Gerald Gaus and the Open Society

This is a guest essay by Dr Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business at Wheeling University, and Executive Director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. Ed is author of a trilogy of important books on freedom and flourishing: “Capitalism and Commerce”, “Champions of a Free Society”, and “Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society”. He also has numerous other publications, including several published on this site. (Please see the list after the end of this essay.) 

 

Gerald Gaus’s The Open Society and Its Complexities (2021) is a response to three theses advanced by Friedrich A. Hayek regarding the Open Society. Hayek’s first thesis is that human beings are not made for a free society. Human evolved psychology makes us xenophobic, parochial, and egalitarian in ways that conflict with the diversity and impartiality of an Open Society. The second thesis is that the operation of institutions in the Open Society is so unclear that we cannot rationally evaluate, critique, or justify that type of society. The third thesis is that the Open Society cannot be governed. Because it is a complex, multidimensional, and dynamic system with many linear, nonlinear, and inextricably related intersections and feedback connections, it is an extremely hard or impossible to predict the effects we will have on society by intervening in it. These theses are pessimistic about the Open Society. Gaus’s achievement is to critically re-examine these theses and to argue that Hayek’s program underestimated the potential resources of human morality and the Open Society to deal with the challenges he perceived.

Gaus begins the book with three questions inspired by Hayek: Are human beings psychologically and morally suited to the Open Society?  Is the Open Society too complex to be morally justified? Is the Open Society too complex to be governed? The structure of the book follows those questions through three major parts: the evolution of a normative species; diversity and self-organized complexity; and the complexities of self-governance. Gaus’s project is therefore both philosophical and interdisciplinary. He draws upon moral philosophy, evolutionary theory, economics, political science, social psychology, complexity theory, and the study of institutions.

 

Although, in his book, Gaus provides an explanation of the emergence and maintenance of cooperative social arrangements, an important philosophical question remains: How should we evaluate the moral principles that have evolved, and what justifies the rights and institutions that make an open society desirable? An explanation of how moral dispositions and cooperative practices emerged does not, by itself, establish that those dispositions or practices are morally justified.

 

Toward the end of this essay, I explain how Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl’s theory of individualistic perfectionism, particularly their account of individual rights as metanormative principles, offers a complementary and underpinning philosophical foundation.  They argue that a neo-Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing supports a political order that protects individual liberty without requiring everyone to pursue the same conception of the good life.

The Evolution of Human Moral Behavior

 

The first part of the book explores the evolution of human moral behavior. Gaus rejects a simple picture of human beings as either selfish maximizers or altruistic cooperators. Instead, human beings are highly social creatures possessing capacities for reciprocity, cooperation, punishment, norm enforcement, moral learning, and cultural adaptation. This evolutionary perspective matters because the Open Society is not merely a political invention imposed upon human beings. It emerges from capacities that human beings have developed over long periods of social interaction. The implication is significant: liberal society must be understood as a dynamic social order whose functioning depends upon actual human capacities for cooperation and norm-following.

 

Gaus cites formal models and empirical evidence to show that the Open Society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in our distant evolutionary past, but has built upon them a complex and diverse society that requires rethinking both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance. Instead of providing a traditional argument for the Open Society, Gaus offers an evolutionary account showing that the Open Society has advantages over alternative arrangements that will cause it to prevail. The features of the Open Society that foster cultural evolution have to do with diversity and complexity.

Diversity and Complexity

 

The second major theme is diversity. Gaus’s Open Society is much more diverse than the relatively homogeneous liberal societies often imagined by classical liberal theory. Individuals possess different values, preferences, identities, projects, moral perspectives, and notions of the good.

 

This second part takes up Hayek’s second thesis—that the Open Society is too complex for the practice of moral justification. Gaus endorses Hayek’s criticism of social contract theory, proposing instead a self-organization model of moral justification. According to this model, moral justification is not a matter of deriving principles from a hypothetical contract or a single collective choice, but rather emerges from socially interdependent decisions. Publicly justified rules aid self-governance through a process of continuous contestation and mutual adjustment.

 

Diversity can generate additional diversity. Gaus describes this as autocatalytic diversity. Interactions among different individuals and groups can create new choices, institutions, occupations, lifestyles, associations, and forms of cooperation. Diversity therefore becomes a source of further complexity. 

 

Freedom does not simply permit people to choose among an existing menu of alternatives. Their interactions can generate new alternatives. The social order is consequently not merely a system in equilibrium. It is evolutionary and generative. Gaus’s central concept is self-organization. A complex social order does not require a central designer. Individuals respond to one another, learn, imitate, compete, cooperate, and adjust. Order emerges from these interactions.

 

This is closely related to the Hayekian concept of spontaneous order, but Gaus develops the idea in a more systematic and contemporary framework. The Open Society is a complex adaptive system in which individual actions can generate patterns that no individual actor planned.

