Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses — we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s various publics.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a Molinari Society Symposium on Spontaneous Order scheduled for the December 2010 meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Boston; when that was snowed out, the venue was shifted, by the kind invitation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to the March 2011 Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, Alabama.

The first essay is by Charles Johnson; an essay by Roderick Long will follow, as will commentaries by Nina Brewer-Davis, Reshef Agam-Segal, and David Gordon, followed by open discussion. We begin with Charles’ essay:

* * *

“The crowd of mankind [sic], are directed in their establishments and measures, by the circumstances in which they are placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of any single projector. Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to future, and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” (Adam Ferguson, “An Essay on the History of Civil Society”)

“For the Common Law of England is nothing else but the Common Custome of the Realm: and a Custome which hath obtained the force of a Law is always said to be Jus non scriptum; for it cannot be made or created either by Charter, or by Parliament, which are Acts reduced to writing, and are alwaies matter of Record; but being onely matter of fact, and consisting in use and practice, it can be recorded and registered nowhere but in the memory of the people… and so by often iteration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a Custome; and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of a Law.” (John Davies, Irish Reports)

Radical feminist theories do mention, and attempt to account for, forms of mass violence against women that have been centrally organized and directed by male political authorities — such as lethal abortion laws, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the mass torture and execution of women during the early modern European witch­craze. But they often concentrate especially on pervasive but diffuse forms of violence, such as rape, domestic violence, harassment, and other forms of interpersonal intimidation and coercion, which are typically inflicted on individual women by individual men — intimates, family, acquaintances, or strangers — for motives of their own, and in “private” life, not in the “public” sphere of government policies or centrally coordinated campaigns. Feminist accounts of these forms of individualized violence have at least three key features in common. First, they characterize the violence as pervasive rather than abnormal, originally citing the shared experiences discovered in women’s consciousness­raising groups, and later empirical research confirming that as many as 1 in 13 men in the U.S. has attempted or committed rape 2 that 1 in 6 women has been raped in her lifetime, 3 and that about 1 in 4 women has been raped or physically battered by her husband, boyfriend, or date. 4 Second, they characterize pervasive violence as systematically structured by sex (overwhelmingly committed by men against women, and rarely vice versa). Third, they argue that systemic male violence must be understood as structural or political — in addition to the physical and psychological harms inflicted on individual victims of violence, the violence has further, powerful ripple effects for all women’s social freedom and material well­being. To insist on this point, and to protest the common tendency to write off violence against women by hiding it in the “private” sphere, as a merely “personal” problem, radical feminists often challenged the common dichotomy between the “private” and “public” spheres, often quoting Carol Hanisch’s famous declaration that “the personal is political.” 5

Feminist social theories hold that historical and contemporary societies are marked by widespread sex inequality — by systemic privileges for men and systemic burdens inflicted on women. Radical feminists, in particular, hold that sex inequality is not only widespread but deeply­rooted and self­sustaining – that casual sexism, misogynistic double standards, gender gaps in wages and social position, the exploitation of wives’ and mothers’ unpaid labor, political assaults on women’s sexual and reproductive freedom, and other harms inflicted on women should all be understood as interlocking components in a system of class power (usually called “patriarchy” or “male supremacy”). Most radical feminists focus especially closely on the role of pervasive male violence against women as a foundational source, a clear expression, and a constant reinforcement, of systemic male power over women. 1

II. Susan Brownmiller: Myrmidons and Misinterpretations

Radical feminist theories of sexual violence also have a fourth feature in common: they are commonly misunderstood, or even wildly distorted, by their critics. For an example of all four points, consider Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape, as presented in Against Our Will (1975), her groundbreaking historical and theoretical discussion of rape as a political force. At the end of the first chapter, Brownmiller famously writes that:

Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. (14—15)

