In other words, Hayek has not done his homework, and his half-baked political theory endangers the very freedom that he is viewed as upholding. (The critiques of Nozick and Buchanan are discussed below in Part 2.)
Here we reach the nub of the problem of why people in some societies behave mostly well, while in others they so often misbehave. Law even at its best controls only a small part of human behavior. At its worst, it aspires to control a great part, but largely fails. Vastly more important than the legal system is the much older and more deeply rooted set of unwritten rules (technically, spontaneous conventions) barring and sanctioning torts, nuisances, and incivilities that together define what each of us is free to do and by the same token what no one is free to do to us. If these rules are kept, everyone is free, property is safe, and every two-person transaction is mutually beneficial.
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[5] Anthony de Jasay, The Intellectual Portrait Series: A Conversation with Anthony de Jasay, at approx. 8:25-8:40, available at -the-intellectual-portrait-series-a-conversation-with-anthony-de-jasay.
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The free rider problem gives rise to large explanatory and normative questions in six main disciplines. Social psychology asks: To what extent and in what circumstances are people motivated to free ride? and What sorts of negative incentives are effective in motivating cooperation when free riding is possible? Game theory asks: Under what strategic circumstances does the rational promotion of individual self-interest recommend free riding? Informed by those two areas of enquiry, mainstream economics then asks: What real-world mechanisms are the most efficient ways of producing public goods, given the incentives to free ride? Political science asks: What explains the existence of large-scale political participation, despite the incentives that favor free riding? Moral philosophy asks: Under exactly which circumstances is free riding morally wrong? and What explains why it is wrong (when it is)? And relatedly, normative political philosophy asks: Do the moral reasons against free riding supply a satisfactory grounding for political obligation?
What I cannot free ride on is the creation of a state. I want thestate, just as everyone who sees it as mutually advantageous wants it.Suppose that somehow, perhaps using the ring of Gyges to make meinvisible as Glaucon proposed, I could get away with theft or othercrimes. Even then, I would still want the state to have the power tocoerce people into order because if they are not orderly, they willproduce nothing for me to steal. If it is true, as Hobbes supposes,that having a state is mutually advantageous, it follows that we allwant it; and none of us can free ride on whether there is astate. Either there is one or there is not, and if there is one, then Iam potentially subject to its powers of legal coercion. On balance, Iwould want there to be an effective state for the protections it givesme against others despite its potential for coercing me into goodbehavior.
The facts that there is a lot of collective action even in manylarge-number contexts in which the individuals do not have richrelationships with each other and that, therefore, many people are notfree riding in relevant contexts suggest at least three possibilities.First, there are ways to affect the incentives of group members to makeit their interest to contribute. Second, motivations other thanself-interest may be in play. Third, the actors in the seeminglysuccessful collective actions fail to understand their own interests.Each of these possibilities is important and interesting, and thelatter two are philosophically interesting. Each is also supported byextensive empirical evidence.
Turn now to the assumption of self-interest. In generalizing fromthe motive of self-interest to the explanation and even justificationof actions and institutions, Hobbes wished to reduce political theoryto an analog of geometry or physics, so that it would be a deductivescience. All of the statements of the logic of collective action aboveare grounded in an assumption of the self-interested incentives of theactors. When the number of members of a group that would benefit fromcollective action is small enough, we might expect cooperation thatresults from extensive interaction, mutual monitoring, and evencommitments to each other that trump or block narrowly self-interestedactions. But when the group is very large, free riding is often clearlyin the interest of most and perhaps all members.
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