 

Public Justification and Polycentric Governance

 

Importantly, Gaus does not conclude that because an order is spontaneous it is beyond evaluation or governance. The third part of his book explores how self-governance can operate within complex systems. 

 

Gaus’s account of public justification is also important. In a diverse society, people will not share a comprehensive conception of the good. Therefore, political legitimacy cannot depend upon everyone sharing the same moral or religious worldview. Instead, social rules must be justifiable to people with diverse normative perspectives. Gaus’s approach attempts to explain how shared rules can emerge without requiring a centralized agreement on ultimate values. His self-organization model suggests that free and equal individuals can sometimes converge on common rules even when they value those rules for different reasons. 

 

This is an important development within liberal public reason theory because it shifts attention away from designing an ideal social contract and toward understanding how actual processes of argument, adaptation, coordination, and institutional evolution can generate publicly acceptable norms. Gaus’s libertarian neutralism embraces perspectival diversity and interspectival justice which involves rational bargains and compromises.

 

Gaus’s discussion of polycentricity extends the analysis from moral norms to institutions. Rather than imagining governance as a single hierarchical state directing society from above, Gaus emphasizes multiple centers of decision-making. Institutions can experiment, learn, compete, cooperate, and adapt.

 

Gaus’s primary target is what he terms the "synoptic delusion"—the belief held by political philosophers and central planners that society can be understood as a simple causal mechanism that can be designed, predicted, and optimized from the top down. Gaus demonstrates that an Open Society is a Complex Adaptive System. In complex systems outcomes emerge from linear and non-linear interactions among heterogeneous, rule-following agents.  Cause and effect are decoupled and even small policy interventions often produce unforeseen, unintended consequences.

System-wide order self-organizes from the bottom up rather than being commanded from above.

Consequently, ideal political theories (such as Rawlsian egalitarianism or strict libertarian utopianism) fail because they assume a static, predictable social model. They demand a level of institutional knowledge that no central authority or philosopher can possess. Crucially, Gaus argues that moral diversity is not a problem to be eliminated, but an engine of social discovery and resilience. Gaus describes diversity in the Open Society as autocatalytic. Free societies grant individuals room to experiment with diverse ways of living and thinking. This diversity drives innovation, specialization, and economic complexity. Increased complexity expands the range of possible social roles and moral perspectives, which in turn generates even greater diversity.

Instead of searching for a single, ideal standard of justice, Gaus argues that the Open Society relies on flexible, self-organizing moral rules that allow diverse agents to live together productively despite moral disagreements. Polycentric governance and decentralized rule-evolution allow society to adapt dynamically to unforeseen challenges.

 

His discussion draws upon the insights associated with Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School. Polycentric institutions can emerge from self-organized networks and can provide mechanisms for solving collective action problems without requiring comprehensive central planning. Thus, Gaus’s liberalism is not simply about limiting government. It is about understanding the architecture of a complex social order in which governance itself can be decentralized.

According to Gaus, the Open Society is characterized by three key features: autocatalytic diversity, unbounded technological innovation, and individual autonomy. These features make the Open Society a complex adaptive system that is difficult to control from the top or center but is resilient and adaptive from the bottom up. Gaus argues that the freedoms of our highly networked society are difficult to extinguish and that its ideals can be vindicated via grassroots exploration and consent. This is a cautiously optimistic argument about the long-term prospects for the Open Society, grounded in an evolutionary analysis of morality as a complex adaptive system.

 

Gaus’s approach is distinctively interdisciplinary, drawing on evolutionary analysis, primatology, anthropology, moral psychology, analyses of complex systems, experimental economics, and studies of norms. This methodological breadth reflects his pivotal role in the re-founding of “moral science” as an explicit form of social inquiry and his championing of philosophy, politics, and economics as a way of injecting empirical and strategic insights into traditional philosophical debates. His detached attitude toward morality, assessing it as an admirable but pragmatic mechanism, contrasts with the more prescriptive tone of much contemporary political philosophy.

Underpinning and Strengthening Gausian Complexity with neo-Aristotelian Perfectionism 

While Gaus’s analysis of social complexity is well done, an exclusively evolutionary defense of liberalism faces weaknesses. Evolutionary processes can sometimes select for illiberal, tribal, or authoritarian social structures if those structures offer short-term survival advantages. If moral rules are merely evolved social conventions, it becomes difficult to explain why an open society is good, rather than merely complex and adaptive.

 

 Evolutionary persistence does not establish moral validity. A disposition may have contributed to the survival or reproductive success of a group without being ethically defensible. Favoritism toward one’s own group, for example, may have supported cooperation among insiders while encouraging hostility toward outsiders. Likewise, an institution may endure because it benefits powerful participants rather than because it respects the rights and flourishing of everyone subject to it.

 

 Spontaneous order should not be treated as automatically just. Self-organizing processes can generate beneficial arrangements, but they can also operate within institutions that permit coercion, exploitation, or rights violations. The fact that a social pattern emerges spontaneously does not establish that it is morally legitimate.