6 (she does not actually say that; the verb in the sentence is not “rape,” but “keep … in a state of fear”), or for advancing an essentialist or determinist theory about rape, on which her remarks about “Man’s structural capacity to rape” are taken to express not merely bare possibilities, but some deep, perhaps even inevitable fact about the biology of the human male.7 Either sort of reading is hard to reconcile with any reading of the text that gets beyond page 15. In the last chapter of the book one can find Brownmiller writing, just as clear as could be, that “[I]nsertion of the penis (a descriptive phrase less semantically loaded than penetration, I think) is not in itself, despite what many men think, an act of male dominance. The real reason for the law’s everlasting confusion as to what constitutes an act of rape and what constitutes an act of mutual intercourse is the underlying cultural assumption that it is the natural masculine role to proceed aggressively toward the stated goal, while the natural feminine role is to ‘resist’ or ‘submit.’” (384­385, emphasis added); the underlying cultural assumption is, presumably, a cultural assumption that she believes it possible and desirable to change. Perhaps more importantly for our analytical purposes, in Chapter 6, “The Police­Blotter Rapist,” Brownmiller discusses the commonplace criminological reality behind sensationalistic myths about the stereotypical stranger­rapist, and the effects of his actions on women’s daily lives: Antifeminist critics have slammed Brownmiller for supposedly slandering all men as rapists(she does not actually say that; the verb in the sentence is not “rape,” but “keep … in a state of fear”), or for advancing an essentialist or determinist theory about rape, on which her remarks about “Man’s structural capacity to rape” are taken to express not merely bare possibilities, but some deep, perhaps even inevitable fact about the biology of the human male.Either sort of reading is hard to reconcile with any reading of the text that gets beyond page 15. In the last chapter of the book one can find Brownmiller writing, just as clear as could be, that “[I]nsertion of the penis (a descriptive phrase less semantically loaded than penetration, I think) is not in itself, despite what many men think, an act of male dominance. The real reason for the law’s everlasting confusion as to what constitutes an act of rape and what constitutes an act of mutual intercourse is the underlying cultural assumption that it is the natural masculine role to proceed aggressively toward the stated goal, while the natural feminine role is to ‘resist’ or ‘submit.’” (384­385, emphasis added); the underlying cultural assumption is, presumably, a cultural assumption that she believes it possible and desirable to change. Perhaps more importantly for our analytical purposes, in Chapter 6, “The Police­Blotter Rapist,” Brownmiller discusses the commonplace criminological reality behind sensationalistic myths about the stereotypical stranger­rapist, and the effects of his actions on women’s daily lives:

Rape is a dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids, their cousins and older brothers, not by charming, witty, unscrupulous, heroic, sensual rakes, or by timid souls deprived of a normal sexual outlet, or by super­menschen possessed of uncontrollable lust. And yet, on the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violence­prone young men there rests an age­old burden that amounts to an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force. The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police­blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple­minded evil have always accrued. A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn into a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police­blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or spoilers of purity, men who commit rape have served in effect as front­line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known (208—209).

Brownmiller does not then portray all men as rapists or biologically driven to rape; one important gear in her theory turns on the structural effects that rapists’ actions have for men who do not rape. When she says that rape is a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear, she has to be understood as asserting not that all men rape, but rather that the practice of rape by some men functions to give all men a position of power over women. This corrected understanding may still be challenged. Many critics turn from the structural effects of rape to the motives of the rapist, suggesting that, since most rapists act on no such grandiose plans about upholding patriarchal control, but rather on concrete, personal desires (from whatever source), it makes no sense to claim that they act to further the interests of men as a class. On the other end, critics frequently accuse Brownmiller of disregarding how far individual men, as well as male­dominated public institutions condemn rape (for example, by making and enforcing laws against it), thus, presumably, demonstrating that rape, however common and devastating, must be understood as a private crime, disavowed by existing political authority, and committed by isolated men for reasons of their own.Both approaches respond to Brownmiller as if she had proposed a sort of conspiracy theory to explain the pervasiveness of male violence — as when Michael Novak claimed Brownmiller views heterosexuality as a self­conscious “extortion racket”8 — in which the men all get together somehow, and the anonymous shock troops who commit rape consciously collaborate with the more respectable men who gain structural power over women, in order to advance a shared plan to keep women down. If that were Brownmiller’s proposal, then certainly it would suffice to show that most men are not in on any such grand plan. It is not Brownmiller’s proposal; she never says anything of the sort, and in fact explicitly states that the role of “police­blotter” rape in maintaining male supremacy “has largely gone unnoticed,” including among men. Such responses to Brownmiller reveal an exegetical failure — they read into the text a claim that Brownmiller never makes. But more than that, they reveal a conceptual failure: a failure to see what Brownmiller is saying because you haven’t yet got the right conceptual lenses through which to see it, or to understand what, theoretically speaking, is going on. This or that misreading can be dispatched, but the source of each misreading cannot be helped with closer readings of the ipsissima verba. What’s needed is an attempt at a more charitable reconstruction. Contrary to canonical misunderstandings of feminist theories of male violence, I will argue that the central insights of radical feminist analysis can be illuminated by rereading them in light of a surprising source — by charitably reconstructing Brownmiller’s Myrmidon theory as an unusual but recognizable application of the concept of “spontaneous order,” as developed in the works of libertarian social theorists, and most notably the Austrian free­market economist Friedrich Hayek. Rearticulating Brownmiller’s theory in Hayekian terms provides a surprising resource for the radical feminist critique of rape culture; it may also dialectically clarify and enrich the concept of “spontaneous order” in the process of applying it to the concrete problem.

