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by cbd1984 3660 days ago
It's impossible to have a society without laws, written or unwritten, and the Constitution is the underlying legal document which all laws must be in accordance with.

(A society without written laws is anarchistic, or despotic. A society without any laws at all is impossible.)

2 comments

> It's impossible to have a society without laws

If by "laws" you simply mean that people's behavior in a society is constrained by what other people in the society will accept, yes, it's impossible to have a society without "laws". But that in no way implies that it is impossible to have a society without laws in the sense that term is usually used--i.e., laws that come out of some kind of formal process, either legislative enactments (statute) or judicial decisions (common law) that are accepted as binding on everyone in the society, not just the parties to a particular case.

For those who want to see such a mental experiment to be visualized for convenience, read these two books:

"The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein

These two give two radically different, perspectives of what such a society, with implicit rules and norms basically enforced by on-the-spot consensus, might look like.

(Note, I'm not saying that societies depicted in these books are likely, or even possible. It's fiction, after all, and arguably utopian fiction at that. But it does help in putting a more concrete image to the abstract concept of anarchism.)

> A society without written laws is anarchistic, or despotic.

So is a society with written laws, if those laws are not enforced exactly as they are written. Which is the case for every society in human history that has had written laws.