Gaus’s dependence on formal empirical models, game theory, empirical evidence, evolutionary adaptation, and the social sciences displays his tendency to disregard or underrate traditional normative political philosophy. He appears to reject the traditional goal of political philosophy which is to determine or identify the best political order. An evolutionary theorist, like Gaus, should at some point judge what has evolved. 

Rasmussen and Den Uyl supply the necessary normative foundation. They remind us that social systems ultimately exist for the sake of real human beings striving to live meaningful, perfectible lives. Grounding the defense of the free society in human self-direction ensures that classical liberalism remains anchored in a firm defense of individual rights, preventing it from being reduced to pure pragmatic functionalism.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl provide the missing normative anchor through their distinction between normative and metanormative principles. Normative principles guide individual moral conduct—they tell us how we ought to live. Metanormative principles, by contrast, regulate the conditions under which normative conduct could take place. Individual rights are metanormative principles: they establish the political and legal framework within which each person can pursue his or her own conception of the good life without being coerced by others. The linchpin of their argument is self-direction. Human flourishing is an objective, individualized, agent-relative achievement that each person must attain through his or her own practical reasoning and choice. Self-direction is both a necessary condition for, and an operating condition of, the pursuit and achievement of human flourishing. Because flourishing requires self-direction, and self-direction is thwarted by coercion, individuals possess natural rights to the conditions of their flourishing—rights that are grounded not in convention or utility but in the very nature of human beings as rational agents.

The complementarity between these approaches is structural. Gaus’s evolutionary-epistemic framework explains how the Open Society emerges, functions, and remains fragile. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s neo-Aristotelian perfectionism explains why it is worth defending and what its moral limits are. Spontaneous orders—markets, evolved legal rules, decentralized coordination—create conditions of prosperity and peace that no central planner could replicate. The spontaneous order of the market does not guarantee that anyone will flourish. It merely creates the space within which flourishing is possible. This is exactly what metanormative rights do. They do not guarantee success or even provide the conditions that make such action possible. The spontaneous order of general rules and the teleological structure of human action are not opposed but mutually supporting. The evolved rules of a free society create the conditions under which individual practical wisdom can operate effectively, while the metanormative framework of rights protects the sphere within which that wisdom is exercised.

Yet, the two approaches also differ in important respects. Gaus’s framework is fundamentally procedural and social. Moral justification emerges from the self-organization of diverse agents converging on shared rules. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s framework is teleological and individualistic. Rights are grounded in the nature of human flourishing as an objective good that each person must achieve in his or her own way. Gaus is more optimistic than Hayek about the capacity of evolved moral psychology to sustain the Open Society. Rasmussen and Den Uyl are more confident that a robust ethical foundation can be articulated without imposing a particular conception of the good on others. Gaus’s account risks leaving the Open Society normatively underdetermined and vulnerable to the objection that if some other arrangement produced more prosperity or coordination, it would be justified. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s account supplies a non-consequentialist ground: the right to self-direction is justified because self-direction is a necessary condition for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate standard of value.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s metanormative framework provides the normative foundation that Gaus’s evolutionary account presupposes but cannot itself generate. Gaus shows that the Open Society is grounded on evolved moral foundations. Rasmussen and Den Uyl show why those foundations are not merely contingent facts but expressions of a deeper teleological structure. The Open Society is an emergent order that creates the conditions for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate end that justifies and limits political power. Liberty and flourishing are not opposed but interdependent. Liberty is the political condition for flourishing, and flourishing is the moral purpose of liberty.

In an age of polarization and skepticism about liberal institutions, this synthesis offers a defense of freedom that is both empirically grounded and ethically robust. Gaus’s evolutionary-epistemic framework explains the fragility and complexity of the Open Society; Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s neo-Aristotelian perfectionism explains why it deserves our understanding and our defense. Together, they articulate a vision of a free society that emerges spontaneously yet serves the ultimate end of human flourishing.

 

Conclusion

 

The relationship between Gerald Gaus’s The Open Society and Its Complexities and Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s Norms of Liberty and The Perfectionist Turn illustrates the potential value of integrating evolutionary social science with neo-Aristotelian political philosophy. Gaus demonstrates how evolved moral capacities, cultural development, and self-organized complexity can help sustain an open society characterized by cooperation and diversity. Rasmussen and Den Uyl provide a complementary and underpinning ethical foundation by explaining why individual rights should protect the conditions necessary for self-directed human flourishing.

 

The resulting synthesis recognizes that an open society requires both an understanding of how cooperative social order develops and a defensible account of the principles that should govern it. Evolutionary success alone cannot determine moral legitimacy, while abstract principles alone cannot explain the full complexity of social life.