III. Spontaneous Order and Libertarian Social Theory

Spontaneous order theories spring from an observation that the vital underpinnings of human social life include large­scale patterns of interaction and coordinating structures which seem to emerge without — and indeed, beyond the capacity of — any intelligent designer or designers to construct or manipulate to particular ends. Hayek writes in “Kinds of Order in Society” (1964) that these “spontaneous orders,” unlike orders that result from conscious organization according to a preconceived plan, are “orders of another kind which have not been designed by men [sic] but have resulted from the action of individuals without their intending to create such an order;” (¶ 7) he later characterizes spontaneous order as a “polycentric order” (¶ 9) in which, rather than “creating a concrete preconceived order by putting each individual on a task assigned by authority,” the interconnected but spontaneous actions of individuals produce an emergent order, without putting any one person or committee of people in charge, as “an adaptation to a multitude of circumstances which are known only to the individual members but not as a totality to any one of them.” Examples of spontaneous social orders are familiar and ever­multiplying both in economics and in libertarian social theory: the adjustment of market prices to relative scarcities under conditions of free exchange, the convergence on common media of exchange in barter economies, the emergence and maintenance of early networks of paths and roads prior to large­scale militaristic road­building.9 Although closely associated with free­market economics, there is no conceptual reason why the employment of spontaneous order concepts need be limited to narrowly economic topics:10 Hayek viewed the attention to spontaneous orders as the distinguishing feature of all serious social sciences, and frequently mentioned as examples the emergence and ongoing evolution of human languages and writing systems, which, he remarks, “possess an order which nobody has deliberately designed and which we have to discover,” through a science of linguistics. He devotes his closest attention, in later works, to the polycentric evolution of customary principles at common law for resolving disputes peacefully, without recourse to blood­ feuds or vendettas11 Other examples of spontaneously­developing community norms have ranged from conventions regulating the use of agricultural commons12 to international postal standards to the evolution of common rules for American baseball.13 In the hands of Hayek and other libertarian social theorists, the concept of “spontaneous order” is employed not only as an explanatory alternative to monocentric, “constructive” orders and government planning, but also an alternative normative ideal. Thus, in his contributions to the socialist calculation debate and his responses to Marxist and Fabian worries about the “social anarchy of production,” Hayek invoked spontaneous order to argue that positive social order can emerge without deliberate “social regulation,” and that production without centralized control need be neither blind, destructive, nor chaotic14 — that, in fact, ordinary individuals acting on the dispersed knowledge embodied in price signals could discover opportunities, anticipate future needs, correct allocative errors, and adjust to changing conditions far beyond the capacity of even the most comprehensive aggregate statistics and best­intentioned central regulator or planner. Changing gears from knowledge of production to the production of knowledge, an increasingly popular example with the kids these days is the explosive growth, refinement, and success of the Internet’s knowledge and communications systems in general, and of Wikipedia in particular15 — a project which was directly inspired by Hayek’s remarks on dispersed local knowledge in “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,”16 and which depends on dispersed contributions, emerging consensus, and the polycentric implementation of evolving community norms to inform and shape its articles. In less than a decade Wikipedia has become the world’s largest and most successful encyclopedia even though — or rather, precisely because — its development is driven by the “social anarchy” of contributions and decentralized initiative from millions of volunteer reader/editors, without prior invitation, authorization, screening or direction by any central point of authority.

