Tradition
Anarcho-capitalism
Overview
Anarcho-capitalism (colloquially: ANCAP, Ancap, AnCap, or An-Cap) is a political ideology and economic theory that advocates for the abolition of state monopolies and the expansion of economic liberalism and market economy through the promotion of a voluntary society.
Proponents argue that a society could function without a centralized state through voluntary exchange and private institutions that provide legal and security services relegating coercion to the collection of tort damages, and refining recoupment in the context of a free and open marketplace. They contend that essential public services, including policing, courts, and defense can be effectively replaced by competing private defense agencies, subrogation markets, and insurance providers.
This synthesis of anti-statism and private property remains deeply controversial among anarchists in general, the overwhelming majority of whom reject anarcho-capitalism. They argue that the institutions advocated by anarcho-capitalists, including private land ownership, the wage system, law and contract enforcement and workplace hierarchy, are inherently hierarchical and governmentalist, and therefore incompatible with anarchist principles.
While the earliest documented use of the term anarcho-capitalism appears in Karl Hess's essay, "The Death of Politics", published in Playboy in March 1969, the American economist Murray Rothbard largely developed and popularized the concepts of anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-capitalism in the early 1970s.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The process of leading men's thought and imagination away from the use of force will be greatly accelerated by the abolition of the capitalist system, provided it is not succeeded by a form of State Socialism in which officials have enormous power. At present, the capitalist has more control over the lives of others than any man ought to have; his friends have authority in the State; his economic power is the…
Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom
Close in meaning to Anarcho-capitalism; the term itself is not named.
Sect. 160. This power to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it, is that which is called prerogative: for since in some governments the lawmaking power is not always in being, and is usually too numerous, and so too slow, for the dispatch requisite to execution; and because also it is impossible to foresee, and so by laws to provide for…
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
States what Anarcho-capitalism is; the author is tied to Anarcho-capitalism in the knowledge graph.
_Negation of the Negation._ "The historical sketch (of the so called original accumulation of capital in England) is comparatively the best part of Marx's book and it would be even better if it had been developed scientifically and not by means of the Dialectic. The Hegelian negation of the negation is called upon to serve here as a midwife, in default of anything better and clearer, and by means of it the future is…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what Anarcho-capitalism is.
Philosophers who discussed Anarcho-capitalism
Related ideas
- Austrian school of economics
- Max Stirner
- Frédéric Bastiat
- Harry Binswanger
- Free market
- Anarchism
- Intellectual property
- Private property
- Individualist anarchism
- Cato Institute
- John Locke
- Laissez-faire
- Infrastructure
- Labor theory of value
- George H. Smith
- Anarchist communism
- London
- Mutualism (economic theory)
- Libertarian socialism
- Capital (economics)
- Retributive justice
- Liberalism
- Murray Rothbard
- Peter Marshall (travel writer)
Place in the tradition
Part of Anarchism.