En cours de chargement...
THROUGHOUT THE WEST, THE BASIC INSTITUTIONS OF PUBLIC LIFE ARE APPROACHING COLLAPSE: Public debt has grown to unrepayable sums - currently at over $30 trillion in the United States alone; violent crime reigns in the once-great cities; social divisions are increasingly intractable; and the supposedly sovereign citizen feels powerless before an ever-growing centralized Leviathan. Is there no other form of government to replace the impending ruin of the state? This book contends that there is.
The state is in fact a recent form of government, which has existed less than 400 years. Its key characteristics - centralization, ceaseless expansion of its powers to tax and coerce, its removal of all intermediating institutions between those powers and its citizens, its pretense of legitimacy in majoritarian absolutism - have finally reached their historical dead end. Far longer-lived and far more successful non-state governments have existed throughout history.
The 500-year-old Hanseatic League, the over 700-year-old Swiss Confederation, and the 1100-year-old Venetian republic provide inspiring alternatives. From those examples this book has abstracted a non-state constitution, kleristocracy, established on the new praxeological category of architectonics. The brilliant insight of architectonics is astonishing in its simplicity. It is this: Just as the subjective theory of value establishes economics, so it establishes reason as the directing agency of political affairs in a communitarian polity.
The book rigorously demonstrates the superiority of the kleristocratic constitution over all of the state's advocates in political science, from Hobbes to Rawls. And it provides a highly detailed implementation of its principles in the American State where it is most likely to succeed: The State of Texas. The Constitution of Non-State Government is a book written with logical power and icon-busting verve, as befits a thoroughgoing tract that breathtakingly upends every received notion about what constitutes good government.