IV. Three Versions of Spontaneity

A careful re­reading of the Myrmidon passage from Brownmiller, with Hayekian lessons in mind, ought to bring out a number of features in her analysis of rape culture that are reminiscent of common characterizations of spontaneous order. Brownmiller holds that rape culture involves some conscious, centrally­ coordinated campaigns — such as the use of rape as a weapon of war in conflicts between male­governed nation­states. But her understanding of rape culture crucially depends on the structural effects of widely dispersed actions, which are carried out by a “swarm of men” acting “in anonymity,” rather than by governments or organized bodies of men acting on a centrally­directed plan; this ought to suggest a very clear and direct parallel to Hayek’s characterizations of spontaneous order as polycentricorder, more akin to “organism” than to “organization.” The undirected but systematic actions of the “swarm” of Myrmidon­rapists have profound social effects but, because of their very anonymity, “police­blotter rapists have performed their duty … so well … that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed” (209); just as Hayek characterizes spontaneous orders in such terms as “the unintended and often uncomprehended results of the separate and yet interrelated actions of men [sic] in society.”17 Yet there are of course other ways in which the sexual politics of a rape culture are more reminiscent of “constructed” order and governmental politics than they are of paradigmatic spontaneous orders. Crucially, the dispersed acts that we are discussing are, after all, not free exchanges or willing negotiations, but acts of force, and so any social order emerging from them must be seen as a social order imposed on women against their will, just as the economic or social plans of governments are imposed on the governed without genuine individual consent.18 Both the similarities and the differences from our paradigmatic cases may help reveal two important and interrelated points that I’d like to make about the notion of “spontaneous order.” Both points are easily missed, and often are missed, in extant writing about spontaneous order, in part because of the normative work that spontaneous order does in libertarian arguments for freeing economic exchange from government control. But as valuable and insightful as that normative employment may be, attempting to apply Hayekian categories to Brownmiller’s account of rape culture may help to highlight the fact that market exchange and government intervention, considered as systems of interpersonal coordination, differ from each other along more than one dimension. Perhaps because these dimensions are so often linked with each other in the cases that spontaneous order theorists commonly discuss, they are often treated as inseparable, if not simply conflated with one another. But rape culture, as understood in Brownmiller’s theory, exhibits some of the features of Hayekian spontaneous orders, while seeming in other senses definitely “constructed” and imposed, and considering a case where these features come apart, may help bring out these different senses of, and thus show that the notion of “spontaneous order,” as employed in libertarian writing, is systematically ambiguous. I would in fact argue that the term may evoke at least three different sorts of distinctions, depending on the precise sense of the critical term “spontaneous.”19 “Spontaneous order” can be used to mean a macro­scale pattern of social coordination which is: Consensual rather than coercive (when “spontaneous” means “uncoerced”); Polycentric or participatory rather than directive (when “spontaneous” means “unprompted”); or Emergent rather than a consciously designed pattern (when “spontaneous” means “not planned in advance”); When “spontaneous order” means consensual, rather than coercive, order, coordination is achieved through the free actions and agreements of many different people, contrasted with coordination imposed by using force to compel the participation of unwilling parties. So, for example, when marketable commodities such cigarettes emerge as de facto currencies in barter economies, they are not selected because any authority forces traders to accept them as payment for all debts public and private; it’s because enough people will willingly trade for a smoke that even non­smokers find it worth their while to accept cigarettes as payment, on the expectation that they could easily make a later exchange with some third party who does smoke, in order to get things they can use. When “spontaneous order” means polycentric, rather than directive order, coordination comes about through the converging micro­actions of many players acting independently, rather than deferring to designated supervisors or authoritative decision­makers or relying on external plans or instructions. In directive orders, coordination happens vertically as players act on the bidding of a recognized personal authority, who takes responsibility for assigning, vetting, and integrating their many micro­scale courses of action. Polycentric orders, by contrast, depend on participatory or entrepreneurial action: there is no recognized final authority, action is guided by impersonal norms rather than personal deference, and it’s up to individual actors to horizontally coordinate with other participants, to determine which courses to pursue in order to achieve their goals, and so on. Consider the contrast between the directive system of top­down editorial vetting in Encyclopedia Britannica, and the wide­open system of self­correction in Wikipedia, which depends on the attention and initiative of an Internet­size pool of potential reader/editors to revise and correct articles. Contributions to Wikipedia are guided by a shared goal of factual accuracy and explicit community norms such as Neutral Point of View20or Citation Needed,21 but rather than being imposed by privileged editors, the interpretation and implementation of these norms, as well as most other questions of vetting and policy, rely almost entirely on the convergent consensus produced by the back­and­forth among Wikipedians, all with equal power to add, revise or revert changes, and with anyone free to join the fray at any given time. When “spontaneous order” means “emergent order,” contrasted with conscious design, forms of social coordination emerge from the actions of many different people, acting on motives separate from any conscious desire to effect that form of social coordination. Intentional orders effect social coordination through people acting for the sake of a shared purpose, whatever it may be; in