 

Individualistic perfectionism supplies a philosophical standard for evaluating the moral and political institutions that evolutionary processes produce. Metanormative rights protect the freedom necessary for individuals to pursue diverse forms of flourishing, while the insights of spontaneous-order theory help explain how those individuals can cooperate peacefully without a centrally imposed plan.

References

Bates, Winton. 2025. “How Can the Study of Human Nature Help Us Reach Normative Conclusions in Political Philosophy”. Freedom and Flourishing  (Oct. 31).

 Den Uyl, Douglas J., and Rasmussen, Douglas B. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 Gaus, Gerald. 2011. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Gaus, Gerald. 2016. The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2021. The Open Society and Its Complexities. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 Hayek, Friedrich A. 1973. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

 Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Other essays by Ed Younkins on this site:

Younkins, Edward W. “What Contribution did David L. Norton Make to our Understanding of Ethical Individualism?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 18, 2025.

----------------------------“How can dialectics help us to defend liberty?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 8, 2025.

---------------------------“How can Austrian Economics be reconciled with the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. October 2, 2025.

----------------------------- “Can Polarized Moral Politics be Bridged by a Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. December 13, 2025.

----------------------------- “Does Humanomics Need a Moral Anchor?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 22, 2026.

----------------------------- “Is Character Education Compatible With Individualistic Perfectionism?” Freedom and Flourishing. February 27, 2026.

 ----------------------------- “Are Spontaneous Order and neo-Aristotelian Arguments for a Free Society Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. March 19, 2026.

----------------------------- “Are Spinoza’s Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelian Philosophies of Freedom and Flourishing Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. June 4, 2026. 

----------------------------- “The Architecture of Freedom: Randy Barnett’s Natural Law Case for a Free Society” Freedom and Flourishing. June 26, 2026.

----------------------------- “Robust Political Economy and Neo-Aristotelianism: Complementary Visions of Freedom and Flourishing” Freedom and Flourishing. July 10, 2026.

------------------------------ “Is Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Consistent with Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 26, 2026.

-------------------------------"Henry B. Veatch’s Neo-Aristotelian Defense of Reality, Reason, and Rights” Freedom and Flourishing. August 30, 2026.

-------------------------------- "Behavioral Economics and Human Flourishing: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective” Freedom and Flourishing. October 4, 2026. 

Why Bother Considering Whether Government is Necessary?

 

Before my most recent trip to India I had to choose which of two recently purchased books I should take with me: Aeon Skoble’s Deleting the State, or Salvatore Babones’ Dharma Democracy. I chose Dharma Democracy (which I have since written about here) because I didn’t like the idea of trying to explain to an airport official that Deleting the State is a philosophical treatise rather than a manual for the violent overthrow of governments.

At that time, I would not have been able to point to pages 107-8 where Skoble argues explicitly against violent action to remove a government in any “nominally liberal democracy”. In the Afterword of the recently published second edition of his book, the author takes the opportunity to emphasize his opposition to violence by giving reasons for eschewing it and reiterating that deleting the state means “deleting the idea of the necessity of the state”.

The subtitle of the book is Requiem for an Illusion. The illusion Skoble refers to is the Hobbesian Fear that in the absence of a government “to keep them all in awe” people would find themselves at each others’ throats - in a war “of every man against every other man”.  I will discuss later the author’s reasons for considering the Hobbesian Fear an illusion.

Skoble regards the neo-Aristotelian conception of human flourishing provided by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl as providing the best defense of a theory of individual liberty. He notes, however, that in Norms of Liberty the Dougs leave open the question of whether a political/legal order defending individual rights necessitates the existence of a state. Skoble points out that the difference between a state and a political/legal order is not trivial.

What is the point of philosophical anarchism? 

In the Afterword Skoble writes:

“If deleting the state means deleting the generally held notion that we need to have a state, and the only way to do it is to make philosophical arguments, we’re in a lot of trouble. Philosophers have a poor track record of being persuasive to large majorities. So what, one might ask, is the point of philosophical anarchism?”

The author goes on to answer that question cogently. However, before considering his response, I want to present a contrary argument.

Is the existence of government an issue that should occupy the minds of those who believe that liberty supports human flourishing? As far as I know, there is no country in the world in which citizens are currently faced with a choice between having a minimal state or no state at all. In liberal democracies – the countries that currently enjoy the greatest personal and economic freedom – liberty is being threatened by political movements with authoritarian tendencies. Authoritarianism is presented in the wrapping of different varieties of collectivist idealism which offer citizens the opportunity to attribute personal and social problems to immigration, foreign competition, the greed of the wealthy, systemic discrimination, environmental degradation or anything else that appears to justify a larger role for government. Shouldn’t libertarians be focusing their attention on supporting the political/legal order – democracy, or representative government - that has been most successful in promoting personal and economic freedom?

Readers who doubt that the countries with greatest economic and personal freedom are liberal democracies should take a look at the graphs shown in an essay I wrote last year. There may be serious errors in common measures of personal freedom for some countries - as noted in my recent essay on Indian politics – but the weight of evidence suggests that representative government has hitherto been more successful in defending individual rights than any other contemporary form of politico/legal order that currently exists in the real world.

