Are Randians (a bit) dogmatic? (short version)

 

Are Randians (a bit) dogmatic?

Objectivist Randians present themselves as champions of reason, logic, and empirical evidence (even extreme inductionism). But when it comes to one specific topic—the private production of law and justice—they exhibit a selective blindness that contradicts their own epistemological principles.

The central dogma: Ayn Rand insisted that government must have a monopoly on retaliatory force, including police, courts, and defense. For her, "objective law" requires a single state legislator to codify written norms. Competition between defense agencies or private judicial systems would cause, she argued without evidence, "perpetual civil war" (The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Nature of Government").

The problem: Legal history completely refutes this claim. The most successful and enduring legal systems in the West were not created by politicians writing statutes, but rather emerged spontaneously through decentralized competition:

1. English Common Law (11th-19th centuries): Private and manorial judges competed for clients, generating precedents through resolution of concrete cases. There was no "central legislator" until Westminster (19th century). Result: Legal foundation of Anglo-Saxon capitalism (Berman, Law and Revolution, 1983).

2. Medieval Lex Mercatoria: European merchants created private arbitration tribunals without the State. Rules emerged from custom and competition between courts. Lasted 500+ years, facilitating cross-border commerce without civil wars (Benson, The Enterprise of Law, 1990).

3. Celtic Ireland (650-1650): Completely private Brehon Law system. Judges (brehons) competed by reputation, with no coercive power. One thousand years of stability until English invasion (Peden, Property in Celtic Irish Law, 1977).

4. Free Iceland (930-1262): Alþingi without central executive. Individuals chose private courts (goðar). 332 years without state army or police (Friedman, Private Creation and Enforcement of Law, 1979).

5. Roman Law (republican period): The ius civile was not legislated; it emerged from responsa prudentium (opinions of private jurists) and praetors competing to innovate procedures (Stein, Roman Law in European History, 1999).

The irony: Rand venerated Roman Law and Common Law as foundations of Western civilization, ignoring that both were systems of private norm production, not state monopolies.

Modern evidence: Bruce Benson documented in The Enterprise of Law (1990) how private systems (international commercial arbitration, private security, even dispute resolution in stateless communities) work better than state judicial monopolies: faster, less costly, more consistent. David Beito showed in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State (2000) how private fraternal societies provided "governmental" services (hospitals, insurance, pensions) more efficiently than the State.

Conclusion: When Randians face this massive historical evidence, they don't respond with arguments; they repeat the dogma. They accuse critics of "utopian anarchism" without refuting concrete historical cases. They invoke "need for objective law" without explaining why political monopolies produce it better than judicial competition, contradicting all evidence.

Final paradox: Many Objectivists are of Jewish ancestry. The Hebrew Bible (Shoftim, Judges) describes precisely a decentralized system of judges without a central legislator, which functioned for centuries before the monarchy. Rand rejected this biblical model... without rational justification.

Are they dogmatic (a bit)? When they ignore centuries of historical evidence contradicting their political theory, well, yes. They are not as "for Reason" as they proclaim.