undesigned orders, participants may know nothing about the macro­pattern emerging from their interlocking micro­scale actions; or they may be aware of it, but consider it only a side effect — even if a pleasant one — of pursuing a different private purpose. A path­ breaker whose actions help clear and maintain a road through the woods is not mainly out to help future fellow travelers, or to lay the groundwork for a future highway; she’s out to remove obstacles that block her way from point A to point B. If it helps other people out later on, that collateral effect is just gravy. For rhetorical simplicity, these three dimensions of spontaneity and non­spontaneity are presented here, as they usually are elsewhere, as if they were simple dichotomies. But each of them must be assessed relative to a level of social organization — an overall polycentric order may contain, as Hayek says, “several nuclei” of centered organization (such as firms or associations in an open market); a consensual process may produce their distinctive spontaneous results because they operate against a backdrop of coercive constraints (when cigarettes are consensually adopted as de facto currency in a prison economy, the adoption is at one level consensual; but of course it is profoundly shaped by pervasive, coercive constraints on possession and exchange, which forbid most uses of outside money). And both the distinction between polycentric and directive orders, and that between emergent and intentional orders, are really differences of degree, with many intermediate shades and borderline cases rather than clean categorical breaks. Participants can exercise greater or lesser degrees of autonomy in selecting and vetting their courses of action; the gap between micro­scale intentions and the macro­scale pattern that results may be more or less wide of a gap. It is important to understand each of these three distinctions as interrelated but analytically distinct pairs of categories — but they tend to coincide in fact often enough that they might be mistaken as indistinguishable in concept. Notably, when libertarians contrast open networks of market exchange with economic planning and allocation by governments, they are contrasting socioeconomic orders that differ along all of our three dimensions: governmental allocation is legally enforced,coordinated by requirements from a designated authority, and consciously designed to achieve a predetermined set of policy goals; whereas free markets produce organic structures which are the product of consensual agreements, which are participatory in character (without a fixed center of authority), and develop an emergent structure that the parties to the exchange did not consciously set out to create. The question, then, is which of these differences we should treat asdefinitive of spontaneous order. Hayek himself was fairly consistent when he attempted formal definitions of “spontaneous order” — as we have seen above, he defined it in terms of emergent coordination, with a noticeable gap between micro­intentions and macro­patterns, and often recurring to Ferguson’s “results of human action but not of human design.” But Hayek also constantly characterizes spontaneous orders by contrast with “constructed” orders that he defined in terms ofmonocentric authority, simply equating them with “polycentric” orders which are “not made by anybody”22 as opposed to order “which has been made by somebody putting the elements of a set in their places or directing their movements” (1973, 37). His application of the concept in discussing free­market processes consistently contrasted their healthy, unimpeded ordering process with purposive “interference” or “intervention,” which are both monocentric and paradigmatically backed by the coercive power of government,23 and in general closely linked it with cases where the consensuality of the transaction was at least as important as its emergent properties or participatory context. In any case, both later Hayekian scholars and popular writing have repeatedly used “spontaneous order” indifferently to refer to orders that are “spontaneous” in any of our three senses or all of ’em; or have equivocated between different senses of “spontaneous” from one statement to the next. Thus, for example, in his chapter on Hayek in Against Politics (1997), Anthony de Jasay passingly characterizes “spontaneous orders” as emergent orders, “an unintended result of human actions directed at other purposes” (121­122), when distinguishing them from the results of conscious political activism. But later in the same chapter he directly equates spontaneous orders with consensual orders in order to argue that they have a “prima facie moral standing” which constructed (read, “coercive”) orders lack: The attraction of spontaneity is both moral and prudential. Though it is not clear whether Hayek saw more than instrumental value in it, he stressed that the elements in a spontaneous order “arrange themselves” rather than being arranged by “unified direction” (1960, p. 160). When the elements are human beings, their property and their choices, nobody’s dispositions are imposed on him [sic] by another’s command. Everybody chooses for himself [sic] what seems to him [sic] the best, given that everybody else chooses likewise. All choices are interdependent, and made mutually compatible by property rights and their voluntary exchanges. None dominates and none is subordinated. This lends the order in question a moral laissez passer, while nonspontaneous orders, constructed by imposing some alternative on the participants by authority or the threat of force, are morally handicapped by their coercive element. If they are to pass for legitimate, they need to show some compensating merit. Spontaneous social orders, in other words, have a prima facie moral standing. Constructed orders must first earn it, or do without. (125­126, emphasis added) But in the following paragraph, de Jasay argues for the “prudential attraction” of spontaneous orders by referring to Hayek’s knowledge problem for constructed orders—to the unique ability of polycentric orders to gather “irretrievably dispersed or latent” knowledge, and so surpass the epistemic limitations of planners, which inevitably hobble the ability to scale up directive orders: The prudential attraction of spontaneous orders springs from the belief, strongly held by Hayek and fairly well supported by historical evidence, that since the knowledge required for successfully designing a complex order is either irretrievably dispersed or latent or both, the constructed order runs a high risk of being inefficient if not grossly counterproductive. (126)

