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Jakob de Haan
Institutions and Evolution of Capitalism
Essays in Honour of Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Edited by Francesca Gagliardi and David Gindis
Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts
Understanding the Blockchain Economy
An Introduction to Institutional Cryptoeconomics
Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts
Trent J. MacDonald
Much has been said about the vices and virtues of democracy. Democracy, said Benjamin Franklin, is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Lord Acton warned that democracy is susceptible to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. Winston Churchill told us that democracy is actually the worst form of government . . . except for every other form that has been tried. Not without irony, he also said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. H. L. Mencken described democracy as the theory that people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. These quotes speak to the majoritarian dimension of democracy and the reality that even in the best-of-functioning systems 49 per cent of the people can remain unhappy. To be sure, in most modern democracies even a less-than-majority popular vote can carry an election, due to the peculiarities of electoral systems.5 Democracy, in other words, is a system to ensure that some people get what they want; it is not a system to allow everyone to do so.
Trent J. MacDonald
The non-territorial governance concept resembles closely the political philosophy of panarchism—a specific form of governance (i.e. ‘-archy’) that encompasses all others (i.e. ‘pan-’). The central idea is that individuals should have maximum freedom to join and leave the jurisdiction of any government they choose, without having to change their current location. The classical foundations of panarchism were laid more than a century and a half ago, but underwent a long dormant period until something of a contemporary revival of panarchist political theory and philosophy in the late twentieth century and today (Tucker & de Bellis 2015): Panarchy (pan-archy: many chiefs; multi-government) is a system of competing, co-existing governments which conduct their operations within the same geographical territories without making any claims to those territories, and whose only powers derive from the consent of those they govern, i.e., those who voluntarily agree to submit to a particular government. These voluntary governments are constituted and operate on the basis of contractual personal law rather than the coercive territorial law of the Nation-State. (Taylor 1989)