So, how do I justify spending time thinking about utopian concepts such as philosophical anarchism instead of spending all my efforts opposing the advances of authoritarianism?

The first defence that comes to mind is that I find it interesting to think about the question of whether government is necessary. I think that is sufficient justification for a human to spend some time thinking about any topic.

However, I have reasons to be particularly interested in the potential for utopian thinking to play a useful role in considering public policy issues. I have claimed in the past:

“We are more likely to improve opportunities for human flourishing if we approach public policy issues with a view to both (a) upholding ideals that ought to apply and (b) the real-world constraints that should not be overlooked.”

I made that comment in a short essay considering Chris Sciabarra’s discussion of the anti-utopianism in the methodology of Marx and Hayek in Marx, Hayek and Utopia.

Skoble argues that anarchist arguments can help people to think about the limits of state power. He suggests that they can be used to clarify that getting a different group of office-holders into power will not resolve problems that are attributable to institutional structures. He cites mass incarceration and business regulation that stifles innovation as examples. He sums up:

“To make the case against the state is to undermine the idea that coercion is necessary for social order or that it is beneficial to human society. It is to point the way toward the continual need to scale back the scope of state power. It is to affirm the priorities of liberty and its necessary connection to human flourishing, and to keep us mindful of the ways in which the state, and our often-unthinking obedience to it, hinders that flourishing.”

Allaying the Hobbesian Fear

Those who argue that a government is necessary to maintain social cooperation often refer to the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory. Players can obtain a greater payoff if they both cooperate than if they both defect. However, each player has an incentive to defect in the hope of obtaining a greater payoff at the expense of the other player. On that basis, it is claimed that in the absence of a coercive intervention to enforce cooperation both players will end up defecting.

However, Skoble observes that defection is only the winning strategy in a one-shot game - social cooperation emerges spontaneously when the prisoner’s dilemma game is repeated over long periods. In support of this argument he refers to Robert Axelrod’s book The Evolution of Cooperation, which found that a tit-for-tat (reciprocation) strategy gave players higher payoffs than constant defection. The author notes that strategies that allow for the possibility that a defecting player may have made a mistake offer higher payoffs than tit-for-tat.

It may be worth adding that the utility maximizing assumptions of game theory tend to be less conducive to social cooperation than are real people engaged in trust games in a laboratory setting. As Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson noted in Humanomics, anonymously paired people are “predominantly caring other-regarding, independent actors in the personal social exchange context of trust games in the laboratory”.

Skoble makes the point that law ought to be construed as a natural consequence of attempts of people to live and work together rather than as something requiring a coercive monopoly power. Among other things, he notes that enforcement of property rights requires “a society that in fact recognizes the practicality of recognizing property rights” rather than a “monopolistic coercive authority”. In that context he discusses the history of spontaneous evolution of civil law conflict resolution drawing upon works by David Friedman and Murray Rothbard.

The author devotes a chapter to providing an extended example of the potential for disaster relief to be provided via voluntary cooperation rather than a centralized political authority.

In his final chapter, Skoble discusses the question of whether disagreements between libertarian anarchists and minimal-state libertarians are radically incommensurable, or capable of being resolved by dialogue. He argues that there are “no fundamental premises or values that separate anarchists from libertarian minimum-statists” that would prevent the differences between them being resolved by dialogue. There is even potential for dialogue between libertarians and welfarist liberals. Political philosophy can explore relevant questions such as the circumstances, if any, under which the will of the majority should override individual liberty.

Additional considerations

One argument that is sometimes advanced in opposition to philosophical anarchism is that a written constitution helps to protect liberty. Perhaps that is true of the United States, but it is not difficult to find examples of countries where constitutional provisions have failed to protect liberty. The former Soviet Union comes to mind. There are also notable examples of countries which have maintained a relatively high degree of liberty without written constitutional protections. Britain comes to mind.  

Roderick Long has suggested that those who believe government is necessary are being misled by a metaphysically illusive picture of what constitutional restraints are and how they work:

“The metaphysical illusion I referred to is the habit of thinking of constitutional restraints (checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.) as though these structures existed in their own right, as external limitations on society as a whole. But in fact those structures exist only insofar as they are continually maintained in existence by human agents acting in certain systematic ways. A constitution is not some impersonal, miraculously self-enforcing robot. It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior, and it persists only so long as human agents continue to conform to that pattern in their actions.” (Long, 2008)

I have previously discussed similar views of the nature of constitutions by Sheldon Richman (here) and Douglass North (here).

A more difficult argument to contend with is that the free rider problem would prevent adequate provision of national defense. I think John Hasnas has advanced an appropriate response to that argument. He suggests that an inability to raise sufficient capital to engage in foreign military adventures or pre-emptive warfare without resort to coercion proves nothing about the potential for defense against outside aggression to be funded voluntarily.