These two paragraphs are followed by several pages of agonizing over the apparent difficulty that Hayek’s understanding of his own prudential arguments seems to depend on the deliberate enforcement of rules by an authoritative agency; but de Jasay makes no clear distinction, in his worries about “enforced enforcement” mechanisms, between (1) the coercive features of such mechanisms (as opposed to “voluntary conventions” like ostracism they are based on punitive force and paid for with tax levies), and (2) their directive character (as opposed to participatory social sanctions, which are implemented, unprompted, by ordinary people, “enforced enforcement” comes from authoritative orders and “exogenous sanctions” from an “ultimate, sovereign enforcer”). Although each of these arguments depends on a distinct sense of “spontaneity,” de Jasay uses the term “spontaneous order” throughout, without noticing that each argument turns on a distinct and conceptually separable characteristic, and that social orders may be “spontaneous” in any of these senses, with or without being “spontaneous” in the others.24But of course they can. These are simply three different distinctions, and while many examples overlap, the features may come apart even in some of the paradigmatic cases of “spontaneous order.” When barterers converge on a highly marketable commodity as the common media of exchange, they settle on it through iterated consensual exchanges; they also make the exchanges in dispersed interactions without any directing center. Market price adjustments produce emergent patterns that few or none of the individual participants could or did plan for (whether the feeding of Paris or the manufacture of a humble number 2 pencil); these emergent orders are possible because of the harnessing of otherwise irretrievably dispersed knowledge through a polycentric network of consensual exchanges. But orders may be consensual while being (voluntarily) directive; and orders may be polycentric while being to some substantial extent designed. Thus, for example, while the development of Wikipedia is a clear example of a consensual and participatory order — nobody’s forced to contribute; the editing process is wide open to anyone who wants to jump in without waiting for instructions — it is not a strong example of an emergent order. Typically, people edit Wikipedia, at least in part, with the intention of improving the breadth and accuracy of information on Wikipedia — that is, the macro­scale success of Wikipedia is a consciously­adopted part of the micro­level intention. The second high­level point to be made about the notion of spontaneous order is related to the point we have made about the equivocal meaning of “spontaneity.” Because the paradigms for applying the concept have generally been cases where a social order is participatory or unplanned, and is also consensual, what libertarians have tended to see in spontaneous order is almost always a macro­scale pattern that is freely chosen and where all involved find some mutual benefit from the proceedings. You don’t need top­down command and control to get many important things that libertarians like to use — language, or money, or roads, or Wikipedia…. So, in libertarian vocabulary “spontaneous order” is almost always employed to praise benign orders, especially benign orders that spontaneously accomplish something that government planners cannot do as well, or at all. It is remarkable and wonderful that bottom­up forms of social cooperation can so often produce unplanned large­scale social outcomes better than could be managed through comprehensive, consciously designed political schemes for social coordination. But nothing conceptually requires that emergent orders need be benign orders. If widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue, or prudence can add up, through many individual self­interested actions, into a benign undesigned order, then there’s no reason why widely distributed forms of ignorance, prejudice, folly or vice might not add up, through many individual self­interested actions, into an unintended, malign order.25 So might widely­distributed, micro­level practices ofviolence; since libertarians are centrally concerned with individual freedom from violence and coercion, the possibility our threefold distinction raises of an emergent but nonconsensual order must surely give us pause.

