Kritarchy

Kritarchy is an ideal legal and political system most closely approximated in the institutional structures of traditional societies, especially those described by anthropologists as “acephalous,” “polycentric,” or “stateless.” Such societies are based on customary rather than statutory law. This type of law fares poorly under statutory regimes, and stateless societies have diminished drastically in numbers with the spread of political states over the past several millennia. Nevertheless, though endangered, societies approximating kritarchies are far from extinct. Nor should they be considered primitive. It is a living and highly developed juridical system looking to the future rather than the past.

Rule of Law

Kritarchy as a form of government is based on equal justice for all, where justice is understood as adherence to the principles of natural law. Natural law is the body of principles underlying all spontaneous human social organization. Implicit in these principles are certain universal natural rights of individuals, notably property rights, including rights in one’s own person, and freedom of contract.

Its consistent adherence to the rules of justice under natural law distinguishes kritarchy from other political systems. Under this ideal, even courts of law, police forces, and other organizations concerned with the day-to-day maintenance of law are denied any power, privilege, or immunity not in conformity with natural law. That means that a police force in a kritarchy can lawfully use its weapons and coercive powers only to maintain the law, i.e. to defend or remedy violations of people’s natural rights. It also means that, unlike their counterparts in the prevailing political systems of today’s world, courts of law and police do not constitute and are not incorporated into a coercive monopoly. Anyone is entitled to offer judicial or police services to willing others. None can be forced to support any court of law or police force against his will. In short, in a kritarchy, judicial and police services are offered in a free market—which, in so far as exchanges of goods and services are concerned, is the natural law of the human world.

Because of its commitment to equal justice for all, a kritarchy does not know the usual political distinction between subjects and rulers. It lacks a government in the modern sense of the word, i.e. an organization with coercive powers that claims both the obedience of and the right to use the labour or property of those living in the area over which it effectively exercises control. Governing and taxing people by public or private force is not among the functions of the political system of kritarchy. People are free to govern their own affairs, either individually or in voluntary association with others, which means that each, in governing his own affairs, is required to leave others free to govern theirs. In this sense, freedom is the basic law of a kritarchy.

It follows that a kritarchy can only exist in societies where, and for as long as, a commitment to justice is sufficiently strong to defeat the efforts of persons who would use unlawful methods such as aggression, coercion, or fraud to further their ends or to evade responsibility and liability for wrongs they have caused others. While it is theoretically conceivable that freedom could be maintained by nothing more than unorganised, spontaneous actions of self-defence, in a kritarchy the commitment to justice manifests in its political system, which guarantees a free market for the enterprise of justice.