Hasnas acknowledges that he doesn’t know whether sufficient funds could be raised by voluntary means to fund protection against outside aggression. He suggests:

“No one believes that we can transition from a world of states to anarchy instantaneously. No reasonable anarchist advocates the total dissolution of government tomorrow. Once we turn our attention to the question of how to move incrementally from government to anarchy, it becomes apparent that national defense would be one of the last governmental functions to be de-politicized.”

That seems to me to be a sensible position to adopt. It does not preclude the possibility that a society that moves incrementally to reduce coercion of some by others will one day end up not requiring coercion to ensure appropriate provision of any goods currently provided by governments.

Conclusion

This essay has been prompted by my reading of the Second edition of Aeon Skoble’s book, Deleting the State.

Early in the essay, I posed the question of whether the existence of government is an issue that should currently occupy the minds of libertarians in the light of current threats to liberty by political movements with authoritarian tendencies. Skoble provides an appropriate response in his defense of philosophical consideration of the possibility of anarchy. In particular, he suggests that such philosophical endeavours help libertarians to make the point that getting a different group of office holders into power will not resolve problems that are attributable to the existence and scope of state power.

A central concern of the book is to allay the Hobbesian Fear that people will be unable to obtain the benefits of social cooperation in the absence of a government to maintain order. In my view, Skoble provides strong arguments to allay that fear.

I endorse Skoble’s view that law ought to be construed as a natural consequence of attempts of people to live and work together, rather than as something requiring a coercive monopoly power. Constitutional restraints are not self-enforcing. It cannot be assumed that they would continue to offer protection of the rights of citizens if enforcement of them did not have broad community support.

The question of how national defense could be provided without coercive taxation is probably the most challenging obstacle to attempts by philosophical anarchists to persuade minarchists that anarchy is a viable option. In my view, it makes sense to acknowledge the difficulties that would be encountered at present in ensuring adequate voluntary provision of defense resources. That doesn’t mean, however, that it makes sense to assume that coercive taxation will always be required to fund defense. Libertarians who have the objective of reducing coercion “as much as possible in society”, should leave open the possibility that at some stage elimination of the state could become a viable option.  

References

Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984).

Babones, Salvatore, Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World’s First Democracy (Connor Court Publishing, 2025).

Hasnas, John, Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Hayek, F. A. The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960).

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Douglas J. Den Uyl Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 

Long, R. T. “Market anarchism as constitutionalism”, in R. T. Long & T. R. Machan (Eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a government part of a free country? (Ashgate Publishing, 2008). pp. 133–154.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew, Marx, Hayek and Utopia (State University of New York Press, 1995).

Skoble, Aeon J. Deleting the State: Requiem for an Illusion, Second edition (Independent Institute, 2026).

Smith, Vernon L., and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Can the rise of populism be explained as a reaction to the rule of experts?

 

In an essay written over 15 years ago I observed that we were beginning to see a populist reaction to the rule of experts in the United States and (to a lesser extent) in Australia. In more recent essays, however, I have tended to see populism as a manifestation of interest group politics. These explanations are not mutually exclusive, but it may be useful to consider how the rule of experts and populism are both entangled with interest group politics.

My 2010 essay

The essay was entitled: Does Australia also have a ruling class? It was prompted by an article by Angelo Codevilla which suggested that Democrat and Republican office-holders in recent governments in the United States had shown “a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits and opinions ... than between both and the rest of the community”. He claimed: “They think, look, and act like a class.”

Codevilla discussed several characteristics of this “ruling class”. For example, he suggested that they believe themselves to be “the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained”. They view the common people’s words as “like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure and frustration”.

I concluded that while Australia also had a self-appointed ruling class which could be identified with the public service and the political left, I didn’t think the conservative side of Australian politics was as closely identified with that ruling class as in the United States. That explains why populist politicians were not particularly popular in Australia at that time.

In retrospect, however, I think I also displayed some “ruling class” attitudes in my essay:

“In my view the words of non-experts on complex economic issues do have little more value than a grunt. Whether we are talking about economic policy, brain surgery or plumbing, I think it should be self-evident that the views of experts count for more than those of non-experts.”

I still think that the views of experts should count for more than those of non-experts, although these days I try to avoid being offensive. Apart from the tone of my comment, I should have made clear that there are reasons to doubt that some of those who claim economic expertise know what they are talking about. The claims that some economists make about the potential to regulate complex market systems to produce better outcomes deserve no more respect than the similar claims of non-experts.

In his book, Expert Failure, published in 2018, Roger Koppl brings an economic perspective to “the problem of experts”. I will briefly consider Koppl’s line of argument in the following section.

Expert Failure

Koppl acknowledges that we must rely on experts even though experts may not be completely reliable and trustworthy sources of the advice we require from them.

 He defines an “expert” as anyone paid to give an opinion. That definition leaves open the question of whether experts are reliable or unreliable.