V. The Invisible Fist and the Unwritten Law of Patriarchy

I would like, then, to return to Brownmiller, in order to attempt to charitably reconstruct her Myrmidon theory in more detail and in light of our enriched, and properly distinguished, concepts of spontaneous order. As I understand Brownmiller, her hypothesis that stranger­rapists serve a Myrmidon function for male supremacy, with benefits that redound not only to practicing rapists but to all men, is best understood as arguing that the pervasive fact of rape, and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all women, produces a spontaneous (emergent) but coercive order, in which nonconsensual micro­scale actions inflicted by unrelated, anonymous stranger rapists, end up reinforcing a macro­scale pattern of male dominance over women, and the cultural and institutional superstructure of patriarchy.26 Feminists highlight the far­reaching significance of the everyday fact that the threat of rape constrains women’s range of free action. These constraints operate through felt danger and through explicit warnings: don’t walk alone; not after dark; not in that neighborhood; don’t go to that party; not dressed like that; watch what you drink; watch what kind of “signals” you give off. Paternalistic double­binds often narrow the range to a vanishing point: don’t leave a late­night event without a man to walk you back; don’t leave with a man, unless you intend to invite him in — or you’ll “give him the wrong idea,” and who knows what could happen then?27 Women are warned about the dangers of crowded public spaces like subways, parties, or concerts while simultaneously being warned about the dangers of empty, secluded or private spaces like parking garages, alleys, empty country or a man’s house or car. The double­binds construct both public space and private space, being eitheralone or accompanied, as pervaded with a lesser or greater degree of danger; ultimately the only space constructed as “safe” is male­protected space. And the reliability of male protection closely linked to personal connections with men, within a limited set of very specific, structured relations — usually either paternal authority, marital protection, or heterosexual availability.28 These restrictions on women’s everyday life, their use or exploration of public space, what they feel they can safely do or say, especially in the presence of men, simply mean that women’s freedom is systematically constrained by the fear of men, as a ripple­effect of the danger of widespread, intense, random male violence, and the practical need to solicit the aid of seemingly safe men for protection against the threat other men create. Thus, as Brownmiller writes, “A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men,” but here, in this world, “That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation” (209). It is important to note here that, just as Hayek writes that in spontaneous orders, much of the structure of social life is determined by rules that are understood through tacit understanding and know­how, rather than conscious application of explicit general principles,29 in Brownmiller’s discussion, while some of the “intimidation” she describes is expressed in self­conscious adjustment to felt dangers and explicit warnings; but a lot of it is tacitly inscribed in everyday relationships, or simply incorporated into an intensification of the sort of small­scale, subconscious acts of vigilance and self­ protection that we all carry out, as a daily routine, or as an expression of felt anxiety. Another natural consequence of the danger created by police­blotter rapists is for men who don’t rape, and who sincerely care about the safety of individual women. Such men are in a material and emotional position where they easily see themselves as needing to protect the women they care about from the threat of male violence, and where women, reasonably responding to that threat, often need to solicit their aid. The desire to protect others from violence is, in itself, a personal virtue, not a social problem. But the danger is how tempting and easy — and how corrupting — it is for men to take the psychological step of going from an attitude human solidarity to a fantasy of male rescue, of coming to see themselves as defined by their identity as a Protector in contrast to frail womanhood, and of coming to see women as uniquely dependent by nature — rather than uniquely threatened due to the chosen actions of other men. And to go even further, to try to make sure that women seek and depend on and stay within the scope of a man’s “protection,” whether or not they really want it — by using intimidating and restrictive warnings, by harassing women — blamed as foolish or wanton — who step outside the dependence of that “protection” or the stiflingly close boundaries of those “safety tips.” That kind of imposed dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for women, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative in men, as any other form of structural dependence and power can. Libertarians and anarchists who so readily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male protection of women.30 All of this can happen quite naturally when a large enough minority of men choose to commit widespread, intense, random acts of violence against a large enough number of women. And it can happen quite naturally without the male rapists, or the male protectors, or the women in the society ever intending to bring about any particular macro­scale social outcome. What does happen, noticed or not, is that women’s social being — how women appear and act, as women, in public — will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed, and the amount of time and effort they need to spend keeping supposedly “protective” men around and pleased and willing to help will be increased; while men’s everyday material leverage over women will be reinforced, and their psychosocial identities as men systematically channeled into more patriarchal expressions — through the diffuse, decentralized threat of violence, and the natural but unintended consequences of many small, self­interested actions carried out by women and men reacting to the unequal positions that that threat constructs. I’ve talked about stranger rape all this time because that’s Brownmiller’s topic, and Brownmiller’s theory is a good case study in the point I’m trying to make. But similar remarks, with different but importantly related consequences, could be made for other forms of violence directed against women — such as harassment in public spaces, or battery and sexual assault in intimate relationships — which Brownmiller’s theory does not encompass. In fact, I think that what feminist researchers have learned about rape in the years since the publication of Brownmiller’s book — in particular, the fact that the overwhelming majority of rape is actually committed by intimates and acquaintances, not by strangers — calls for some significant revisions to Brownmiller’s theory about stranger rape,31 although what will remain after the revision is still a feminist theory importantly akin to Brownmiller’s. But whether Brownmiller’s theory is true, or something else in the neighborhood is, the different roles that different forms of violence play in shaping the violent undesigned order of a rape culture is best understood when they are seen as different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.

