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Pirates, prisoners, and preliterates: anarchic context and the private enforcement of law

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Abstract

This paper investigates institutions that develop to strengthen or expand the discipline of continuous dealings as a mechanism for privately enforcing law. I consider three such institutions in three different anarchic contexts: that of Caribbean pirates; that of drug-dealing gangs and prison inmates; and that of preliterate tribesmen. These cases highlight several ways in which different anarchic contexts give rise to different private law enforcement institutions. The varieties of private law enforcement institutions that emerge in different anarchic contexts reflect the particular problem situations that persons who rely on those institutions confront in their attempts to protect property rights without government.

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Notes

  1. I define anarchy as the absence of government (or state) and call the institutions that emerge under anarchy self-governing (or private). Defining government satisfactorily is much more difficult (Leeson 2013a). Max Weber’s classic characterization of government—as a territorial monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion—while widely used, is problematic. Whether an agency of coercion could be said to have a “monopoly” depends on how one defines the territory under consideration, merely pushing the definitional problem back a level. Further, Weber’s definition encompasses governance arrangements that could be equally well, and perhaps even better, described as self-governing, such as an agency with a territorial monopoly on coercion created through the unanimous, voluntary agreement of the persons it governs, which we might call a club. If we modify Weber’s definition of government to include only those agencies that govern some persons who have not consented to their governance, a new definitional ambiguity emerges: How many non-consenting persons–persons who don’t consider the agency legitimate—are required to render a territorial monopoly on coercion “illegitimate” and thus not a government? Attempting to use exit costs to define government is equally problematic. It’s costly to exit any governance arrangement unless there are an infinite number of such arrangements in a territory (which there never are). And there’s no objective “cutoff cost”—no exit cost above which all must agree we that we definitively have government and below which all must agree that we definitively have anarchy—to appeal to for definition. Despite our inability to define government in a way that, if applied consistently, would not sometimes run counter to our intuitions about whether we have anarchy or government in a particular case, we nonetheless can, and do, distinguish anarchy/government in practice. People tend to agree about when a set of social relations seems better described as self-governed versus governed by government. For example, the cases this paper considers, which I describe as anarchic, have also been described that way by others. It of course remains possible for a reader to disagree with this description. But I expect most will not. On the governance spectrum along which we might place various systems of social organization (given our inability to distinguish them sharply), the cases this paper considers lie, I hope most will concur, closer to anarchy than to government.

  2. For other examples of such contexts, see the research surveyed in Powell and Stringham (2009).

  3. See Leeson (2008) for a discussion of the conditions required for the discipline of continuous dealings to be effective and the conditions under which it breaks down.

  4. It’s in this broadest sense that this article uses the term “law.”

  5. Anderson and Hill (1979), Friedman (1979), Leeson (2007b, 2009a, 2012a, 2013b), and Leeson and Coyne (2012) provide further examples and discussion of self-governing institutions that go beyond the discipline of continuous dealings alone.

  6. See also, for instance, Johnson (1726–1728), Pringle (1953), Rediker (1987), and Cordingly (2006).

  7. Indeed, they were indispensable for any kind of sustained maritime activity. On merchantmen and Royal Navy ships these functions had to be performed too. Though, in contrast to pirates, on these vessels, those functions were concentrated in captains’ hands. For a discussion of the economic reason for this, see Leeson (2007c, 2009c).

  8. For a further discussion of how pirates’ constitutionally created common knowledge about laws facilitated pirates’ ability to cooperate, see Leeson and Skarbek (2010).

  9. See also, Blatchford (2008), Mendoza (2005), Morales (2008), Morrill (2005), and Rafael (2007).

  10. This assumes that profits don’t rise so much through collusion that another gang enters the market and competes for the same territory.

  11. I consider the same case of private law enforcement, but for a different purpose, in Leeson (2012b).

  12. “Azande” is the plural of “Zande.” The latter is also used as an adjective. My use of these terms follows this convention.

  13. See also, Evans-Pritchard (1928, 1929, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1960a, b, 1963a, b, 1965, 1971).

  14. Though formal law’s and legal institutions’ reach remained limited, requiring private legal institutions even outside the realm of intellectual property. See Leeson (2013c).

  15. Of course, none of this is to say that most, or even many, of Zande treatments for illness were in fact efficacious. Evans-Pritchard (1937) concluded that few Zande “medicines” were likely to be efficacious in the scientific sense.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Economics, George Mason University, MS 3G4, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Peter T. Leeson

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Leeson, P.T. Pirates, prisoners, and preliterates: anarchic context and the private enforcement of law. Eur J Law Econ 37, 365–379 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-013-9424-x

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