 Koppl adopts the Hayekian view that knowledge is generally emergent from practice, often tacit, and embodied in our norms, habits, practices, and traditions. His comparative institutional approach leads to the conclusion that expert error and abuse are more likely when experts have monopoly power, and less likely in a “competitive” market for expert opinion.

I expect most economists would view that as commonsense, but it is far removed from standard practice in many fields which rely on expert knowledge. Based on his study of the use of expert witnesses in law, Koppl observes that it is common to encounter the view that it is scandalous for the opinions of men of science to be challenged, even by other scientists. It is often held that the knowledge of expert witnesses is or should be uniform, unambiguous and certain. Experts are often encouraged to come to a common understanding rather than to offer competing views.

Koppl observes that the division of knowledge makes it impossible for anyone to avoid a limited and partial perspective, which implies a parochial bias in our perceptions and judgments. That kind of bias cannot be eliminated by blinding protocols – such as the double-blind requirements used in testing of pharmaceuticals.  It can only be mitigated by multiplying the number of experts and putting them in positions of genuine rivalry.

The book contains an interesting discussion of epistemic systems design in an experimental economics laboratory. In that setting, the experimenter is in the god-like position of defining unambiguously what the truth is and examining how close experimental subjects come to it in different institutional settings. The knowledge gained of which institutional structures promote the discovery and elimination of error is relevant to the real world. Experimental systems design studies offer opportunities to test the role of network structure in producing reliable knowledge in scientific fields.

Koppl comments:

“Rather than attempting to instruct people in how to form true opinions, we might reform our social institutions in ways that tend to induce people to find and speak the truth.”

However, at the end of the next chapter, after considering the problems arising from the monopoly of expert opinion in government -  referred to as the rule of experts or the entangled deep state - the author suggests that the experimental approach of “piecemeal institutional reform (which is mostly borrowed from Vernon Smith) does not have an obvious application to the entangled deep state.”  He concludes:

“If my diagnosis of the deep state is at all correct, reform is urgently required. I freely confess, however, that I have no specific ideas on how we might attempt to roll back the deep state with a reasonable prospect of success.”

Nevertheless, Koppl offers useful insights into the nature of the problem arising from the rule of experts. His conclusion that the problem of experts “mostly boils down to the question of knowledge imposition” is highly relevant to consideration of institutional approaches to determination of public policies.

In the introductory chapter to his book Koppl explains that he values pluralistic democracy and is as much opposed to populism as to the rule of experts.  He argues for pluralism on the grounds that each of us has at best a partial view of the truth:

“In a pluralist democracy, competing partial perspectives on the truth have at least a chance to be heard and to influence political choices. Decisions in a political system – be it populist, elitist, or something else – that override or ignore plural perspectives will be based on knowledge that is at best limited, partial, biased.”

In the process of developing that view Koppl refers to an article by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti (“Populism and Technocracy: Opposites or Complements?” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 20(2), 2015) which describes populism and technocracy as two organizing poles of politics which are both opposed to “party democracy”. I will now discuss that article because it raises the question in my mind of whether party democracy has more in common with interest group politics than with pluralism.

Party democracy, interest group politics and pluralism

 Bickerton and Accetti argue that whilst populism and technocracy are usually assumed to be opposed to each other, there is also an important element of complementarity between them. Both populism and technocracy are predicated on an implicit critique of party democracy. The authors suggest that “if we accept the idea that politics is increasingly structured in terms of this conflict between populism and technocracy, then we find that even the very possibility of articulating a defense of party democracy is excluded from the political spectrum”.

I have no difficulty agreeing with Bickerton and Accetti if they are just using different words to say that both populism and the rule of experts are opposed to pluralistic democracy. Technocracy seems to correspond closely with rule of experts, but “party democracy”, as the authors describe it, seems to me to corresponds more closely to interest group politics than to the role of encompassing political groups in a two-party pluralistic democracy.

The authors define party democracy as a political regime based on two key features: the mediation of political conflicts through the institution of political parties; and the idea that the specific conception of the common good that ought to prevail and therefore be translated into public policy is the one that is constructed through the democratic procedures of parliamentary deliberation and electoral competition. The role of political parties in “mediation of political conflicts” is the focus of my concern.

The authors suggest that an important function performed by political parties is that of “integrating a plurality of particular interests” and moulding them into “an overarching conception of the common good”. When political parties aim to do such things, it seems to me that they end up cobbling together coalitions of interest groups which seek to obtain benefits for themselves at the expense of others. That is essentially what interest group politics is about.

In my view, better outcomes are produced when political parties take on the role of encompassing political groups in two-party pluralistic democracies. In discussing the importance of encompassing political groups in a two-party system of government, Mancur Olson asserted that the leader of a party “whose clients comprise half or more of the society naturally is concerned about the efficiency and welfare of the society as a whole” because this affects the party’s electoral prospects.  (See further discussion and reference here.)

