Since it sort of blew up more than I was expecting, I’ll share a few thoughts I had on matters relating to that “antipolitics“ post.
First of all, there’s the desire for rules that can’t be games by socially savvy people, but what you’re instead getting is rules that are games by people who are skilled in certain types of abstract reasoning. Legal realism means more than just “property is coercive,“ it means that you can think of law as less of rules that are followed and more and predictions on what legal judgements will be passed. When laws are vague or contradictory, as they often are, then it’s those abstract reasoning abilities that matter when arguing.
I’ve said before that it’s interesting how many libertarian bloggers are lawyers, and to me this pretty much lays out the connection. Same thing I was thinking about when I remarked on how Veblen said that lawyers tended to be most opposed to socialism or when I was mildly smug that people with a law degree are significantly worse predictors than those without. It’s all about this certain way of thinking. Hell, you can think of the legal realism school as the exception that proves the rule.
So this is a method of thinking that’s shared by libertarians, rationalists, neoreactionaries and exemplified by lawyers. I’ve got problems with this school, I think it tends against empiricism. It’s not explicit, and empirical observations can be slotted in, but they often appear to be an afterthought.
The upshot of this though is that rather than oppose this because it’s unworkable, you can view this type of legalism as just an attempt to shift power from people who do social networking to people who do this style of abstract reasoning. You may view it as not a power shift but a principled objection, but I’m sure the social networkers feel that their method is the natural and just way to organize society.
(Not saying this is explicitly self-serving, it’s just about how the patterns of thinking people have inform their worldview in way that ends up favoring themselves.)
Quite frankly, a lot of the social network dominance types (in politics) are either self-serving “protagonist-centered morality” types, or manipulators, or against some kind of empiricism. The concerns over the Tyranny of Structurelessness are very valid.
Not to mention that countries with this Rules focus are outperforming ones that have high amoral familism, etc.
That doesn’t mean Libertarianism is going to fly (as you’ve no doubt read me pointing out), though. What it means is that since we can’t entirely chase out politics, we have to plan for it. You can think of it as the values portion of the policy vector < values, efficacy >.