The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Associate Editors
• Editorial
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• I: Methodology
• Scientific Paradigms and History
• Kuhn's Paradigm
• Paradigm Choice, Art, and Reason
• Do Concepts Mold Percepts?
• Paradigms Vs. Research Programmes
• Kuhn and Historical Truth
• Paradigms and Determinism
• A Historian Between Paradigms
• Survival of the Fittest Paradigms?
• Fumbling Toward Truth
• Necessary Truths and Reality
• Economic Laws
• “pure” Vs. “grubby” Knowledge
• Paradigms and Social Change
• II: Consensus, Obedience, and Dissent
• State and Society
• Consensus and Authority
• Civil Disobedience
• Dissent and Virtue
• Underdevelopment Vs. Consensus
• Democracy Vs. Elitism
• Majority Tyranny
• Majority Frustration
• Consensus Vs. Politics
• Consensus and Rights
• Consensus Vs. Majority Rule
• III: Consent and Coercion
• The Right Against Coercion
• Private Property and Coercion
• Consent, Coercion, and Property
• Threats Vs. Offers
• A Clockwork Orange, Freedom, and Coercion
• Weak Will Vs. Compulsion
• Freedom and Using Others
• Equality and Social Coercion
• Human Action Vs. Behavior
• IV: Regulation
• The Regulating Class
• Regulation and Revolution
• Land Expropriation
• State Planning
• Hoover As Regulator
• State Science Research
• The Costs of Research
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• V: Social Control
• Power and Servility
• State Vs. Education
• Public Vs. Private Education
• Public Schools Vs. Privacy
• Truant Officers As Scapegoats
• Were Professionals Technocrats?
• The Courts and Social Control
• The Army and Social Control
• Land Use and Control
• VI: The Liberal Tradition
• The History of Liberalism
• Freedom and Progress
• Reason and Progress
• Individualism, Property, and Revolt
• Liberal Class Analysis
• Nature and Liberty
• Free Trade and Development
• Liberalism In Transition
• “positive” Liberalism
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• Mill: Liberal Or Socialist?
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• Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code)

Consensus vs. Majority Rule

David B. Suits

• University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

“On Locke's Argument for Government.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1977): 195–203.

In his Second Treatise of Government (1690), John Locke seeks to justify the existence of civil government and ignores the possibilities for social organization without government. Locke claims that certain “inconveniences” of a State of Nature can find their remedy only in a state-governed society. Locke's arguments are not persuasive. Autonomy, freedom, and political justice (as they exist in a State of Nature or stateless society) are in fact violated by the injustice, coercion, and vagaries of majoritarianism that characterize civil government.

For Locke, the State of Nature is the condition of complete individual freedom and autonomy:

a State of perfect Freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other Man (II,4).

Reason and the avoidance of initiating coercion define the meaning of the “Law of Nature.” Such an idyllic stateless society suffers, in Locke's judgment, however, from three failings: (1) the lack of an established and known law, (2) the lack of an impartial and known judge, and (3) the lack of power to execute sentences on wrongdoers. These three inconveniences of the State of Nature, supposedly remedied by government, center around the possibility of Hobbes's war of “all against all,” that is, the implausibility of lasting peaceful coexistence among stateless individuals.

Fearing that a State of Nature may allow men to use force without right (this initiation of coercion may be termed a violation of the Rule of Political Justice), Lockean political organization seeks to compensate for these “inconveniences” by three powers of government: the legislative, judicial, and executive.

People in a State of Nature might dissent, judging that the governmental cure is more harmful and unjust than other stateless alternatives. They could first question pragmatically whether political organization is the most efficient means to achieve the goal of an orderly society. Secondly, they could also raise the moral question of justice and argue that government might intrinsically involve unjustified coercion. This would entail a violation of the Law of Nature and its standard, the Rule of Political Justice.

Even if Locke's political organization originally arose through popular consent, it inevitably threatens coercion against dissenters because of its principle of majoritarian decision making. Since governmental acts cannot elicit unanimous consensus, the state allows majority rule to coerce minority dissenters to act against their own judgment and interests. By contrast, the State of Nature could allow competitive private legal, judicial, and defense systems to offer their services noncoercively and avoid any alleged inconveniences from lawless force.

Majority rule involves other problems for states. Majorities can lose their own power through delegating it to usurping governmental elites who then define what the law means to their own advantage.

Prudence suggests that people in a State of Nature would desire a flexible and revocable stateless system rather than lock themselves into an irrevocable government. They might well prefer an “easily discontinued arrangement for private law making and law enforcement” rather than the unpredictable consequences of governmental majority rule and its possible abuses of the Rule of Political Justice.

III

Consent and Coercion

Liberty, intimately related to the antinomy between consent and coercion, is frequently defined as either the condition of not being subject to external coercion or the right to act voluntarily by our own consent.

This concept of liberty and its relation to consent and coercion involves ambiguities and contested notions, as the first three summaries demonstrate. The first summary urges us to understand liberty as the “negative” right to noncoercion or nonaggression and derives all other “positive” rights from contractual consent. The following two summaries challenge this view of negative liberty as advocated in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) and argue for a “positive” liberty that would “balance” nonabsolute rights, approve of coercion, and waive the requirement of consent to secure an egalitarian redistribution of property.

The next four summaries examine various distinctions surrounding the notions of coercion, compulsion, and control. Do offers differ substantially from threats or do they also curtail liberty? How is the Skinnerian behavioral condition in A Clockwork Orange as a form of coercive control different from other forms of noncoercive control? Next, does weakness of will differ from psychological compulsion? Finally, does “using people” or treating them like objects—even though in voluntary and noncoercive transactions—involve immorality?

The last two summaries of this set bring the issues of liberty, coercion, and consent home by applying them to judge American history and the modern world respectively. Different views of human nature determine whether we practice social engineering to regulate depersonalized “behavior” or whether we establish an open society and “public space” to encourage free “human action” and diversity.