 As I have explained elsewhere (for example in a recent essay on the consequences of path dependence) the growth of interest group politics has tended to contract economic freedom, constrain economic growth and increase public debt levels. As a result, voters have tended to become increasingly disenchanted with conventional politics.

It seems to me that as party politics has increasingly focused on pandering to particular interest groups it has helped to bring about a situation where more people have become more willing to listen to populists who tell them that they are being disadvantaged by the policies of conventional political leaders. Unfortunately, most of those populist leaders advance policies that are likely to produce even worse economic and social outcomes.

The ubiquity of populism, rule of experts, and interest group politics

Looking at recent politics in the United Sates, it might seem appropriate to identify the Democratic Party with rule of experts and the Republican Party with populism. However, that assignment understates the extent of populism in the Democratic Party, which tends to seek popular support by attributing economic woes to the wealthy 1% of the population in much the same way as economic nationalists in the Republican Party attribute economic woes to import competition and immigration. It also understates the extent to which the current Administration relies on commercial expertise – dealmaking – in running the government. It seems that the rule of one group of experts has been replaced by rule of another group with different expertise. The problems arising from the monopoly of expert opinion have changed their character but have not disappeared.

Roger Koppl’s reference to the “entangled deep state” reflects his awareness that the rule of experts is not immune to interest group politics. He notes that participants in the American deep state “have a variety of competing and parochial interests”. More generally, interest group politics is strongly associated with the entanglement of entrepreneurs and interests in private and public sectors.

Interest group politics seems to have attended to the pleas of increasingly narrow groups in recent years. As well as seeking support of broad economic groups such as unions, industry groups, and groups with differing social and environmental attitudes, political parties have increasingly sought the support of narrow interest groups by engaging in identity politics. The progressive side of politics has favoured groups that have previously been disadvantaged by ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. The conservative side of politics has pushed back against what they label as wokeness, while seeking support from some groups, e.g. young men, who perceive themselves to be disadvantage by it.

Another interesting development in interest group politics in the United States is the emergence of an alliance between conservative populists and the high-tech community. It is not easy to comprehend how populists who claim to be concerned about economic and social impacts of competition from imports and immigration could be complacent about the economic and social impacts of AI. Action by the U.S. government to facilitate rapid development of AI has been accompanied by a change in the economic nationalist narrative away from its populist roots to emphasize the importance of retaining technological leadership in AI in the face of increasing competition from China.

The warning of President Eisenhower, quoted in the epigraph, might now be relevant for reasons that he could not have foreseen. Public policy is not only at risk of becoming the captive of a scientific-technological elite supported by the administrative state, it is also at risk of becoming the captive of a scientific-technological elite controlling the development of powerful AI models.

However, I don’t think we should assume that a future in which AI models will have an increasing influence on social and economic outcomes will necessarily be worse than a future in which the entangled deep state retains its current influence.  It is possible that rivalry between different AI models will ensure that their social and economic impacts are relatively benign and consistent with pluralistic democracy. Even now, greater use of truth-seeking bots has potential to lessen the problem of rational ignorance, and thus to reduce the susceptibility of voters to populists peddling false narratives.

Conclusions

The rise of populism in the Western liberal democracies can be explained to some degree as a reaction to the “ruling class” attitudes of experts within governments.  I have recently tended to see populism as a manifestation of interest group politics, but it is worth considering how the rule of experts and populism are entangled with interest group politics.

The essay has outlined the views presented by Roger Koppl in his book, Expert Failure. Koppl offers the useful insight that the main problem arising from the rule of experts is knowledge imposition. Expert error and abuse are more likely when experts have monopoly power and are less likely when experts are placed in positions of genuine rivalry. Koppl argues that pluralist democracy is superior to both the rule of experts and populism because it enables competing partial perspectives on the truth to have a chance to be heard.

I have also considered the view of Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti that both populism and technocracy are predicated on an implicit critique of party democracy. I suggested that party democracy, as the authors described it, seemed to have more in common with interest group politics than with pluralistic democracy. In my view, interest group politics is largely to blame for the poor economic and social outcomes that have encouraged the growth of populism.

My main conclusion is that the rule of experts, populism, and interest group politics are currently ubiquitous on both the progressive and conservative sides of politics. Populism is certainly not confined to one side of politics and populist governments don’t eliminate problems arising from the monopoly of expert opinion. In the U.S. a populist executive has continued to discourage rival views, while attempting to substitute expertise in commercial deal-making for expertise in statecraft.

The emergence of an alliance between the current U.S. Administration and the high-tech community poses a risk that public policy may become captive to a scientific-technological elite controlling the development of powerful AI models.  We should not assume, however, that a future in which AI models have an increasing influence on social and economic outcomes will necessarily be worse than one in which the entangled deep state retains its current influence. Rivalry between AI models may even have potential to produce better outcomes.