VI. Crises and Opportunities

A carefully articulated and fully radicalized concept of spontaneous order presents both a crisis and opportunity for radical feminists. Given the analysis of rape culture as a malign form of (nonconsensual) spontaneous order, it might seem tempting to suppose that that offers feminist reasons for general skepticism of spontaneous orders, and a challenge to anything like libertarianism, which proposes to transfer vast spaces of social life from government control to spontaneous orders within civil society. But if the distinctions I have traced helped illuminate the radical feminist understanding of rape culture, I believe that they can also help illuminate how the genuine need for a systematic and comprehensive response to oppression need not entail a governmental response: spontaneity is not chaos, and resistance can be systematic and comprehensive while remaining decentralized and bottom­up. Abandoning government solutions to oppressive political systems like patriarchal violence hardly means trusting that anonymous “civil society” will come up with a solution, somehow. If distinguishing consensual from unplanned from participatory orders allows us to better understand feminist understandings of the problem, it may also help us better understand the radical impulse behind many feminist solutions — woman­led social movements to counter the effects of diffuse male violence outside, or beyond, the sphere of government and conventional political lobbying. C.r. groups, speak­outs, culture­ jamming, building grassroots networks of battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, and other feminist spaces originally had little if any connection to hierarchical power­politics or the male­dominated State, and all could productively be understood as voluntarily­coordinated,polycentric, but consciously organized political resistance to a polycentric, emergent, coercive order of violent oppression. But libertarian social theorists face their own crisis, and their own opportunity, as well. Given the central role that pervasive violence against women plays in upholding patriarchy, the way in which a pervasive, diffuse threat of coercive force constrains the liberty of women in everyday life to move and act and live as they want, libertarians must recognize patriarchy as a system of violent political oppression even older, just as invasive, and no less powerful, than the violence of invasive government and state command­and­control. But unlike the kinds of State violence which male libertarians have been accustomed to discuss — violent restrictions of freedom handed down as explicit policies, ratified through political processes, promulgated from the center and consciously carried out by official agents of the State — patriarchy expresses itself in attitudes, behaviors, and coercive restrictions that are largely produced by bottom­up, decentralized forms of violence, committed independently by countless unrelated men, freelance terrorists who commit violence of their own accord, out of a desire for domination and control but without any grand unified social plan, without conscious collaboration or conspiracy, sometimes in conflict with the explicit provisions of the law (though rarely investigated and ineffectively prosecuted in the male­dominated legal system). This is part of what I take Catharine MacKinnon to mean when she writes that: Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life. (1989, 161.) It is vital for libertarians to recognize that the coercive social orders that arise from this kind of diffuse gender violence, both as a direct consequence and as social, psychological, or economic ripple effects from the direct consequences — are no less real, no less important, no less political, and no less evil, for being undesigned, for battering women into the social position they currently occupy as if by an invisible fist. As I have argued elsewhere, together with Roderick Long, that the radical traditions within libertarianism and feminism have many critical insights to offer each other in social theory and political practice; and that the form that the exchange should take is not one of mutual compromise, in which the more “extreme” end of one’s libertarian or feminist principles are watered down for the sake of, or traded off against, some sort of superficial political or cultural alliance, but rather one of mutual radicalization, in which each side of the dialogue encourages the other to live up to their own better selves, and to more fully embrace the radical insights that they have held thus far, but only at arm’s length.32 Here as elsewhere, the insights of libertarian theory are genuine and essential, but to apply them for all human beings, they must be radicalized, and applied everywhere that systemic coercion limits freedom. That includes invasions on liberty by the State; but it also includes radically different forms of invasive violence, coordinated through wholly different means, and calling for different sorts of response. Spontaneous order and civil society, on a properly rich and well­delineated conception of both, can be a space for hard­driving, conscious grassroots activism at least as much as conventional governmental politics can. Too many libertarian theorists have written as if only forms of oppression enacted through the familiar structures of government legislation an enforcement are worth treating as serious political issues, while too many feminist theorists, while recognizing the prevalence of non­governmental forms of oppression, have written as if only action by the state can provide a systematic and effective response. In fact, spontaneous order theory is vital as a tool both for analyzing the workings of non­governmental forms of oppression, and also for more clearly understanding the unique non­governmental forms ofsolidarity and resistance that radical feminists have employed — which have often, over the past 40 years, done a much more effective job at changing social attitudes towards violence against women, and at providing life­saving help to women who need it, than any comparable government program. When feminists challenge the dichotomy of pervasive “private” crimes from “public” policy, and insist that the personal is political, antifeminist critics often react to this move by treating it as an attempt to extend our existing concept of politics out to new cases, which we had formerly classified as “personal” — in particular, as an attempt to interpret “private” violence as parts of a consciously­coordinated social policy, aimed at some defined common end and directed towards that end by policies handed down from The Patriarchy as some recognizable central authority, or coordinating body. But the aim in declaring the personal to be political is not simply to extend preexisting conventional notions of political coordination to new cases, formerly considered private; rather, it was to challenge the conventional understanding of politics, and to call for a more supple understanding, in order to encompass other kinds of social structures and relationships of power that involve “private” interactions without any conscious coordination, or recognizable center of authority, or promulgation of policies from the top down, but which nevertheless share the pervasive, systematic and far­reaching characteristics of more conventionally “political” social structures. If, as I argue, spontaneous order theory can provide a rich conceptual resource for articulating this new conception of political order and political resistance, then a fuller development and application of spontaneous order theories, to an agenda set by the needs of women’s freedom as well as men’s, may provide a vital point of reconciliation between feminist and libertarian insights, by further radicalizing libertarianism and liberating radical feminism, and by helping to highlight possibilities for more effective radical activism than male­dominated state politics could ever allow for. Spontaneous order theory, so often pilloried by statists as a tool of political quietism or conservative defenses of the socioeconomic status quo, can and should be defended as a vital tool for radical politics and transformative social critique. Charles Johnson is a individualist anarchist writer living and working in Auburn, Alabama. He is a Research Associate with the Molinari Institute, co-editor (with Gary Chartier) of the anthology Markets Not Capitalism (Autonomedia, 2011), and keeps a blog at radgeek.com. * * *

Notes