its own rules in dealing with its subjects.”
But Barnett correctly points out that Fuller errs significantly in failing to apply his own principle far enough: in limiting the principle to the procedural “rules by which laws are passed” rather than applying it to the substance of the laws themselves. Because of this failure to carry his principle to its logical conclusion, Fuller fails to see the inherent inner contradiction of the State as maker of law.…
Barnett adds, if Fuller's principle were carried forward to assert that the “lawmaker must obey the substance of his own laws,” then Fuller would see “that the State by its nature must violate this commitment.” For Barnett correctly points out that the two unique and essential features of the State are its power to tax—to acquire its revenue by coercion and hence robbery—and to prevent its subjects from hiring any other defense agency (compulsory monopoly of defense). But in doing so, the State violates its own laws that it sets down for its subjects. As Barnett explains,
“For example, the State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State through its power to tax “legitimately” does just that.…More essentially, the State says that a person may use force upon another only in self-defense, i.e. only as a defense against another who initiated the use of force. To go beyond one's right of self-defense would be to aggress on the rights of others, a violation of one's legal duty. And yet the State by its claimed monopoly forcibly imposes its jurisdiction on persons who may have done nothing wrong. By doing so it aggresses against the rights of its citizens, something which its rules say citizens may not do. The State, in short, may steal where its subjects may not and it may aggress (initiate the use of force) against its subjects while prohibiting them from exercising the same right. lt is to this that the positivists look when they say that the law (meaning State-made law) is a one-way, vertical process. lt is this that belies any claim of true reciprocity.”
Barnett concludes that, interpreted consistently, Fuller's principle means that in a true and proper legal system, the lawmaker must “follow all of its rules, procedural and substantive alike.” Therefore, “to the degree that it does not and cannot do this it is not and cannot be a legal system and its acts are outside the law. The State qua state, therefore, is an illegal system.”
TL;DR: The state does things that it forbids you from doing; therefore, it deems itself to be above the law:
It allows itself to tax (to take money by force, and without consent).
It allows itself to initiate violence for its own purposes.
It allows itself to claim sole authority over a given territory.
You are forbidden from doing any of these things.
You may not choose a different provider of security and justice. You may not secede and become your own provider of security and justice. You have only one choice: to submit to the protection racket ‘offered’ by government. It’s the magical mystical social contract, don’cha know.
You are beneath the laws. Government is above them. Full stop.
Hannan makes it very clear that in a system that respects the law of the land, the leaders must not be above the law. Yet every government on Earth today fails this test.
Let me say that again, louder:
EVERY GOVERNMENT ON EARTH FAILS THAT TEST.
He notes that there were instances in pre-Norman Britain in which kings were actually held to account by his subjects. If so, then eighth-century Saxons were far freer than we are today.
Hannan’s belief in the nation state in general, and his abiding patriotism towards Great Britain as a nation, very likely will preclude consideration by him of the arguments hereabove illuminated.
And yet, can you tell me any way in which these arguments are wrong?
You may reply that government must, in fact, be above the law in this way. That they should impose a law to which they themselves are not subject. That being subject to their own laws is not a test you would impose upon governments.
But it is a test that Hannan imposes. So why is he not an anarchist?
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Remarkable essay. Thank you. (going to check the Netflix show) I will have to read this book soon, it appears as though I would really enjoy at least the first half. To directly answer your final question, I would state that I suspect the author is a form of intellectual Heyoka, an agent of misdirection. While certainly this is speculation, it fits the M.O. that I wrote about in my Discourse 6.3 about the author of "The End of History and The last man" Francis Fukuyama. Essentially he goes on about the same thing, this liberal democracy thing we currently have is an evolutionary product of the perfecting of the liberal system, all while using the rhetoric of its original values. (freedom, liberty et cetera) Fukuyama is very intelligent and he knows better than most that we are far removed from certain revolutionary (or magna carta) liberal ideals (classical). He is someone who worked for Rand Corporation and has spent time on the Council of Foreign Relations, and is now a board member for Bellingcat (among other things), so he clearly is aware of the fact that western democracies are national security states. His work mentions nothing about the reality he certainly is aware of, instead he champions democracy as the pinnacle of human political development. I have come to understand the system has its trappings on every level of discourse. It seems to me that Hannan is certainly intelligent, and clearly connected. While I will have to read the book, I suspect he is fully aware that every government fails that test, even our liberal "democracies". I suspect he is not an anarchist because in reality he is a globalist technocrat. Some of the worlds biggest have called themselves libertarians..
Side note: (sorta) The subject of natural law fascinates me. I wrote something on this a long time ago, but the very short of it... I made a postulation that natural law being what it is, a universal phenomenon, is really a form or category of biological instinct, psychological scaffolding if you will. While it took time and a particular level of civilizational development for it to be recognized intellectually, its roots can be found in the cultures and customs of unrelated and unconnected peoples all over the world dating deep into pre-history. Even things like property rights manifest to a degree in primates... it has something to do with our neural architecture. The more advanced the species the more it is designed for cooperation and boundaries. Undoubtedly Neanderthals had similar dispositions. With all of that being said, I have long suspected that about the time these ideas of natural law began to become formalized by recognizing this truth in human laws, power realized it needed a way to subvert such liberations so that it may preserve itself... so it found ways to either obfuscate our perception of the reality that we do not in fact have these liberties in our current form of government and/or it sought to make us willing to trade them away for convenience or safety. Now, with the help of intellectual influencers (and time) we use many of the same signifiers of classical liberalism, but what is signified has become inverted. The whole war is peace, ignorance is strength... and a world full of Russell conjugation games.
Great quote: You are beneath the laws. Government is above them. Full stop.
Wonderful Exposure Christopher!
Keep in mind the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy-which is ridiculous to me. Anunnaki Divine Right of Kings and all that stupidity. Consider today the 3 top spots in the UK have unelected leaders which is even worse than Demoncracy:
King
PM
Secretary of State
King John of the Magna Carta was the villain in the Robin Hood Saga and in real life was no freedom fighter.